Ommateum and the Early Career of A. R. Ammons

abstract: A. R. Ammons's strange first volume, Ommateum (1955), failed upon delivery, leaving the poet stalled and depressed. This article examines Ammons's book as both an aesthetic object, or an arrangement of utterances, and a gesture in the literary field by a poet unfamiliar with the game. Following William McNeill, I argue that the question of "the accessibility of other beings" is the question upon which Ammons's early career turns. A set of animal poems of 1958, arising from an access of childhood feeling and memory, provides the "kindness" that is the key to Ammons's post-Ommateum transformation.