Uplands

The critic Harold Bloom writes With the publication of his Selected Poems (1968) soon after turning forty A. R. Ammons quietly demonstrated a unique and central position in recent American poetry. . . . Recognition as is always the case with a poetry difficult and central has come slowly but critics now begin to see in Ammons what he is: the maker of a body of poetry that fulfills Emerson''s prophecy by addressing itself to life ''with sufficient plainness and with sufficient profoundness.''