A science-minded businessman late bloomed into rustic bard, Archie Randolph Ammons unintentionally achieved a visionary optimism through lyric analogies. He was influenced by Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams. He has earned critical respect for verse essays, meditations, and anthems replete with rural pragmatism, contemporary misgivings, and a vibrant but guarded holiness. Deriving focus from Henry David Thoreau's hermitage at Walden Pond and structure from Wallace Stevens' exacting phrasing, Ammons has forged a unique succinctness. His logic derives from patterns in nature.
A native of the poor North Carolina sandhills outside Whiteville, Ammons was born on February 18, 1926. His link with nature stems from life on a farm, where the regeneration of nature was an everyday occurrence. A United States Navy veteran of the Pacific theater, he began writing poems during long night watches at sea. After graduating from Wake Forest University with a degree in chemistry, he married Phyllis Plumbo, mother of their son, John Randolph. He did advanced work in English at the University of California at Berkeley, which matched Ammons' concreteness with a poet's curiosity. His twelve-year pre-literary background includes a principalship of a Hatteras, North Carolina, elementary school and serving as officer of Friederich & Dimmock Inc., a New Jersey manufacturer of laboratory glass.
