Beginning in the 1950s, Ammons injected vigor into American poetry. He earned little attention for his first self-published collection, Ommateum, with Doxology (1955), which uses the multiple eyes of an insect as metaphor for the fragmented poetic vision. After a nine-year pause, he issued Expressions of Sea Level (1964), the preface to a staff position at Cornell and a growing shelf of poetry collections. He allowed himself an unusual experiment — typing a daybook on a piece of adding machine tape, which resulted in a lengthy, digressive narrative, Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965). Sure-footed at last with formal verse, he blended poignant puzzles with humor in Corsons Inlet: A Book of Poems (1965), Northfield Poems (1966), and Selected Poems (1968), a success that earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship. Mid-career titles continued the rhythm of innovation in Uplands (1970), Briefings (1971), and Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974). A pinnacle of his mature verse, Collected Poems 1951–1971 (1972), won a National Book Award.
Firmly wedded to studying physical nature, Ammons interspersed classroom work with increasingly welcomed collections: Diversifications (1975), The Snow Poems (1977), Selected Longer Poems (1980), A Coast of Trees (1981), World Hopes (1982), Sumerian Vistas (1987), The Really Short Poems (1991), Garbage (1993), and Glare (1998), a venture into funkier rhythms, eccentric subjects, and colloquial speech. For his visionary grace, he has earned numerous awards, including the Lannan Poetry award, National Book Critics Circle award, Bollingen Prize, MacArthur Foundation award, and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the MacArthur Foundation.
