ABSTRACT
Despite being one of the great American poets of the 20thcentury, A.R. Ammons irascibly refused to adhere to the labels set upon him by critics. His work has never been easy to categorize, and his career was marked by sudden turns that seem intended to confuse the issue of what kind of poet he is. For many, he remains the prototypical American Romantic: The Dictionary of Literary Biography in 1996 called him the "foremost living representative of the American Romantic tradition in poetry." His Romanticism was always rather skeptical, however, and his views of nature too dependent on humankind's frail and fumbling interactions with it for him to be seen as purely Romantic.
