Consider the Radiance

An essential new selection of poems from one of the greatest American poets.

Among A. R. Ammons’s most devout readers—and lifelong friends—was critic Harold Bloom, who declared Ammons’s Collected Poems “the most distinguished book of American verse since the publication of Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems in 1955.” This new compendium of work by a major American poet, selected and with an introduction by one of the most prominent literary critics of our time, is therefore of wide interest. Ammons’s work engages with a rich lineage from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau to Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams. Bloom was for decades one of Ammons’s most insightful and influential critical champions, and he last worked on this book in March 2019, about seven months before his death. Bloom’s list included the entire or partial texts of 150 poems, including Garbage, winner of the National Book Award and Tape for the Turn of the Year, written on a roll of adding-machine tape. Edited for publication by Ammons scholar and fellow poet Robert M. West, Consider the Radiance illuminates the achievement of one of poetry’s transcendent voices.