"There's enough": Ulysses and the Long Lyrics of A. R. Ammons

James Joyce's influence on recent American poetry has not yet been the subject of much sustained discussion. The work of A. R. Ammons—ambitious, capacious, rangy, comic, colloquial—offers one striking example of how Joyce's work and especially Ulysses have called to writers on the other side of the fiction-poetry divide. Ammons finds in Joyce a way of including the ordinary without necessarily loading it with significance. He then builds on Joyce's scope through formal and linguistic innovations, creating poems that reflect the workings of a porous, wayward mind. The essay also takes brief glances at the wider array of poets who acknowledge and draw on Joyce; it concludes by suggesting that one reason for the appeal of Ulysses lies in temperament, in the book's balancing of affirmation and deflation.