A. R. Ammons analogized poetry to this activity in a 1967 essay that calls it an "externalization of an interior seeking” that “turns … and eventually returns.” For 10 points each:
[10h] Name this activity that releases the speaker “from forms, / from the perpendiculars” in the poem “Corsons Inlet.” It ends by noting, as “Scope eludes [his] grasp,” tomorrow this activity will be made anew.
ANSWER: walking [or equivalents like perambulation; accept “A Poem is a Walk”; prompt on movement or locomotion or equivalents]
[10m] To argue that “A Poem is a Walk,” A. R. Ammons quotes from a poem by this author, whose speaker walks into a frozen swamp and reflects on the “slow smokeless burning of decay” of a pile of wood.
ANSWER: Robert Frost [or Robert Lee Frost] (The poem is “The Wood-Pile.”)
[10e] Harold Bloom called Ammons “the most direct” poet since Frost to emulate this 19th-century movement, which included the authors of the essays “Walking” and “Nature.”
ANSWER: transcendentalism [or word forms, such as transcendental] (Henry David Thoreau wrote “Walking” and Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “Nature.”)
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