The critic Harold Bloom writes, "With the publication of his Selected Poems (1968), soon after turning forty, A. R. Ammons quietly demonstrated a unique and central position in recent American poetry. . . . Recognition, as is always the case with a poetry difficult and central, has come slowly, but critics now begin to see in Ammons what he is: the maker of a body of poetry that fulfills Emerson's prophecy by addressing itself to life 'with sufficient plainness and with sufficient profoundness.'"