Archie Randolph Ammons, one of the great American poets of the twentieth century, never became as widely known as his contemporaries. He avoided reading his poems in public (“I get stage fright,” he wrote), and even when he received the National Book Award in 1993, anxiety precluded his appearing in person to collect it. I was one of the judges that year, and he asked me to read his acceptance speech at the ceremony. “As you’ll recall,” he wrote to me, “I show off but not up.” In spite of this intense emotional fragility, he wrote tirelessly.

If poetry…