"It was inevitable to think about that as the central image of our lives—that sphere," A. R. Ammons said of the earth seen from space. Along with television viewers across the United States and abroad, Ammons had marveled at the 1968 broadcast sent from the Apollo 8 mission. By the early 1970s, the Apollo program, and the enthusiasm it once generated, had come to an end. But the images it had produced remained in the public consciousness, and they gave Ammons a new way to formulate the "One-Many problem" that had long consumed his thought.
    Ammons's book-length poem Sphere (1974) begins with the atom and ends with the planet, moving across scales to contrast the particularity of things with their sameness. He resolves his meditations with a final description of the earth that too closely recalls early celebrations of the Apollo images as a promise of U.S.-guided global unity. But the poetics that Ammons develops and discusses in the poem works against this resolution; he preserves the difference between parts and wholes even while he brings them into relation. In this paper, I consider how Ammons's poetics of one and many answers a need, later identified by theorists of postmodern culture, for a new form adequate to the total complex we inhabit.
    A poet of both "really short" and extended, book-length poems, Ammons joins extremes of lyric scale in Sphere's one-hundred-and-fifty-five numbered sections of four tercets each. These parts of the poem, measured and counted, collect to form the whole the title names, a whole he gives the completeness of a geometric solid. He uses this form to imagine a perfect continuity of physical matter, derived from shared elements and confirmed by his chosen vocabulary: "([. . .] the widest sweep of / unity taking definition and meaning from the unit)." He brackets this thought, though, and, elsewhere, considers how such continuity disrupts the parts that form it: "when the one item stands for all, the one item is so lost / in its charge that it is no longer bounded but all radiance." This unifying "radiance," or spiritual worth comes at the expense of the item's integrity. Yet Ammons, I will argue, insists on retaining that integrity through his structured form and the particularizing language he takes from both physical science and individual human experience.