Amy Clampitt
Amy Clampitt was an influential American poet whose work gained significant attention in the mid-1980s, particularly with the publication of her collections, *The Kingfisher* and *What the Light Was Like*. Raised on a large farm in Iowa and educated at Columbia University, Clampitt’s poetry reflects a deep engagement with both personal and cultural themes. Critics often note her stylistic connections to a younger generation of poets, even as her influences include notable literary figures such as John Keats and Wallace Stevens. Her writing is characterized by rich literary allusions, mood shifts, and structural variations, which create a baroque style that evolves over her career.
Clampitt received numerous prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship, underscoring her intellectual contributions and the unique perspective she brings to female experience. Her work articulates themes of change and spirituality, often juxtaposed against the backdrop of nature and personal memory. The exploration of contrasts—between home life and travel, myth and history—forms a central part of her poetic achievement. Clampitt's legacy is encapsulated in the posthumous collection, *The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt*, which gathers her extensive contributions to contemporary poetry.
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Amy Clampitt
American poet
- Born: June 15, 1920
- Birthplace: New Providence, Iowa
- Died: September 10, 1994
- Place of death: Lenox, Massachusetts
Biography
Amy Clampitt’s luminous enunciations in The Kingfisher and What the Light Was Like brought her suddenly into the forefront of American poetry in the mid-1980’s. She is often linked, stylistically, with poets of a younger generation, such as Gjertrud Schnackenberg and Louise Erdrich, rather than with the writers who contributed to her formation, such as John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bowen, and May Sarton. The awards she received (Guggenheim Fellowship, 1982; Academy of American Poets, 1984; American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1984; honorary doctorate, Grinnell College, 1984; writer-in-residence, College of William and Mary, 1984-1985; Hurst Professor, Washington University, 1987-1988; and MacArthur Fellowship, 1992) bear witness to the insistent, unsentimental, plucky intelligence that affirms an exalted state of female intelligence.
Clampitt was born and raised in Iowa on a fairly large farm. After college she studied at Columbia University in New York and afterward remained closely associated with publishing houses and research societies in the Northeast. In the 1960’s and 1970’s she traveled widely as a freelance writer, editor, and researcher; Greece and Italy made lasting impressions.
Her poetic voice, manifested in the powerful verse of the late 1980’s, often bears comparison to Medusa figures—beautiful, erratic, threatening, and mournful. Many critics observe that the early poems, with their numerous literary allusions, rich observations, effortless digressions, mood changes, and structural variations, represent a form of baroque profusion. In the later works, especially A Silence Opens, hidden tendencies toward a spiritual dimension—the ineffable, pared-down, and transcendental aspects of reality—point backward to earlier signposts.
The emphasis on change, vividly articulated in elegiac locales, represents a dynamic presence in The Kingfisher, in which opportunities for divergence are symbolized by the seascape of Maine and the movement from waterfront toward the heartland. Birth and creativity in transitional zones reinforce patterns in a woman’s life much like the topographical shifts in Westward from European civilization to New York, Washington, D.C., the Midwest, and California, home of Hollywood and the Asian influx.
In The Kingfisher, What the Light Was Like, and Westward, Clampitt organizes her material in such a way that fleeting glimpses of momentary events produce a kaleidoscope of sounds and images. Enlightenment is confirmed, but only through loss of innocence. Multiple voices announce a series of refocusings in which telephoto vistas dissolve into close-ups. In the same way, the outer appearances of self-detachment become subtly personalized as memory, sorrow, grief, and remorse are interrogated. This combination of confessional elements and archetypal extrapolations from them allows Clampitt to reflect upon the passage of time and the brocaded textures of language that trace this inevitable flow.
Clampitt’s poetic achievement can be summarized as the perfect identification of contrasts and contradictions (classified in Westward as “crossings” and “habitats”); intellectual interludes and grassroots platitudes, home life and travel, myth and history, defiance and submission are gathered into a single scheme. This synthesizing process is linked to “a remnant of uncountable transformings” (“Matrix,” in A Silence Opens), which allows Clampitt to explore marginal positions in language, perception, and spirituality. It is no accident that her last book of poems celebrates in song this beguiling web of visitations and departures in equal numbers. The contents of five of her books were brought together in one volume in the posthumously published The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt.
Bibliography
Clampitt, Amy. “Amy Clampitt: An Interview.” Interview by Laura Fairchild. American Poetry Review 16 (July/August, 1987): 17-20. In one of her few widely circulated interviews, Clampitt candidly discusses her poetry’s emphasis on sound, as well as the impact classic poets Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson have had on her work.
Fairchild, Laura. “Amy Clampitt: An Interview.” American Poetry Review, 16 (July/August, 1987): 17-20. In one of her few widely circulated interviews, Clampitt candidly discusses her poetry’s emphasis on sound, as well as the impact classic poets Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson have had on her work. Although she observes that “I don’t have a lot of the teacher in me,” she muses amicably about her tenure as writer in residence at The College of William and Mary as well.
Morrisroe, Patricia. “The Prime of Amy Clampitt.” New York 17 (October 15, 1984): 44-48. Part interview and part critical analysis, Morisroe’s article emphasizes the differences between Clampitt’s poetry and that of her most widely read contemporaries, “confessional” poets, such as Sylvia Plath.
Salter, Mary Jo. Introduction to The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt. New York: Knopf, 1997. One of the most illuminating and personal sketches of Clampitt available, Salter’s introduction to Clampitt’s posthumously published collected poems bristles with surprising and heretofore undocumented information and anecdotes about the poet.
Spiegelman, Willard. “What to Make of an Augmented Thing.” Kenyon Review 21, no. 1 (1999): 172-182. A thorough stylistic critique of Clampitt’s work through an analysis of her Collected Poems.
Stein, Jean C., and Daniel G. Maroski, eds. Contemporary Literary Criticism 32. Detroit: Gale Research, 1985. Focuses on the critical reception for Clampitt’s seminal collection The Kingfisher. Points out that several critics—including Helen Vendler, Paul Olson, Peter Stitt, and Richard Howard—viewed Clampitt as “the most important new poet on the American scene” in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Vendler, Helen. “On the Thread of Language.” New York Review of Books 30 (March 3, 1983): 19-22. Probably the most celebrated (and quoted) review of Clampitt’s work to appear in her lifetime, Vendler’s ebullient review of The Kingfisher notes that its progression over her previous work is “dumbfounding” and that the collection as a whole serves as a remarkable “triumph over the resistance of language, the reason why poetry lasts.”
Weisman, Karen A. “Starving Before the Actual: Amy Clampitt’s Voyages: A Homage to John Keats.” Criticism 36, no. 1 (1994): 119-138. A close reading of one of Clampitt’s collections.
White, Edmund. “Poetry as Alchemy.” Nation 236 (April 16, 1983): 485-486. White concentrates on what he views as a profound and poignant contradiction in Clampitt’s work: that her poems simultaneously both suggest and shy away from narrative. As he observes of Clampitt’s work, “one senses [in it] not awkwardness but rather a strange fusion of an ambition to narrate and a talent for suppressing the tale.”