Life

Amy Clampitt was born on June 15, 1920 of Quaker parents, and brought up in New Providence

New Providence

New Providence is the most populous island in the Bahamas, containing more than 70% of the total population. It also houses the national capital city, Nassau.The island was originally under Spanish control following Christopher Columbus' discovery of the New World, but the Spanish government showed...

, Iowa

Iowa

Iowa is a state located in the Midwestern United States, an area often referred to as the "American Heartland". It derives its name from the Ioway people, one of the many American Indian tribes that occupied the state at the time of European exploration. Iowa was a part of the French colony of New...

. In the American Academy of Arts and Letters and at nearby Grinnell College

Grinnell College

Grinnell College is a private liberal arts college in Grinnell, Iowa, U.S. known for its strong tradition of social activism. It was founded in 1846, when a group of pioneer New England Congregationalists established the Trustees of Iowa College....

 she began a study of English literature

English literature

English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....

 that eventually led her to poetry. She graduated from Grinnell College, and from that time on lived mainly in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. To support herself, she worked as a secretary at the Oxford University Press

Oxford University Press

Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...

, a reference librarian

Library reference desk

The reference desk or information desk of a library is a public service counter where professional librarians provide library users with direction to library materials, advice on library collections and services, and expertise on multiple kinds of information from multiple sources.- Explanation...

 at the Audubon Society, and a freelance editor. Not until the mid-1960s, when she was in her forties, did she return to writing poetry. Her first poem was published by The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

in 1978. In 1983, at the age of sixty-three, she published her first full-length collection, The Kingfisher. In the decade that followed, Clampitt published five books of poetry, including What the Light Was Like (1985), Archaic Figure (1987), and Westward (1990). Her last book, A Silence Opens, appeared in 1994. She also published a book of essays and several privately printed editions of her longer poems. She was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and taught at the College of William and Mary

College of William and Mary

The College of William & Mary in Virginia is a public research university located in Williamsburg, Virginia, United States...

, Smith College

Smith College

Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college located in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters...

, and Amherst College

Amherst College

Amherst College is a private liberal arts college located in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. Amherst is an exclusively undergraduate four-year institution and enrolled 1,744 students in the fall of 2009...

, but it was her time spent in Manhattan, in a remote part of Maine, and on various trips to Europe, the former Soviet Union, Iowa, Wales, and England that most directly influenced her work. Clampitt was the recipient of a 1982 Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...

, a MacArthur Fellowship (1992), and she was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Poets. She died of cancer in September, 1994.

Poetry collections

• Multitudes, Multitudes (Washington Street Press, 1973).
• The Summer Solstice (Sarabande Press, 1983).
• The Kingfisher (Knopf, 1983). ISBN 0-394-52840-9.
• What the Light Was Like (Knopf, 1983). ISBN 0-394-54318-1.
• Archaic Figure (Knopf, 1987). ISBN 0-394-75090-X.
• Westward (Knopf, 1990). ISBN 0-394-58455-4.
• Manhattan: An Elegy, and Other Poems (University of Iowa Center for the Book, 1990).
• A Silence Opens (Knopf, 1994). ISBN 0-679-75022-3.
• The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt (Knopf, 1997). ISBN 0-375-70064-1.

Prose

• A Homage to John Keats (Sarabande Press, 1984).
• The Essential Donne (Ecco Press, 1988). ISBN 0-88001-480-6.
• Predecessors, Et Cetera: Essays (University of Michigan Press, 1991). ISBN 0-472-06457-6.

External links

• The Amy Clampitt Fund
• Clampitt's Academy of American Poets page
• Poetry Foundation page
• "Clampitt, Amy: Introduction" Poetry Criticism. Vol. 19, edited by Carol T. Gaffke (Thomson Gale, 1997).