Amy Clampitt - Life, Works

Poet, born near New Providence, Iowa, USA. Raised on a farm in Iowa, she attended Columbia University but dropped out before graduating. She worked for Oxford University Press and the National Audubon Society in New York before winning a trip to England for an essay competition. It was there that she started writing poetry. Her first major collection, The Kingfisher (1983), was immediately successful, critics comparing her with Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Marianne Moore. Her poetry has been acclaimed for its rich vocabulary and verbal dexterity and for her delight in the natural world. Other collections include What the Light was Like (1985), Archaic Figure (1987), Westward (1990), and A Silence Opens (1994).

Amy Clampitt (1920 - 1994) was an American poet and author.

Life

Amy Clampitt was born on June 15, 1920 of Quaker parents, and brought up in New Providence, Iowa. 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). She was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and taught at the College of William and Mary, Smith College, and Amherst College, 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 Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and she was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Poets.

Works

Poetry Collections

As If: Poems New and Selected (1955) Multitudes, Multitudes (1973). The Summer Solstice (Sarabande Press, 1983). The Kingfisher (Knopf, 1983). ISBN 0394528409. ISBN 0394543181. ISBN 039475090X. ISBN 0394584554. ISBN 0679750223. The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt (Knopf, 1997). ISBN 0375700641.

Prose

A Homage to John Keats (Sarabande Press, 1984). The Essential Donne (Ecco Press, 1988). ISBN 0880014806. ISBN 0472064576.