User:Lit312/Amy Clampitt

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

Life

Amy Clampitt was born on June 15, 1920, and brought up in New Providence, Iowa. She wrote poetry in high school, but then ceased and focused her energies on writing fiction instead. She graduated from Grinnell College, and from that time on lived mainly in New York City. To support herself, she worked as a secretary at the Oxford University Press, a reference librarian 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 in 1978. In 1983, at the age of sixty-three, she published her first full-length collection, The Kingfisher. Between 1983 and 1994, Clampitt published six full-length books of poetry. 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.

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 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. She died of cancer in September 1994.

Works

Poetry

• As If: Poems New and Selected (1955)
• Multitudes, Multitudes (1973)
• The Summer Solstice (1983)
• The Kingfisher (1983)
• What the Light Was Like (1983)
• Archaic Figure (1987)
• Westward (1990)
• Manhattan: An Elegy, and Other Poems (1990)
• A Silence Opens (1994)
• The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt (1997)

Prose

• A Homage to John Keats (1984)
• The Essential Donne (1988)
• Predecessors, Et Cetera: Essays (1991)

External links

• Clampitt's Academy of American Poets page
• Review of Clampitt’s A Hermit Thrush