CLAMPITT, Amy (Kathleen)

Born 15 June 1920, New Providence, Iowa; died 10 September 1994

Daughter of Roy Justice and Lutie Pauline Felt Clampitt; married Harold L. Korn

Amy Clampitt grew up in Iowa on a 125-acre farm, gaining an appreciation for nature but at the same time becoming cognizant of feelings of isolation and unhappiness. Both her love for the natural world and her awareness of the darker emotions are evident throughout her densely literate and allusion-filled work. She has often been hailed as one of the leading contemporary poets in America, a fact especially notable given that her first major collection of poetry was not published until she was sixty-three.

While attending Grinnell College in Iowa, she discovered poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who became a major influence. After graduating in 1941, Clampitt moved to New York and studied briefly at Columbia University and later at the New School for Social Research. Never viewing herself as an academic, she dropped out of Columbia and found a job as a secretary at Oxford University Press, where she eventually rose to promotion director for the college textbook division. In 1952 she moved to the National Audubon Society, where she served as research librarian.

The 1950s were an unhappy period for Clampitt, who felt herself somewhat of a misfit. She wrote several novels during this decade, but none were ever published. In 1959 she returned to Iowa to be closer to her family, but after six months returned to New York. The 1960s, with the decade's anything-goes acceptance, was a happier time for Clampitt who found success as a freelance editor, writer, and researcher for the next 17 years. In 1977 she accepted a position as editor at E. P. Dutton, where she remained until 1982.

During the 1960s and 1970s Clampitt began to concentrate on writing poetry. After being unable to secure a publisher, Clampitt paid Washington Street Press to publish a limited edition of her first collection, Multitudes, Multitudes, which was released in 1973. In 1978 the poetry editor at the New Yorker, Howard Moss, noticed her work and began to publish her frequently, as did other magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly, Kenyon Review and Yale Review. In 1981 the Coalition of Publishers for Employment published her second limited-edition collection, The Isthmus. Two more limited editions of Clampitt's poetry followed, The Summer Solstice in 1983 and A Homage to John Keats in 1984.

Meanwhile, Clampitt's first major collection, The Kingfisher—the title inspired by a Hopkins poem—was published in 1983 and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award. The collection is organized around the four elements of fire, water, earth, and air, focusing on natural themes and contains examinations of negative emotions (although rarely of relationships). The sixty-three-year-old's reputation as a leading contemporary American poet was immediate.

Clampitt's second collection, What the Light Was Like, was published in 1985 and contains 40 poems organized into five sections. Like The Kingfisher and all of her subsequent work, it garnered nearly unanimous critical approval, although some reviewers took issue with individual poems. Clampitt's poetry is full of allusions to modern and classical literature. A poem in the second collection, "Voyages: A Homage to John Keats," for example, requires knowledge not only of his poetry but of his correspondence and the facts of his life. Clampitt purposely included some poems on lighter subjects in What the Light Was Like, although the overall darkness of the collection persisted.

Three other collections followed, Archaic Figure (1987), Westward (1990), and A Silence Opens (1994), the latter of which was published the year Clampitt died from cancer. Publishers Weekly wrote of the last, "Clampitt's gravely luminous fifth volume of poems dwells, with an extraordinary certainty of language, on the uncertain texture of living." The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt (1997) contains excerpts from all of her five previous works but none of the new poems that had surfaced since her death.

All of Clampitt's poetry is challenging to the reader on many levels. Its rich vocabulary includes many unfamiliar words; its syntax is complicated; and its allusions, which are central to the poems' meanings, require an educated audience. While her themes are universal, her topics are wide-ranging and her work brings together travel, science, psychology, metaphysics, myth, foreign language, commerce, nature, art, and, in some instances, humor. Her dense poems defied the 1980s' trend toward plain-language poetry.

Clampitt won a number of awards after her late start as an acclaimed poet, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a MacArthur Foundation grant, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's award. She was a writer-in-residence at several colleges, including the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the College of William and Mary, and Amherst.

Other Works:

The Essential Donne (ed., 1988). Predecessors, Et Cetera (a collection of essays, 1991).

Bibliography:

Reference Works:

Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature (1991). CANR 29 (1990). CBY (1992, 1994).

Other reference:

Economist (15 Aug. 1998). Nation (3 Nov. 1997). New Republic (19 and 26 Sept. 1994, 6 March 1995). NYT (12 Sept. 1994). NYTBR (9 Nov. 1997). Poetry (July 1998). PW (31 Jan. 1994). Time (26 Sept. 1994). Wall Street Journal (7 Nov. 1997).

—KAREN RAUGUST