Amy Clampitt
Who is Amy Clampitt
Amy Clampitt (June 15, 1920 – September 10, 1994) was an American poet and author.
Life
Clampitt was born on June 15, 1920, of Quaker parents, and brought up in New Providence, Iowa. In the American Academy of Arts and Letters and at nearby Grinnell College she began a study of English literature that eventually led her to poetry. 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 firs...
Read Full Biography
Amy Clampitt Poems
- Brought From Beyond
The magpie and the bowerbird, its odd
predilection unheard of by Marco Polo
when he came upon, high in Badakhshan,
that blue stoneâ??s
...
- Athena
Force of reason, who shut up the shrill
foul Furies in the dungeon of the Parthenon,
led whimpering to the cave they live in still,
...
- Easter Morning
a stone at dawn
cold water in the basin
these walls' rough plaster
imageless
...
- A Hermit Thrush
Nothing's certain. Crossing, on this longest day,
the low-tide-uncovered isthmus, scrambling up
the scree-slope of what at high tide
will be again an island,
...
- Fog
A vagueness comes over everything,
as though proving color and contour
alike dispensable: the lighthouse
extinct, the islands' spruce-tips
...
Read All Poems
Amy Clampitt Quotes
Read All Quotes
Comments about Amy Clampitt
- Cwruenglish: friday, april 14th: "becoming a poet: the case of amy clampitt," a lecture by willard spiegelman. clark 206. 3:15 to 4:15 p.m.
amy clampitt lived in obscurity for almost four decades before bursting onto the literary scene in 1978, when the new yorker published her first poems.
- Newdoorbooks: amy clampitt, patron saint of late bloomers:
- Chessforumnyc: pinning down the cagey emotions of poet amy clampitt
- Richiehof: savoring willard spiegelman’s nothing stays put: the life and poetry of amy clampitt—already a thrilling story of an unconventional poet’s life and also a sensitive meditation on the relation of biography to literature.
- Emmertandrew: i always have too many books going (five times over), but had to make room for the new amy clampitt biog... if i could dream up a book i would want (need) to read right now, this would be it. and here it is, poof! magic.
Read All Comments