Amy Clampitt

Clampitt, Amy (1920–94), poet. A native of New Providence, Iowa, a region at the center of some of her richest verse, Clampitt graduated from Grinnell College. She describes herself as one of a “late blooming family.” In the later 1970s her poems began to be published in The New Yorker, and in 1983 appeared The Kingfisher, a work at once perceived as that of a mature and various talent. Clampitt writes about growing up in rural Iowa, about the Maine coast, about the life of Keats. Later collections are What the Light Was Like (1985), Archaic Figure (1987), Westward (1990), and A Silence Opens (1994).

Amy Clampitt 1920-94, American poet, b. New Providence, Iowa. A librarian and editor, she wrote little until the 1960s. Her first major magazine publication was in 1974, and her first commercially published volume of poems, The Kingfisher (1983), appeared when she was 63. Later volumes are What the Light Was Like (1985), Archaic Figure (1987), Westward (1990), and A Silence Opens (1994). Clampitt's collected poems appeared in 1997. Her densely ornate and richly allusive verse is often elegiac in tone, and much of her best work concerns the natural world. She also published an essay collection, Predecessors, et Cetera (1990).

Bibliography: See her selected letters, ed. by W. Spiegelman (2005).