DeGolyer Library

Amy Clampitt (June, 1920-September, 1994) grew up in the Quaker community of New Providence, Iowa. She wrote Shakespearean sonnets as a young girl, but by the time she attended Grinnell College she had decided that being a poet was untenable. After graduating with honors, she pursued graduate studies at Columbia University briefly and then turned to publishing. She worked at Oxford University Press for five years; gave herself five months of travel abroad; and then returned to New York City to work as a reference librarian, freelance editor, and writer. Her first collection, privately printed, appeared in 1973. The New Yorker published a poem in 1979. Only with The Kingfisher in 1983 did Clampitt’s work receive regular trade publication. Critics deemed it a brilliant debut. Edmund White accorded The Kingfisher four pages of praise in The New York Review of Books . Helen Vendler placed in her the company of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton. She confessed in an interview the avalanche of attention intimidated her, but she plunged into the business of being a poet with brio. In the short decade left to her, three more collections followed, as did a collection of critical essays, a translation of two cantos of Dante’s Inferno, and interviews and appearances in numerous journals. She edited, offered praise to other poets' titles, and appeared at poetry readings and celebrations. She taught at the College of William and Mary, Smith, and Amherst Colleges. Clampitt accumulated the following honors: A Guggenheim Fellowship, and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in the American Academy of Poets. A MacArthur Fellowship enabled her to buy her first home in Lenox, Massachusetts. In June 1994 she and her longtime companion Harold Korn married. In September of 1994 she succumbed to cancer.

From the guide to the Collection on Amy Clampitt A2008. 0010., 1938-1998, (DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University)

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