Amy Clampitt

Poet Class of 1992
location icon Location
New York, New York
age iconAge
72 at time of award
age iconDate Deceased
September 10, 1994
area of focus iconArea of Focus

About Amy's Work

Amy Clampitt was a poet and a critic.

She was noted for her use of luminous, telling details and metaphorical transformations to express undercurrents of attachment and loss.  Clampitt possessed an acute aural imagination with an ability to work in several poetic conventions, achieving a remarkable range of tone, style, and form.  Her books of poetry include The Kingfisher (1983), What the Light Was Like (1985), Archaic Figure (1987), Westward (1990), Manhattan: An Elegy, and Other Poems (1990), A Silence Opens (1994), and The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt (1997).  She was also the author of Predecessors, Et Cetera: Essays (1991) and Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt By Amy Clampitt (2005).

Biography

Clampitt was the recipient of numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1982), a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets (1984), and a grant from the Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Fund (1991).  She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a Writer-in-Residence at the College of William and Mary, Visiting Writer at Amherst College, and Grace Hazard Conkling Visiting Writer at Smith College.

Clampitt received a B.A. (1941) from Grinnell College and subsequently attended Columbia University and the New School for Social Research. 

Last updated January 1, 2006

Published on July 1, 1992

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