Research Catalog

Title

Love, Amy : the selected letters of Amy Clampitt / edited by Willard Spiegelman.

Author

Clampitt, Amy.

Publication

New York : Columbia University Press, [2005], ©2005.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

Spiegelman, Willard.

Description

xxiv, 304 pages, 7 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

"This collection of letters sheds light on one of the most important postwar American poets and on a creative woman's life from the 1950s onward. Amy Clampitt was an American original, a literary woman from a Quaker family in rural Iowa who came to New York after college and lived in Manhattan for almost forty years before she found success (or before it found her) at the age of sixty-three with the publication of The Kingfisher. Her letters from 1950 until her death in 1994 are a testimony to her fiercely independent spirit and her quest for various kinds of truth - religious, spiritual, political, and artistic." "Clampitt's letters illuminate the habits of imagination she would later use to such effect in her poetry. She offers a portrait of life as an independent woman recently arrived in New York City. She recounts her struggle to find a place for herself in the world of literature as well as the excitement of living in Manhattan. In other letters she describes a religious conversion (and then a gradual religious disillusionment) and her work as a political activist. Clampitt also reveals her passionate interest in and fascination with the world around her. She conveys her delight in a variety of day-to-day experiences and sights, reporting on trips to Europe, the books she has read, and her walks in nature." "After struggling as a novelist, Clampitt turned to poetry in her fifties and was eventually published in the New Yorker. In the last decade of her life she appeared like a meteor on the national literary scene, lionized and honored. In letters to Helen Vendler, Mary Jo Salter, and others, she discusses her poetry as well as her surprise at her newfound success and the long overdue satisfaction she obviously felt, along with gratitude, for her recognition."--BOOK JACKET.

Subject

• Clampitt, Amy > Correspondence
• Poets, American > 20th century > Correspondence

Note

• Includes index.

ISBN

0231132867 (alk. paper)

LCCN

2004065669

OCLC

• ocm57434250
• SCSB-5187077

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries