Books : Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt
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by: Amy Clampitt
Amazon.com's Price: $45.00 Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9780231132862
ISBN: 0231132867
Label: Columbia University Press
Manufacturer: Columbia University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: June 10, 2005
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Sales Rank: 1155876
Studio: Columbia University Press
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
This extraordinary 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 63 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.
Written in clear, limpid prose, Clampitt's letters illuminate the habits of imagination she would later use to such effect in her poetry. She offers, with wit and intelligence, an intimate and personal 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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - The Delight of a New Friend
Aside from the pleasure this excellent collection of her letters will bring to fans of Amy Clampitt's poetry, real delight is in store for any reader who loves books and taking life seriously but not grimly. Amy Clampitt came late to being recognized as a poet but she always had the integrity of an artist. Unusually modest, unusually interested in the world outside her self, her correspondence tells the classic American story of a bright young woman from the Midwest who moves to New York City. But ... Read More
Rating: - A Woman's Literary Life
Even people with no interest in poetry will be touched by the letters of Amy Clampitt, who lived in New York for forty years before she became an instant celebrity at 63 when Knopf published her first book of poems. Late bloomers: take heart. Clampitt was there before you. She worked as a literary editor and a librarian, and led a quiet, humble, thoughtful life. Her letters are marvels of energy and observation. As a Quaker, she participated in political activism in the 60s, and had a strong sense ... Read More
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