Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt

Review
"Amy Clampitt, a major American poet, was a marvelous letter-writer. Spiegelman has edited her letters with skill and devotion. The book will be permanently important for readers and students of the best American poetry." -- Harold Bloom

Book Description
Amy Clampitt lived in Manhattan for almost forty years before she found success at the age of sixty-three with the publication of The Kingfisher (1983). 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. The letters detail her life in Manhattan, a religious conversion (and then a gradual religious disillusionment), as well as her ongoing efforts to find a place for herself in the world of literature

About the Author
Willard Spiegelman is the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University. The author of four books, most recently How Poets See the World: The Art of Description in Contemporary Poetry; he writes regularly for the Wall Street Journal and is editor-in-chief of The Southwest Review.


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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 (1983), a collection of her poetry. 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.The letters detail her life in Manhattan, a religious conversion (and then a gradual religious disillusionment), as well as her ongoing efforts to find a place for herself in the world of literature. In the last decade of her life she appeared like a meteor on the national literary scene, lionized and honored. The letters written during her years of fame reveal the long overdue satisfaction she obviously felt, along with gratitude, for her recognition.


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