Arts and Letters

So rich and intricate and complete are the poems of Amy Clampitt, as we have them in five volumes published every couple of years from 1983 to 1994, that there is only one astonishment to record about her life, which is just the fact I have mentioned: it was between her sixties and her seventies that the poet produced a body of work so consistent in its temper, so engaging in its tonality, so sedulous in its attention to things seen, things heard and things learned, that there is nothing left out, nothing left over, nothing epactal, as the astronomers say of a calendar which fails to match the stars in their courses. The one surprise, then—that all this work came into being for us in the last decade of a life lived so invisibly to the literary and academic and intellectual establishment—gave way after 1983 to mere suspense as to whether she would keep it up. She did. No question of what in our modernity we have learned to call development; the poems as they first were published by Howard Moss in The New Yorker and then as they amazed us in that first book The Kingfisher continued fully and without fragmentation or frugality what they were to be to the end, last September: an ardent inspection of what it is like to be alive in the company of closely regarded plants and animals, homelands and foreign countries, weathers and cities, bearing up under the consciousness of history, its large-scale demonization and its miniscule despairs, solicited and even sustained by the eager admiration of the dead who are so beloved (Wordsworth and Keats, George Eliot and Margaret Fuller) and the living who are so fervently believed-in.

The case of Amy Clampitt is incomparable for this one circumstance, though analogous to the wonder more classically required of us by that precocious production which is so often exhibited as a prized literary phenomenon cited from Catullus to Rimbaud, to Hart Crane. There was, of course, no mistaking her achievement: critical acclaim virtually pounced upon the books as they appeared, and awards and honors followed, including membership in this body. The greatness was not to be missed, and it has not been; among the praise, I believe the most cogent observations were made by our colleague John Hollander, who cites "not only the poetic acknowledgment of the life of the mind as the life of the heart, of a world in which cultural and historical facts were authentically part of nature… but also a mode of distancing, in which the expression of feelings about objects of experience was rejected as sentimental and falsifying, whereas the representation of those feelings—in tropes, models, indirect reports, allegorical constructions—was considered true to emotion and to the almost sacred human activity of representing."

To which I would add only that pleasure—the confident reliance upon language as a continuing source of play (by which I mean both discovery and repetition, ritual and surprise)—has never had a more fervent and more expert heroine. Amy Clampitt once called herself "a poet of displacement," and her book of essays (Predecessors, Et Cetera) will chronicle the literal sense of that phrase; but for us, bereft of her enchanting presence and confronting her permanent legacy, she is a poet of replacement, the world and its beings restored, reclaimed by her headlong and continuously ecstatic emblems of what she called in that first book "the transparent strata / of experience, the increment of years."