Paul Krueger
        Willard Spiegelman
        David Son
        Virginia Dupuy
        Alan Brown
        Wayne Shaw
        Evelyn Parker
        Valerie F. Hunt
        Dan Orlovsky

Letters From A Late Bloomer

Poet Amy Clampitt became known relatively late in life – her verse did not gain a significant audience until she was 57, when she published her first book of poetry. Hughes Professor of English Willard Spiegelman has edited a collection of her letters that portray a woman who lived a “fiercely independent and intellectual life” long before she started writing poetry, he says.

Spiegelman compiled the collection using Clampitt’s letters from New York to her friends and family in Iowa. The letters cover a 40-year span of the poet’s life and chronicle her years as an editor, librarian, political activist, and traveler who spent her summers on the Maine coast.

Her ornate, highly complex poetry reflects these experiences, Spiegelman says. “Her poems often include natural descriptions and anecdotes about her travels. She also is one of the finest political poets of the 20th century.”

Clampitt’s first book of poetry, The Kingfisher, was published in 1983. She produced three other works, earning a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1992 and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Spiegelman edited the collection of letters as the first artist-in-residence at the Amy Clampitt home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. “All her books were there, along with boxes of her memoirs and photographs,” he says.

Spiegelman was acquainted with Clampitt before her death in 1994. As editor of SMU’s literary journal, Southwest Review, Spiegelman had published her poetry, and his books about poetry were included in her library. But assembling Clamplitt’s letters gave him new insight about her life.

His book Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt is scheduled for a June 2005 publication date from Columbia University Press. Spiegelman examines Clampitt’s work as well as the work of other poets in How Poets See the World: The Art of Description in Contemporary Poetry, to be published by Oxford University Press in June.

Spiegelman, who joined the English faculty in 1971, has received numerous teaching awards as well as Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Rockefeller fellowships. Twenty-four of his lectures are included in “How to Read and Understand Poetry” on The Great Courses on Tape series. In addition, he is the author of Wordsworth’s Heroes, Majestic Indolence: English Romantic Poetry and the Work of Art, and The Didactic Muse: Scenes of Instruction in Contemporary American Poetry. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

For more information: wspiegel@smu.edu