A poet’s unlikely rise to fame.

Literary scholar Spiegelman draws on interviews, diaries, letters, and poems to create a sensitive, admiring life of Amy Clampitt (1920-1994), a critically acclaimed poet who was first published in the New Yorker in 1978. By the time she died, she had earned international recognition, including both Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. Born in Iowa to a Quaker family, Clampitt was a bookish child who felt out of place among her peers. As deeply as she connected with nature, she also longed for the stimulation and opportunities of a city. After college at Grinnell, she eagerly left for New York City, where she found an entry-level job at Oxford University Press, a studio apartment in Greenwich Village, and a social life filled with theater, ballet, concerts, movies, and new friends. In 1949, an essay contest prize paid for a trip to England, the first of many travels that nurtured her spirit and her writing. After quitting her job at Oxford, she worked at the National Audubon Society, then as a freelance editor, all the while writing fiction, which Spiegelman characterizes as unpublishable. A spiritual epiphany in 1956 drew her to the Episcopal Church, and the Vietnam War led her to activism: “protesting, marching, petitioning, getting arrested.” In the 1970s, she abandoned fiction for poetry and enrolled in a class at the New School, where, mentored by her professor, she honed a distinctive style. An editor at Dutton, for whom she did freelance copy editing, was impressed by that new work and sent a few poems to his friend Howard Moss, “the longtime, much-respected poetry editor” at the New Yorker. This launched her career. Spiegelman handles her personal life—affairs, friendships, and her decadeslong relationship with legal scholar Hal Korn—delicately, and he offers perceptive readings of her work. Although he claims that “poems are the writer’s best biography,” his discerning examination is outstanding.

An insightful, exemplary literary biography.