World Enough and Time: A Review of Willard Spiegelman’s Nothing Stays Put, The Life and Art of Amy Clampitt

When the poet Amy Clampitt was a young child, growing up in a Quaker farming family in rural Iowa, she quipped “Big drink!” as she crossed the Mississippi River: an anecdote that hints at her electric wit and penchant for metaphor, even as a toddler. It’s one of many telling anecdotes woven through Willard Spiegelman’s lively biography of Clampitt, Nothing Stays Put, The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt, which brings solidly to the fore this poet’s life and sensibility—before and after her stunning emergence as a profoundly significant poet with the publication of her first book, The Kingfisher (1983), in her early sixties. Within months, Clampitt’s aesthetic achievement had won almost instant champions (including Parnassians Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom) and a petite chorus of detractors: critics who, by and large, simply couldn’t fit a unicorn into equestrian tackle.

In the more than thirty years since her death, in 1994, of ovarian cancer, Clampitt is still earning her due and finding her readership. Spiegelman’s welcome biography, like Brett Millier’s pathbreaking biography of Elizabeth Bishop in 1992, should spur a renewed engagement with Clampitt’s poems and recognition of her lasting achievement—among scholars, poets, and general readers. 

Indeed, in the past two decades, we’ve witnessed a golden age of literary biography, particularly of American women poets from the twentieth century, redeeming many figures from outmoded, reductive stereotypy. Spiegelman’s account renders Clampitt in her complexity. Drawing on her prodigious correspondence, drafts, and abandoned novels, and on interviews with the poet’s friends and family, he explores her combination of “Keatsian lushness and Quaker austerity.” He tracks her rural Midwestern roots and Manhattanite adulthood, her attraction to the glittering metropolises of Europe and the rugged remote shore of Corea, Maine, her decades of artistic failure (as a would-be novelist) and late meteoric rise as a poet, giving us a satisfyingly three-dimensional portrait of a writer whose private life and habits of mind remained a bit of a cipher, even among lifelong friends. 

Clampitt required, of her biographer, an erudite scholar and a dogged sleuth. Spiegelman is both. Biographically, he fills in many blanks such as her rise through the professional ranks—from secretary to librarian to “book doctor”—at Oxford University Press, the National Audubon Society, and Dutton Books (E.P. Dutton). Just as carefully, he outlines the lacunae such as the unknown reason she abandoned graduate study at Columbia University in 1941, the identity of an early fiancé (an engagement called off), and her short stint at Cyanamid, a chemical company, in the ’40s, before she joined Oxford University Press. He also charts her religious convictions—from a Midwestern version of Quakerism that assimilated parts of Protestant liturgy to her deep attraction to (and eventual departure from) the Anglican Church, and the serious if brief consideration she gave to becoming a nun.

Critically, he provides insightful readings of an astonishing number of Clampitt’s poems including such signature works as “The Kingfisher,” “The Hermit Thrush,” “The Cove,” “Manhattan,” “Iola, Kansas” and “A Procession at Candlemas.” Deftly, he opens up each poem’s architectonics and contexts (geographic, historic, and allusive) for the reader. Of “The Kingfisher,” for instance, which refers to Hardy, Hopkins, Shakespeare, and Keats while obliquely glossing the dissolution of a love affair, Spiegelman crisply notes that it is “a confessional poem masquerading as objective third-person narrative, an extended series of vignettes, with birds rather than people as the central characters.” He also brings us vividly to the coast of Corea, in the Down East reaches of Maine, where Clampitt and her late-life partner, the legal scholar Harold Korn, spent a month each summer. It is the setting of “The Hermit Thrush,” a poem that describes the couple’s annual picnic on a coastal island accessible only at low-tide, a ritual that marks their fidelity to each other and to “this existence, this / botched, cumbersome, much-mended, / not unsatisfactory thing.” These lines have, Spiegelman observes, a “kind of British understatement uncommon for this poet given typically to exaggeration.” Litotes, for Clampitt, might have been the mark of deepest feeling.

Clampitt’s emergence in the early ’80s coincided with the prizing, in poetry circles, of plain speech, on the one hand, and “confessional” revelation on the other. Baroque as Cicero and circumspect as Julius Caesar probably should have been, Clampitt’s style did not fit either vogue, though her best poems handsomely reward the reader and place her in the firmament of writers who knew the English language intimately, etymologically. Her skills combined the sprezzatura of the concert pianist and the elite piano tuner who knows—by ear, eye, and touch—the anatomy of each hammer and key.

Spiegelman’s robust account of Clampitt’s interwoven life and art joins a growing field of recent biographies that have, collectively, broken many American women poets out of the two frames prevalent in anthologies.

We learn from Spiegelman that before Clampitt worked as a copy editor for “complicated” books at E. P. Dutton, including science volumes, she was a fervent reader whose favorite books included George Eliot’s Middlemarch; indeed, he notes that Clampitt identiifed with both the liberated nineteenth-century novelist and the chastened Dorothea. Clampitt’s ability to render psychic states in language suggests what she learned from Eliot and other great novelists; she also expected such learned responsiveness from her readers, and when she taught creative writing late in life, from her students. In a letter detailing her teaching style, Clampitt noted that she asked students to practice strict verse forms, such as giving “an account of a Superbowl game in the manner of [Alexander Pope’s] ‘The Rape of the Lock.’” (One can only imagine a fourth down or an interception in rhyming heroic couplets.)

For Clampitt, however, literary tradition and contemporary experience were not estranged but bound together: she saw things both for what they were and what they were like, powers of metaphor and allusion being conatural to her. Though they occasionally lend a vertiginous whirl to some of her poems, a seasoned reader can keep his or her balance. In his readings of Clampitt’s bus poems—such as the magisterial elegy “A Procession at Candlemas” and the engaging “Iola, Kansas”—Spiegelman notes that the poet, who hated flying on airplanes, enjoyed the happenstance human medley she encountered when traveling by bus or boat: trips akin, he observes, to a Quaker meeting with its spells of quiet and sporadic speech.

Spiegelman’s robust account of Clampitt’s interwoven life and art joins a growing field of recent biographies that have, collectively, broken many American women poets out of the two frames prevalent in anthologies—and even in criticism—that proliferated well into the ’80s and ’90s. As a teenager, scouring headnotes of poets in my anthologies, I was dismayed to find that many women were characterized either as quaint “curios”—flouting norms of haberdashery, marital patterns, pets, or patriotism—or “tragic types”—suffering from mental illness, poverty, chauvinism, crude psychiatry, addiction, or deadbeat lovers. I longed to read accounts of their lives and experiences that did not focus on mysterious heartbreak, sartorial cuteness, or manner of suicide. 

Heather Clark’s biography of Sylvia Plath proved that a poet can be redeemed from caricature and restored, in the public’s mind, as a major literary artist and embodied person. The past twenty years have also seen new biographies of Elizabeth Bishop by Thomas Travisano and Megan Marshall, a biography of Marianne Moore by Linda Leavell, a biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and a biography of Adrienne Rich by Hilary Holladay—all of which work in this salutary vein. Recounting artistic lives with accuracy, authority, and thorough archival research, biographers have done much to buttress studious attention and informed assessment of twentieth-century American women poets in all their dimensions. It is gratifying to see Spiegelman’s rendering of Clampitt’s life story added to this growing wave.