Predecessors, Et Cetera: Essays

Poets on Poetry

by Amy Clampitt

Predecessors, Et Cetera collects Amy Clampitt’s reflections on her predecessors (the poets Donne, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, and Marianne Moore as well as the novelists Henry James and Edith Wharton) and her contemporaries (including James Merrill, Anthony Hecht, Howard Moss, Thomas McGrath, John Berryman, Stevie Smith, and Seamus Heaney) and reveals the intricate connections inherent in their art. Other essays include “Purloined Sincerity,” which examines the fate of the personal letter in these days of electronic communication, and “The Long, Long Wait,” which looks at the epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians. Along the way she offers ruminations on the poet’s craft, the vagaries of reputation, and the perennial question of what makes a poet – or any writer – tick.

Genres: Literary Criticism

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Amy Clampitt was brought up in New Providence, Iowa. She wrote poetry in high school, but then ceased and focused her energies on writing fiction instead. She graduated from Grinnell College, and from that time on lived mainly in New York City.

To support herself, she worked as a secretary at the Oxford University Press, a reference librarian at the Audubon Society, and a freelance editor. Not until the mid-1960s, when she was in her forties, did she return to writing poetry. Her first poem was published by The New Yorker in 1978. In 1983, at the age of sixty-three, she published her first full-length collection, The Kingfisher.

Clampitt was the recipient of a 1982 Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship (1992), and she was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Poets. She died of cancer in September 1994.