Spiegelman_FM 4/15/05 5:09 PM Page i Love, Amy Spiegelman_FM 4/15/05 5:09 PM Page ii Spiegelman_FM 4/15/05 5:09 PM Page iii Love, Amy THE SELECTED LETTERS OF AMY CLAMPITT Edited by Willard Spiegelman COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK Spiegelman_FM 4/15/05 5:09 PM Page iv Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2005 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Clampitt, Amy. Love, Amy : the selected letters of Amy Clampitt / edited by Willard Spiegelman p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-231-13286-7 (alk. paper) 2.Clampitt, Amy — Correspondence. 2.Poets, American — 20th century — Correspondence. I.Spiegelman, Willard. II.Title. Ps3553.L23Z48 2005 811'.54 — dc22 2204065669 Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Spiegelman_FM 4/15/05 5:09 PM Page v For the family, friends, and fans of Amy Clampitt Spiegelman_FM 4/15/05 5:09 PM Page vi Spiegelman_FM 4/15/05 5:09 PM Page vii Contents A Poet’s Life in Letters ix Acknowledgments xxiii The Letters of Amy Clampitt 1 Index 291 Illustrations appear following page 46 Spiegelman_FM 4/15/05 5:09 PM Page viii Spiegelman_FM 4/15/05 5:09 PM Page ix A Poet’s Life in Letters It is a sad but undeniable truth that the age of letter writing, among the literati as well as ordinary people, has probably come to a close. Some fu- ture scholar may have access to “The Complete E-Mails of Mr. or Ms X,” but by the end of the twentieth century the great epistolary tradition had begun to wither following its vast flowering in the nineteenth. Lewis Car- roll is said to have written ninety-seven thousand letters. Darwin’s pro- jected correspondence will require thirty volumes. After 1871, the year of The Descent of Man, he wrote approximately four letters a day (fifteen hundred a year), and he installed a mirror in his study window to catch sight of the postman when he walked up the drive. Still, bulk is not everything. In roughly seven years’ worth of letters before his death at twenty-five Keats presented as full an autobiography of a young writer as has ever existed. Because we like acquainting ourselves with people even at a distance, the draw of letters as a means of getting to know their author remains strong. Their allure requires little explanation: reading correspondence is one way of constructing or reimagining a life, like assembling a jigsaw puzzle slowly out of various mosaic pieces. And letters by literary figures (like Keats, Byron, George Eliot, and, in the century just past, Virginia ix