ARCHIVE: Correspondence and manuscripts. (six bankers boxes)
Amy Clampitt Archive
Manuscripts and correspondence documenting the life and work of poet Amy Clampitt. Born in Iowa in 1920, Clampitt achieved success as a writer late in life. Her first book, Multitudes, Multitudes, was privately printed in 1973 and her first commercially printed full-length collection, The Kingfisher, in 1983. In the years that followed came What the Light Was Like (1985), Archaic Figure (1987), Westward (1990), and A Silence Opens (1994), along with a book of essays.
Manuscript material is present for Clampitt’s first book, as well as for at least one unpublished full-length work (a play), numerous unpublished poems, and unpublished versions of published poems. Personal correspondence includes a trove of wonderfully descriptive, witty outgoing letters from Clampitt – nearly a hundred to her friend Doris Thompson Myers as well as over a dozen to her family, bulking 1950s-60s, written while she was living, working, and writing in Manhattan – and several hundred incoming letters, spanning 1940s-80s, largely from family and many from her sister Beth who struggled with mental illness. A small amount of professional correspondence is present for the years 1979-83 and includes routine communication from editors, publishers, etc., as well as Clampitt’s outgoing carbons, often cover letters accompanying manuscript submissions to journals and magazines.
Contents
Manuscripts (approx. 1.5 cubic feet; ca. 1970s-80s) 2
Correspondence (approx. 2.5 cubic feet; ca. 1940s-80s) 4
Outgoing correspondence (over 100 items; bulking 1950s-60s) 4
Incoming correspondence (hundreds of items; ca. 1940s-80s) 6
Awards, photographs, and related material (approx. one foot.; ca. 1940s-80s) 8
Manuscripts (approx. 2.5 cubic feet; ca. 1970s-80s)
Note: includes one box of unsorted manuscript material that appears to have sustained some moisture damage.
Includes several files of:
Typescripts – many annotated and representing various stages of Clampitt’s creative process – and autograph notes for poems, essays, an unpublished play, and a novel
Loose typescript poems representing final versions submitted to journals for publication (in some instances there are several versions of the same poem)
Books of poetry
Multitudes, Multitudes (New York: The Press on Washington Street, 1973)
Final typescript with setting instructions and copyeditor’s notes throughout
Mock-up of final text with stanzas cut from galleys and pasted to individual pages
Galley proofs – a few versions, lightly copyedited, with one or two corrections by the author; 17 pp. each; with earlier title, Departures
Numerous loose typescript poems yet to be collated
Ways of Dying: Elegies, Epitaphs and Other Memorials [n.d.; unpublished?]
Typescript; approx. 45 pp. in binder; numerous poems
Letter from Mid-America [ca. 1972-74; unpublished?]
Typescript; approx. 36 pp., with table of contents; includes 20 poems; with related correspondence from literary journals
II. Individual poems
Autograph notes and typescripts for the following poems, some annotated; occasionally present in photocopy:
“Written in a Mirror”
“At the Clinic”
“The Quarry”
“Triptych”
and many more
From the Kingfisher (1983)
“Imago”
“Woodlot”
From Westward (1990)
“My Cousin Muriel,” annotated typescript pages and autograph notes
“The Field Pansy,” typescript photocopy
Autograph notes on index-size cards; approx. 30 (to verso of cards announcing Clampitt’s publication party for What the Light Was Like, published in 1985)
Autograph notes; 8 ½ x 13-inch leaves; approx ten pages
III. Longer works
The Three of Us: A Play in Two Acts (ca. late 1980s; Clampitt’s play about Wordsworth’s sister, who apparently played an important role in his writing)
Folder of several typescript and photocopy drafts, some annotated, with related correspondence and backgr
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