Amy Clampitt; Poet Gained Acclaim Late in Her Life

LENOX, Mass. — Amy Clampitt, an acclaimed poet who didn’t publish her first major collection until she was 63, has died of cancer at 74.

She died at her home Saturday, surrounded by her husband, Columbia University law professor Harold Korn, and several friends, said Mary Jo Salter, a friend and poetry editor at the New Republic.

Ms. Clampitt’s first major collection, “The Kingfisher,” established her as an important poet, and numerous honors followed, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

In awarding Ms. Clampitt a “genius grant” in 1992, the MacArthur Foundation cited “a quick eye for small, luminous details combined with a wide range of tone, style and form.”

“She had many imitators and she’ll have many more, because the most original writers are always the ones that the rest of us try to imitate,” Salter said.

Ms. Clampitt began writing poetry seriously in the early 1970s, and by the end of the decade her poems were being published in the New Yorker and other magazines. Many of her early poems dealt with life in the lobstermen’s town of Corea, Me., where she spent her summers for 20 years.

In the decade after “The Kingfisher’s” publication in 1983, her reputation grew as she published at a feverish pace. “The Kingfisher” was followed by “What the Light Was Like,” “Archaic Figure” and “Westward.” Her final volume, “A Silence Opens,” was published in February.