Clampitt and the Cloisters

This article describes the importance of a visionary experience that Amy Clampitt had while visiting the Cloisters in New York City in 1956. Immediately afterwards, Clampitt began writing poetry for the first time, and her letters describing the experience evoke what is most distinctive about her later work: wonder before the world’s richness; an embrace of temporality and flux; the understanding that perception is the surest route to mystery. Clampitt remained an incarnational poet even after she left the church, committed to the claim that, as she put it, “whatever we know of incorporeal reality is to date inseparable from the channels that received it.”