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    A Study Guide for Amy Clampitt's "Fog"
    A Study Guide for Amy Clampitt's "Fog"
    A Study Guide for Amy Clampitt's "Fog"
    Ebook43 pages31 minutes

    A Study Guide for Amy Clampitt's "Fog"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Amy Clampitt's "Fog", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Studentsfor all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMar 22, 2018
    ISBN9781535845793
    A Study Guide for Amy Clampitt's "Fog"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Amy Clampitt's "Fog" - Gale

      18

      Fog

      Amy Clampitt

      1983

      Introduction

      Amy Clampitt was an Iowa farm girl who wrote poems since the age of nine, but she did not pursue poetry seriously until middle age, after she had been working in New York for thirty years. After a string of failed novels that she never submitted for publication, she sent her poem The Sun Underfoot among the Sundews to the poetry editor of the New Yorker, Howard Moss, in 1978. He enthusiastically accepted it and published more. The 1983 collection The Kingfisher, in which Fog appears, made Clampitt famous overnight, at the age of sixty-three. This was just the start; when most would be winding up a career, Clampitt produced four more major volumes of poetry and a volume of critical essays in the eleven years left to her, almost as short a career as her hero, John Keats.

      She was criticized by those interested in postmodernism as a throwback to the modernist poets of the early twentieth century, such as T. S. Eliot, in her desire to be part of what she called the grand tradition of literature. She felt there was a conspiracy to stamp out the continuity of this tradition and the moral vision of poets who had preceded her. She mentioned them in her essays: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Keats, William Wordsworth, Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, John Donne, Henry James, John Milton, William Shakespeare, and Dante Alighieri, to name a few. She was also indebted to Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marianne Moore for witty, learned, and deep meditations on subjects.

      Fog is seemingly a simple description of a place—Corea, a fishing village on the coast of Maine—as the fog rolls in and blots out the landscape. It becomes so much more than a simple description, though, as Clampitt compresses history, philosophy, culture, and description of the natural landscape into complex and paradoxical insights. If some find her overly intellectual because of her use of botanical names, literary allusions, leaps of association, and difficult words (the reader needs to have a dictionary nearby), still the sensual beauty of the scene is what most impresses readers, for her special models for poetry were Hopkins and Keats, the poets of beauty. Fog gives a thumbnail sketch of her fear of the forces of destruction that tear down life and voices her assertion of the power of art to overcome that fear. She called herself a poet of place—not one place but many, for she was a nomad. Her poetry is a vision of movement in nature and in life, of ongoing evolution, of historical forces and gigantic natural forces at work, with human

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