Born in the small Quaker-settled town of New Providence, Iowa, poet Amy Clampitt grew up on her family’s farm, where she discovered a love for, and ease in, the natural world. She received a BA from Grinnell College and briefly attended Columbia University on a fellowship. After school, Clampitt continued to live in New York City, where she worked for the Oxford University Press and canvassed for Eugene McCarthy. An antiwar activist, she left the Episcopal Church after years of active membership because she felt the Church was not strong enough in its opposition to the war. She traveled to Europe, where she visited the landscapes of her literary heroes Dorothy and Williams Wordsworth, Keats, George Eliot, and Woolf. Upon returning to the United States, she took a job as a reference librarian for the Audubon Society.

Initially drawn to fiction writing, Clampitt turned to poetry later in life. Influenced by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson, Clampitt wrote poetry marked by an expansive use of language, weaving botanical names and foreign phrases into her musical, syntactically complex explorations of the natural and domestic worlds. She published several collections of poetry, including The Kingfisher (1983), Archaic Figure (1987), and Westward (1990). The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt, with a foreword by Mary Jo Salter, appeared in 1997, and Willard Spiegelman edited Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt (2005).

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Clampitt was awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the MacArthur Foundation. After winning a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992, she bought a small house in Lenox, Massachusetts, where she spent much of the remainder of her life with her husband, Harold Korn. After his death in 2001, the Amy Clampitt Fund was established to enable poets and scholars to reside in her home for extended periods while creating new work.