Amy Clampitt Understood Hopkins As Well As Anybody

In the first essay in her notable collection of essays, Predecessors Et Cetera,
Amy Clampitt states:

I can't be sure I'd ever have become a poet if I had never been introduced to his [Hopkin's] poems-- but in any event I find it impossible to imagine the kind of poet I would have been if I hadn't. It is like imagining a world in which one's own parents had never met.

In the 1990's Clampitt's essay reawakened my interest in Hopkins. Like Amy Clampitt, I discovered Hopkins poetry as an undergraduate at Grinnell College; after reading Hopkins, it became impossible to imagine the world before Hopkins. In 1997, two years after Clampitt's death, I published an article, "In Deepest Iowa," in the Grinnell Magazine describing a visit to the Clampitt family homestead in New Providence, Iowa.

On that visit, I determined that it was possible that Clampitt may have discovered Hopkins in high school. Her classmate Abner White recalls how when everyone else read, she read widely. While others play acted Shakespeare, she memorized her lines.

It is also possible that she discovered Hopkins at Grinnell College and shared her first ideas with art historian Edith Sternfeld or English professor Charles Foster.

Indeed, the first section of poems, "Fire and Water," that opens Clampitt's first book moves quickly from iambics into sprung rhythm.

Your mind keeps turning back to look at them--

chain-gang archangels that in their prismatic

frenzy fall, gall and gash the daylight

out there, all through the winter.

There emerging out of the background's steady rub-a-dub iambics is the fall, gall and gash--

from the Windhover's gold-vermillion signature line.