Time & Perspective Quote by Amy Clampitt

Anxiety, in Amy Clampitt's line, isn't just a private ailment; it's a social sedative. "When you get over the anxiety" reads like a recovery story, but the punchline flips the expected moral. Relief doesn't return you to calm. It clears your vision. What rushes in afterward is anger - not petty irritation, but the kind of rage that has been waiting patiently beneath self-doubt.

Clampitt's genius is the way she stages emotion as a sequence that doubles as a political diagnosis. Anxiety is the feeling that something is wrong and you might be the problem. Madness, here, is the correction: the recognition that something is wrong and it's been wrong for a while. The word "should" is doing quiet damage. It's accusatory, almost comic in its understatement, implying a backlog of justified outrage you've been talked out of feeling. The line smuggles in a critique of the cultures that reward composure and punish complaint: if you're anxious, you're fragile; if you're mad, you're difficult.

As a poet working through late-20th-century American life, Clampitt often maps outer landscapes onto inner weather. This sentence works the same way: it makes anxiety feel like fog and anger like an unignorable coastline. The subtext isn't "be angrier". It's sharper: your nervousness may be the product of misdirected responsibility. Get "over" it and you don't become less sensitive; you become more accurate.