Art & Creativity Quote by Amy Clampitt

Clampitt’s line is a sly corrective to the tradition that expects women’s poems to arrive as perfume: pretty, decorous, safely “lyrical.” She flips the premise. The spark isn’t dainty inspiration or soft-focus sensitivity; it’s anger, and not the theatrical kind but the sustained, clarifying irritation that comes from being talked over, fenced in, or politely diminished. “Inclined” does a lot of work here, suggesting a predisposition that gets read as temperament or moodiness, then immediately reframed as motive force. If a woman is writing at all, Clampitt implies, she’s already resisting something.

The subtext is as barbed as it is practical: women have historically been granted permission to write when they’re muses, not when they’re critics. Anger becomes the engine because it has to be. It’s the emotion most likely to be disciplined out of women in public life, so when it surfaces on the page it carries the voltage of transgression. Clampitt isn’t romanticizing “madness” as chaos; she’s pointing to anger as a focusing lens, a way of noticing hypocrisy, unfairness, small violences dressed up as normal.

Context matters: Clampitt’s career bloomed late, after years working in libraries and editing, entering a literary world still sorting women into categories (confessional, domestic, minor). Her poems are famously intricate, allusive, meticulously observed. The joke is that such precision is often born from being fed up. Here, anger isn’t the opposite of craft; it’s the reason craft sharpens into a tool.