Letter Writing Among Poets

Jonathan Ellis is Reader in American Literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop (Ashgate, 2006). His articles and essays on twentieth-century poetry have appeared in various journals, including English, The Journal of Modern Literature, Mosaic, PN Review and Poetry Ireland Review. He is co-editor (with Angus Cleghorn) of The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop (2014).

• Contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction: For what is a letter? JONATHAN ELLIS; I: CONTEXTS AND ISSUES; 1 Dangerous Letters: A Biographer’s Perspective HERMIONE LEE; 2 Editing Poems in Letters DANIEL KARLIN; 3 Editing Twentieth-Century Letters: The Road to Words in Air THOMAS TRAVISANO; 4 Just Letters: Modern Poets in Correspondence HUGH HAUGHTON; II: ROMANTIC AND VICTORIAN LETTER WRITING; 5 Wordsworth’s Sweating Pages: The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth FRANCES WILSON; 6 The Oakling and the Oak: The Tragedy of the Coleridges ANNE FADIMAN; 7 “Any thing human or earthly”: Shelley’s Letters and Poetry MADELEINE CALLAGHAN; 8 “Another sort of writing”? Invalidism and Poetic Labour in the Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning MARCUS WAITHE; 9 Passion and Playfulness in the Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins MICHAEL D. HURLEY; III: TWENTIETH-CENTURY LETTER WRITING; 10 The Gift of George Yeats MATTHEW CAMPBELL; 11 Epistolary Psychotherapy: The Letters of Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin EDNA LONGLEY; 12 Lorine Niedecker’s Republic of Letters SIOBHAN PHILLIPS; 13 “Wherever you listen from”: W. S. Graham and the Art of the Letter ANGELA LEIGHTON; 14 Fire Balloons: The Letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop PAUL MULDOON; 15 Last Letters: Keats, Bishop, and Hughes and Donaghy JONATHAN ELLIS; Index

Vicarious lives, the alter egos of unwritten or belatedly written poems, trap doors into hitherto unseen aspects of a personality, feints and personae—poets’ letters can be and have been all these and more, and the all-star lineup of critics, poets and essayists here demonstrate. This collection isn’t just the last word so far on a topic (two topics, at least) or permanent interest, but an example for literary critics in general: Anne Fadiman’s defense of Hartley Coleridge, Paul Muldoon on Bishop and (or Bishop vs.) Lowell, Michael Hurley on humour in Hopkins, Ellis himself on frustration and temporality in Bishop and Keats—here is a model for writers. And for readers. And for letter-writers, scholarly and otherwise, everywhere.