The Gift of George Yeats

Much scholarship has been devoted to the extraordinary experience of W.B. Yeats and his wife George on their honeymoon, when she acted as medium for the writing dictated by the spirits who came, they told Yeats, ‘to give you metaphors for poetry.’ Much has been made of Yeats’s adoption of the revealed symbolic system as it emerged into his subsequent poetry. And much has also been said about the sexual politics of the relationship between Yeats and George and the other women in his life, like Maud Gonne or Lady Gregory and their various functions from muse to patron. This chapter thinks again about these writers as correspondents with the poetry, as historical persons, amatory fantasies, spiritual personae and psychic practitioners. It focuses on George, though, and gives another version of Yeats the collaborator, the poet of correspondences: ‘Where got I that truth?’, the two-part lyric ‘Fragments’ asks: ‘Out of a medium’s mouth’ is the answer.

Fire Balloons: The Letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop

This chapter offers a close reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Armadillo’ and Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’ in the light of the recently published letters between the two poets, as well as Bishop’s correspondence with The New Yorker. It looks at letters as ‘the other life that [a poem] might have had’ and a poem as ‘the other life that [letters’ might have had’, concluding that the relationship between Lowell and Bishop was often less benign than we’ve led ourselves to believe.

‘Wherever you listen from’: W. S. Graham and the Art of the Letter1

This chapter looks at W. S. Graham’s many wonderful letters to those contemporaries, painters and artists of the St Ives school, who shared his ideals, but who also often remain distant, idealised correspondents—sounding-boards for the poet’s preoccupations. It examines, in particular, how these letters become practice grounds for poetry, allowing Graham to try out his epistolary poetic style in prose—prose which half-invents both self and other, as it searches the distances between the speaker and his notional, half-imaginary correspondent. The sheer musicality of these letters shows the extent to which Graham is really writing for himself, and sounding out the phrases that will then become part of his poetry.

Dangerous Letters: A Biographer’s Perspective1

This chapter considers the seduction and the challenge of written letters for the literary biographer. Letters are both dangerous and attractive tools for the biographer; they often lie, but the lies are an important part of the subject’s behaviour. They should not be used by the biographer as pure data, but as mixtures of negotiation, performance, and partial self-expression. The essay takes a few powerful examples of writers’ letters from the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth century, a period when writers were increasingly conscious of the dangers of the public exposure of the private life. Writers discussed include John Keats and Katherine Mansfield.

Lorine Niedecker’s Republic of Letters

Lorine Niedecker’s poetry is only beginning to garner the critical attention it deserves. From the 1930s to the 1970s, she wrote lyrics whose force and influence belie her ostensible position—literally and figuratively—on the outskirts of the literary world. Accounts of Niedecker’s work are incomplete, however, without analysis of her epistolarity. Niedecker needed correspondence to keep in touch with the friends and mentors of her literary life, sending notes, drafts, comments and questions from her home in Wisconsin to her peers in New York or Japan. But Niedecker also used correspondence to develop a model of writing that defined her singularity among such peers.

‘Any thing human or earthly’: Shelley’s Letters and Poetry

This chapter shifts the terms of previously rare discussions of Shelley’s letters to show that there is a comparable mode of self-fashioning across the letters and the poetry. The balance between communicating with friends and creating texts of abiding literary value comes to the fore in the relationship between the poem and the letter. This chapter reveals the significance of the connection between the two through close attention to the verbal echoes and biographical detail. Shelley’s experimentation with the idea of the ‘I,’ in the prose letter to the Gisbornes and in the Letter to Maria Gisborne, represents Shelley’s sophisticated epistolary practice, where the letter becomes far more than mere ore to be mined by biographical criticism just as the poem goes beyond the parameters of being a verse version of a private letter.

Epistolary Psychotherapy: The Letters of Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin

This chapter takes a psychological approach to the letters of Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin; and to the relation between their letters and their poems. The main focus is on Thomas’s correspondence with the poet and playwright Gordon Bottomley (an invalid, who lived in the Lake District); and on Larkin’s letters to his lover Monica Jones. The chief ground for comparison is that both Thomas and Larkin are lyric poets, whose letters can be read as rehearsals for poetic psychodrama. The word ‘psychotherapy’ suggests that they write letters which seek relief from inner distress, and which may themselves relieve it.

Wordsworth’s Sweating Pages: The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth

In 1977, an exchange of thirty-one letters between William and Mary Wordsworth, written in 1810, was discovered by a stamp dealer in Carlisle. Their subject is what Wordsworth describes as ‘the lively gushing thought employing spirit stirring passion of love’ between husband and wife. This chapter explores how the discovery of these letters has changed our understanding the domestic life of Wordsworth, a man described by Coleridge as ‘by nature incapable of love.’

Editing Twentieth-Century Letters: The Road to Words in Air

This chapter offers a personal account of how its author came to edit Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (2008). In doing so it reflects on how previous editions of correspondence were edited, including The Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907-1941 (1950), and the extent to which letter writing offers readers powerful examples of literary style while at the same time providing deep glimpses into personal and literary history. The chapter also considers how the practice of editing and publishing the letters of poets has changed since 1950.

Introduction: ‘For what is a letter?’

The Introduction outlines the history and reception of poets’ letters from the Romantic period to the present day, what many epistolary critics might gloss as a journey from ‘the golden age of letter writing’ to the apparent eclipse of letter writing by e-mail. It also discusses the different ways in which letters have been represented and utilized by biographers and literary critics, as well as by prominent theorists such as Bakhtin and Derrida.