Letter Writing Among Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop

Fifteen enlightening chapters by leading international biographers, critics and poets examine letter writing among poets in the last two hundred years. They range from Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley in the nineteenth-century to Eliot, Yeats, Bishop and Larkin in the twentieth. In doing so, they respond to the following questions. Who are the great letter writers of the past? Why is reading other people’s mail so addictive? What is the relationship between letter writing and other literary genres such as poetry? Divided into three sections—Contexts and Issues, Romantic and Victorian Letter Writing, and Twentieth-Century Letter Writing—the volume demonstrates that real letters still have an allure that virtual post struggles to replicate.