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This chapter explores poets’ letters as ‘an art form’ in the post-Romantic period, exploring the bearing of poets’ letters on their poems (and vice versa). It reflects on the key role played by epistolary dialogue in the creation and circulation of poetry in the modern period, documenting the ways poets first launched poems in letters to friends, and used letters to sketch out their ideas about poetry and poetics. It comment on the practice of a number of nineteenth-century poets who used letters to launch ideas about their poetry (including Keats, the Brownings, Hopkins and Emily Dickinson), before moving on to consider the equally crucial role of correspondence in the work of twentieth-century poets (including Bishop, Lowell, Marianne Moore, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Philip Larkin). In offering a survey of this broad epistolary territory, it also outlines an idea of an epistolary poetics.

This chapter first explores how Woolf associates the ordinary with prose rather than with poetry—a distinction that emphasizes how the genres were becoming less distinct, as both aimed to represent the “dirty work” typically associated with prose. The chapter then examines the significance of what Woolf calls “the cotton wool of daily life” in relationship to literary realism. Particularly in Mrs. Dalloway, daily life lies at the heart of Woolf’s representation of character. The novel also turns to the ordinary as an alternative to the trauma associated with the First World War. The chapter proceeds to show how the ordinary becomes an enduring fixation for Woolf in her subsequent novels. Her ambivalent use of “facts” in fiction is an ordinary style, as she herself implies in her long essay “Phases of Fiction,” an essay that reveals Woolf’s strong attachment to novelists who satisfy a reader’s need to believe in a recognizable world. Her determined disassociation from the Edwardians, whose work is entrenched in materialist facts, is considered in context of her admiration for many older novelists whose use of facts she emulates as a means of achieving the ordinary.

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.

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.

Lear’s letters are full of playful nonsense, as one might expect, but also insights into the play of language in his work. This essay argues that Lear’s correspondence offers us a unique view of the role of nonsense in his life, and of his life in his nonsense. It suggests that that Lear’s letters highlight the sociability as well as eccentricity of his imagination, and are as integral to his oeuvre as those of Keats. Indeed they can be read as epistolary extensions of The Complete Nonsense. Like Lewis Carroll, Lear was a prolific letter-writer, and corresponded with the great and the good of Victorian England. Through close readings of the texts themselves, the chapter presents the ‘scribblebibble’ of his letters as not only documents of his professional life as traveller, topographer, and nonsense poet but a tragic-comic portrait of the artist in epistolary form.