Examines letter writing among poets in the last 200 years. Poets discussed include Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley in the nineteenth century and Eliot, Yeats, Bishop and Larkin in the twentieth century. 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.

Essential reading for scholars, poetry lovers, and anyone with an interest in Rainer Maria Rilke, German poetry, or the creative impulse, these ten letters of correspondence between Rilke and a young aspiring poet reveal elements from the inner workings of his own poetic identity. The letters coincided with an important stage of his artistic development and readers can trace many of the themes that later emerge in his best works to these messages—Rilke himself stated these letters contained part of his creative genius.

Letters written to F.X. Kappus during the years 1903-1908. Chronicle of Rilkes's life for the years 1903-1908 (p. 81-123).

Romanticism and the Letter is a collection of essays that explore various aspects of letter writing in the Romantic period of British Literature. Although the correspondence of the Romantics constitutes a major literary achievement in its own right, it has received relatively little critical attention. Essays focus on the letters of major poets, including Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Keats; novelists and prose writers, including Jane Austen, Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb; and lesser-known writers such as Melesina Trench and Mary Leadbeater. Moving from theories of letter writing, through the period’s diverse epistolary culture, to essays on individual writers, the collection opens new perspectives for students and scholars of the Romantic period.

First published in 1932, “A Letter to a Young Poet” is an essay by Virginia Woolf. Written in epistolary form, it is a response to the writer John Lehman's request for Woolf to explain her views on contemporary poetry. A fascinating insight into the mind of one of England's greatest feminist writers not to be missed by fans and collectors of her seminal work. Adeline Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English writer. She is widely hailed as being among the most influential modernist authors of the 20th century and a pioneer of stream of consciousness narration. Woolf was a central figure in the feminist criticism movement of the 1970s, her works having inspired countless women to take up the cause. She suffered numerous nervous breakdowns during her life primarily as a result of the deaths of family members, and it is now believed that she may have suffered from bipolar disorder. In 1941, Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse at Lewes, aged 59. Contents include: “Virginia Woolf”, “Craftsmanship - BBC Broadcast on April 20th, 1937”, and “A Letter to a Young Poet - First Published in the Yale Review, June 1932”. Read & Co. Great Essays is republishing this classic essay now in a brand new edition complete with Woolf's essay “Craftsmanship”.

'I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination' - Keats, in a letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey in November 1817. In a period of great letter-writing, Keats's letters are outstanding. They begin in summer 1816, as he approached his twenty-first birthday, and were written over the next four years until his early death. Viewed together, they give the fullest and most poignant record we have of Keats's ambitions and hopes as a poet, his life as a literary man about town, his close relationship with his brothers and young sister, and, later, his passionate, jealous and frustrated love for Fanny Brawne. Keats enclosed many of his poems with his letters, and read together, they offer an incomparable insight into his creative process and development as a poet. This major new edition edited by Professor John Barnard includes an introduction and notes, as well as a map of Keats's Scottish walking tour and reproductions of his letters. John Keats was born in October 1795. His Poems appeared in 1817, while Endymion was published in 1818, both to mixed reviews. In 1819 he wrote The Eve of St Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci, the major odes, Lamia and the Fall of Hyperion. Keats was already unwell when preparing his 1820 volume for the press; by the time it appeared in July he was desperately ill. He died in Rome in 1821, in a rented apartment next to the Spanish Steps, at the age of twenty-five. John Barnard is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds and has edited The Complete Poems of Keats for Penguin Classics.

Collects more than six hundred letters to and from the editors of "Poetry" that were written about and by such figures as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Wallace Stevens.