Correspondence with My Greeks

Citing a line from Elizabeth Bishop—“The bight is littered with old correspondences”—Scott Cairns avers: “So, also, is my mind.”

Indeed, it was Bishop’s “The Bight”—encountered late in his undergraduate education—that may have first alerted Cairns to one, key, salutary fact of literary history: virtually every work written over the centuries has been to some degree a responsive text, something of an epistolary response to what the writer beholds—the landscape, the heavens, or—as in most cas...