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 case...