In reading letters, we want to make the ghosts flesh again. We want to see through the epistolary reminders of artistic lives to life once more. This can be a deeply destructive and morbid desire that is at times channelled into amazing creativity. We, too, appear to be acting like a ghost that refuses to live in the present.
Jonathan Ellis, “Introduction: ‘For what is a letter?’” (in Letter Writing Among Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop)









