101 Letters

This selection of Middleton’s letters offers a new beginning point for readers of this dazzling, many-talented writer. The first letter here dates from 1936, the last from 2015, and this selection charts a life lived to the full as the poet reports on his work, his writing life and his continuous transatlantic engagement with the poets and critics of his generation.

Enthusiastic, discursive and slyly humorous, Christopher Middleton (1926-2015) was an electrifying correspondent. This selection of his letters spans his entire literary career, illuminating his own practice and the modernist poetic project more broadly. He is represented here as poet, translator, teacher, reader: perhaps most of all, voracious noticer. The letter was an ideal medium for an imagination like Middleton’s, open to unexpected connections and transitions, interested jackdaw-like in whatever presents itself, as these 101 examples make clear.