Correspondence with My Greeks

<p>Citing a line from Elizabeth Bishop-The bight is littered with old correspondences-Scott Cairns avers: So also is my mind.</p><p><br></p><p>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 <em>responsive</em> text something of an epistolary response to what the writer beholds-the landscape the heavens or-as in most cases-another prior <em>text</em>. </p><p><br></p><p>In addition to volumes by Coleridge Keats Bishop Dickinson Frost Stevens and Auden Cairns keeps collections by his beloved Greeks-Kavafy Elytis and Seferis-on his writing desk. In corresponding with them he engages some of the profound and recurring themes of his distinguished career: the mystery of creation (and its absent/present Creator) the sense that every word-every <em>term</em>-proves to be less a terminus than a point of departure and a vision of inexhaustible Love transcending all apparent limits all neat binaries including that of heaven and hell. These poets have served as his mentors his provocateurs and-in his mind at least-his primary audience.</p><p><em>Correspondence with My Greeks</em> is a work at once deeply human and hauntingly transcendent the full flowering of the poet's lifelong devotion to the generative power of the word.</p>