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 cases-another prior text. 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 term-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. Correspondence with My Greeks 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.