by beatriceotto | Nov 30, 2018 | you got mail
Hand written cards and letters are part of an ancient but rapidly dying art, hardly helped by the high ratio of people who like or love receiving them to people who find the place, paper, pen and postage to write them. I mourn this demise while contributing only a...
by beatriceotto | Nov 1, 2018 | a quote to note
Keats had a humbling capacity to squeeze out moments of joy even while grappling with the illness which would kill him and which had already killed his mother and brother. But he also gave expression to the toll it took on his spirit, here likening it to a long lane. ...
by beatriceotto | Nov 1, 2018 | a quote to note
A moment of despair for Keats, despite his resilient spirit and his desperate attempts to seize life and wring every drop of joy out of it. He snatched moments, but didn’t survive the tuberculosis which killed his mother and brother. ‘I see nothing but...
by beatriceotto | Aug 10, 2018 | you got mail
What happened to all those love letter in a private drawer, sent and kept over centuries when this was the main medium for long distance love making? The population is larger than ever, yet the material that will survive the ephemera of digital letters and messages...
by beatriceotto | Aug 10, 2018 | you got mail
Earlier posts touched on letters unwritten or unopened. There is also a whole class of correspondence that is written but never sent. I have done this myself a couple of times, finding the writing of the letter to be a cathartic act, without any need to follow through...
by beatriceotto | Jul 13, 2018 | think ink, you got mail
Keats’ letters are treasures – he is every bit as fine a correspondent as he is a poet. Here he chides a friend for visually attractive but sprawlingly illegible hand-writing. ‘You must improve in your penmanship; your writing is like the speaking...
by beatriceotto | Jul 13, 2018 | poetry mojo, writing & writers, you got mail
Here are Keats’ own aspirations for his letter-writing. Whether he found interesting matter or just made matter interesting, his letters reveal a brilliantly alert, alive, playful, lovable human being. Andrew Motion’s splendid biography also comments on...
by beatriceotto | Jan 12, 2018 | you got mail
Yes, there is that small ceremony that precedes the reading of a letter, particularly a hand-written one delivered by post. You look at the envelope, the stamps, the hand-writing (familiar or new?), the franking date and place. Then you open it and examine the paper...
by beatriceotto | Nov 7, 2017 | readers & reading
Branwell Bronte, the sister-eclipsed son in a family of six, caused them and his father great heartache through alcoholism and opium addiction, dying young. However, in a saner moment, he wrote to Wordsworth of another, healthier craving. ‘I read for the same...
