Some Letters Never Sent, Neil Curry, Enitharmon Press, 2014, 79pp,
£9.99 (paperback)

William Cowper: A Revaluation, Neil Curry, Greenwich Exchange, 2015,
266 pp, £16.99 (paperback)

The age of letter-writing is over. No one nowadays writes letters, except a
few people in their late sixties or beyond (and perhaps your energy company).
Electronic text has killed the letter, for practical reasons: besides
being fast and almost free, it’s easier to dash off six fragmentary emails as
a situation develops than to wait for a breathing-space, give a considered
summary, and perhaps add news of family or mutual friends, reflections
on the weather and the government, and (for good measure) the poem one
wrote yesterday, or a recipe, or a pressed flower. Future biographers will
have a problem. Despite the fantasies of IT visionaries, it is hard to believe
that our descendants will find the resources or motivation endlessly to ‘migrate’
into new media the colossal amounts of data we now all create. Letters
could create a lasting self-portrait, even of the most ordinary person.
Today’s appetite for instant celebrity may well result in total oblivion.

Some Letters Never Sent is a kind of elegy for the letter as an art form, but
becomes also a meditation on the passing of many other things. Curry opens
his witty and highly readable collection of poems with the fantasy of buying
an anthology of letters – ‘(there’s bound to be one in Oxfam)’ – so that he
can cut it up and mail the letters to himself, ‘so that every day / among the
offers of cut-price car insurance / there’d be something akin to Johnson’s
put-down of Lord Chesterfield’ – or perhaps Charles Lamb’s cheeky letter
telling Wordsworth he wasn’t coming to stay and didn’t care if he never saw
a mountain in his life, or Jane Austen’s to her sister Cassandra about the
woman who ‘appeared exactly as she did / in September, with the same broad
face, / diamond bandeau, white shoes, / pink husband, and fat neck.’

But the thirty letters which follow – to recipients as varied as Gilbert
White’s tortoise Timothy, Odysseus, Angela Carter, the god Mercury and a
Spanish priest with whom Curry stayed when he walked the pilgrim route
to Santiago – are by no means all just fun and games. Several memorably
disturbing letters address ecological topics. One to Edmund Sandars, author
of a Bird Book for the Pocket which was Curry’s childhood companion
despite its awful artwork (‘Your dabchick for one / looks more like a toad
than a bird’) ruminates

Seemingly you expected us
To hear a corncrake, the booming of bitterns,
Or the ‘Little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheeeeese’
Of the yellowhammer. Small chance of that now.

More grimly, the letter to Ketill Ketillson, a nineteenth-century Icelander
who is hardly a household name, begins by asking

What went through your mind
I wonder, that sunny
morning in the June of 1844,

when you stamped on the egg
of the last great auk
and watched the yolk
go splattering over the toe of your boot?

A memorable opening, demonstrating Curry’s ability to use his verseform
to enhance a shock; but the poem goes on to assure Ketillson ‘You
were not alone’. There was, for example, the fourteen-year-old Ohio boy
who deliberately shot the last known passenger pigeon. Audubon (‘no
arguing with that authority’) had ‘recorded one flock / so vast it took
three days to pass. / One billion was his estimate.’ But they’re all gone:
‘America ate them’. So much for the mindless, spoilt past, we may think;
but the letter concludes with Curry ‘looking out at the bird-feeder / hanging
in our garden’, and wondering ‘where have all / the finches gone, and
the robins?’ The number of blackbirds has halved, and

I
find myself smiling
with pleasure, whenever

out from under the camellia
our resident hedge sparrow
creeps.

That last, isolated monosyllable says it all.

A letter to the travel writer Freya Stark (‘last of the Romantic travellers, /
Travelling with the Bedouin to Damascus’) is written alongside a cooling
cup of coffee and an unappealing ‘cinnamon muffin’ in a service station on
the M6, watching the Eddie Stobarts and Norbert Dantressangles hurtling
by: ‘Nobody was talking. / Muzak betrayed the silence. / We might have
been painted by Edward Hopper.’

There is a curiously poignant letter to ‘N.C., c/o L’Auberge de France,
Avignon’ – his nineteen-year-old self, hitching to Andorra decades ago,
whose diary he finds when clearing a drawer, prompting reflections on the
weirdness of personal identity across time: ‘Now the handwriting / Doesn’t
even look that familiar.’ Promising not to reveal what happened in Avignon
(it ‘certainly / Filled up a few pages, didn’t it?’), Curry affirms ‘You have
my word,’ but reflects that that’s impossible: ‘I read these words of yours,
but you – you / Will never read a single one of mine. … I don’t like to think
/ Of you left behind there in the past.’ Thoroughly readable, always entertaining,
these ‘letters’ are poems of deceptive simplicity which stick in the
mind and grow more profound as one returns to them.

Cowper: A Reassessment also highlights letters, opening with the poet’s
wonderful description of the post-boy arriving on a winter day,

the herald of a noisy world,
With spatter’d boots, strapp’d waist, and frozen locks,
News from all nations lumb’ring at his back.
True to his charge, the close-pack’d load behind,
Yet careless what he brings, his one concern
Is to conduct it to the destin’d inn,
And having dropp’d the’expected bag, pass on.

William Cowper (1731-1800) was one of the great letter-writers (some
critics have claimed that his letters are even better than his poems) and is
certainly overdue for reassessment. His major poem, The Task, is (apart
from a few passages of naïve Evengelical rant) a delightful read, a vivid,
spontaneous conversational poem about household life and the natural
environment; and there is little question that without it Wordsworth’s
‘Tintern Abbey’ and The Prelude, and Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’,
would never have been written. He invented an aspect of Romanticism
and practised it wonderfully.

That said, Cowper was a strange customer, and Curry’s book is a reassessment
of the man as much as of his work. In letters and poems, Cowper was
a tireless self-portrayer, and Curry is sceptical about much of what he portrays.
The once-famous poem ‘On Receipt of my Mother’s Picture’, with
its detailed memories of early childhood and his mother’s affection, has
been used as evidence that Cowper was traumatised by his mother’s death
when he was six years old, and thus to explain the persistent depression
which tormented his adult life. Curry, however, sees the poem as largely
fictional, and the sentimental letters the poet wrote to Anne Bodham, who
had sent the picture, as being manipulative and self-centred. Like all of us,
but to a greater degree than most, Cowper portrayed himself differently to
different correspondents; but he had an amazing ability to exploit friendships
(spending most of his adult life living in other people’s houses and at
other people’s expense), and yet to withhold sympathy (his many letters of
condolence mostly end by assuring the bereaved that they haven’t much to
mourn, and stressing how much more he himself has to lament).

Curry is also sceptical about the early suicide attempt which ended Cow
per’s legal career: on the evidence, his supposed effort to hang himself
wasn’t serious, and he made quite sure to be found in good time. Nonetheless,
Cowper manage to tie himself into wonderful psychological knots,
convincing himself (a) that – despite suicide being a terrible sin – a Calvinist
God had wanted him to do it, since he was going to hell anyway; and (b)
that having failed to do it, he was now doubly damned: already in hell, as it
were, but unable to die so that, as he put it in a superb and horrible poem,
‘I, fed with judgment, in a fleshly tomb, am / buried above ground.’

Curry is – excusably – not very clear about the nature of Cowper’s mental
illness, referring to him at one stage as ‘psychotic’, which seems wrong;
and though sceptical about the early suicide attempt, he takes a later one seriously.
Certainly the modern diagnosis of ‘clinical depression’ would seem
relevant; and since there were also bouts of what looks like mania (in 1781,
for example, Cowper composed 3,000 lines of couplets in eight weeks,
more than fifty lines a day even if, as is unlikely, he wrote on Sundays),
the term ‘bipolar’ suggests itself. But this is a lively critical biography of
a remarkable and neglected writer, and Curry shows that he was far more
than (as some have thought) a gossipy bore who kept a tame hare. A great
and inventive poet, he stands alongside Hopkins in his exploration of the
‘frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’ mountains of the mind.

At the end Cowper certainly believed, dreadfully, that he was going to hell.
He had been haunted all his life by images of shipwreck and drowning, and
it all comes together in his final unforgettable short poem, ‘The Castaway’.
If you don’t know it, you should Google it right now for a demurely-expressed
shot of sheer, soul-chilling horror.