Correspondence with My Greeks

C iting a line from ElizabethBishop—“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 undergraduateeducation—that may have first alerted Cairns to one, key, salutary fact ofliterary history: virtually every work written over the centuries has been tosome degree a responsive text, something of an epistolary response to what thewrit