Letters in Poems: Epistles

Epistolary poems, from the Latin “epistula” for “letter," are, quite literally, poems that read as letters. They can be intimate and colloquial or formal and measured. The subject matter can range from philosophical investigation to a declaration of love to a list of errands, and epistles can take any form, from heroic couplets to free verse. 

Elizabeth Bishop’s “Letter to N.Y.," for example, uses rhyming quatrains:

In your next letter I wish you’d say

where you are going and what you are doing;

how are the plays, and after the plays

what other pleasures you’re pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,

driving as if to save your soul

where the road goes round and round the park

and the meter glares like a moral owl

The rigid rhyme scheme and structure of the poem belie its mournful, almost obsessive nature. Bishop employs the direct address to express her isolation and longing while maintaining formal distance.

This is counter to epistles that assume the more recognizable conventions of a letter, complete with a traditional opening address, such as Langston Hughes’s “Letter," which begins: “Dear Mama / Time I pay rent and get my food / and laundry I don’t have much left / but here is five dollars for you.” The simple intimacy of the epistolary form gives the poem a familiar ease.

The epistle form dates back to verse letters of the Roman Empire, and was refined and popularized by Horace and Ovid. Ovid’s epistolary explorations were adopted by the courtly poets from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance. The Horatian epistles, however, more deeply influenced our modern understanding of the form. Horace drew on the familiar and confessional nature of letters to tackle lofty moral and philosophical conjectures. It is this tradition that produced what are generally thought to be the greatest epistles written in English: Alexander Pope’s Moral Essays and the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, an autobiographical defense of satire and poetry written in heroic couplets as an address to his friend John Arbuthnot.

Adapted from https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poetic-form-epistle

The appeal of epistolary poems is in their freedom. The audience can be internal or external. The poet may be speaking to an unnamed recipient or to the world at large, to bodiless entities or abstract concepts. 

We will present some of these epistolary poems in future entries of this blog