Letters of a Poet Dying: The Selected Correspondence of Frank Stanford

Letters of a Poet Dying is a watershed publication-the first collection of correspondence by the virtuosic poet Frank Stanford (1948-78).Born in southeast Mississippi, Stanford lived most of his brief life in northern Arkansas, where he studied, loved, founded a publishing company, and wrote prolifically before ending his life at the age of twenty-nine.These strikingly original letters, postcards, and book inscriptions written in Stanford's twenties to several dozen recipients-poets, editors, friends, lovers, and family members-illuminate his complicated and often tumultuous creative process. Enhanced by A. P. Walton's painstaking scholarship, Stanford's correspondence reveals a poet intent on crafting and shaping his oeuvre as he approached the death he long anticipated. "I have never feared Death," he wrote in 1972. For him, "Death was always there, a pale master holding the reins of my horse." Yet these letters are much more than a contemplation of the poet's own mortality-they demo