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Maya C. Popa is the poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and the author of If You Love That Lady: Poems, a collection of poetry inspired by nineteenth-century courtship letters that is out this week from WW Norton. Below, she discusses the appeal of courtship letters in an age of instant communication. (Photo credit: Diana Solis)
I fell in love with Sally McDowell and John Miller during the pandemic, when I discovered their collected correspondence. She, a Virginia divorcée. He, a Presbyterian minister.
Their courtship begins with a rejection, then unfolds across years of letters written on the brink of the Civil War. They often chastise each other for not writing quickly enough and make wry remarks on the nature of the new paper or ink.
The letters are funny, intimate, tender. They’re idiosyncratic—one learns all sorts of unlikely things about Virginia and New England in the 1850s. But most importantly, one hears that deep, satisfying well of human quiddity: two irreplicable, unreplaceable individuals who became more alive by writing to each other.
Writers love to eavesdrop. There’s no richer act of eavesdropping than reading a collection of letters exchanged over years. In “On the Addressee,” Osip Mandelstam posits why letters are so ripe for literary imagination: a letter may never reach its intended recipient.
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“A letter sealed in a bottle is thrown into the sea…I have found it. Therefore I am the secret addressee.”
That is also true of poems of apostrophe, addressed to someone absent, imagined, or otherwise unreachable. They are fueled by their sense of reaching, of never quite closing the gap between desire and desired. As readers, we turn to their elegant intimacies, becoming both the listener and witness to uncertainty.
That was the energy I hoped to draw from for my third collection, If You Love That Lady (W.W. Norton, 2026). Not the letters themselves, but their enchanting, stirring mix of precision and vulnerability, measured craft and cosmic chance.
In lives accustomed, as they all mostly are, to immediate contact, letters remind us how generative a place silence and delay can be. And if love is a luminous act of the imagination, then letters are our best evidence of that sustained capacity over time.
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