SOURCE: "Matthew Prior's Correspondence," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 304, 1992, pp. 932-33.

In the following essay, Merians contends that Prior deliberately adopted a style of letter-writing incorporating metaphor and persona. She also explores possible personal, professional, and political reasons for Prior's deliberate adoption of this mode of correspondence.

The purpose of my paper is to demonstrate how Matthew Prior used his public and private correspondence to become the last English poet-courtier who successfully promoted and maintained himself by linking his poetry and his political friendships. Past commentators on Prior's letters have not regarded them as (literary) documents that could shed light on his poetry, and as a result have dismissed them as simple letters of flattery written by a struggling young diplomat. This approach is wrong-headed because it fails to take into account how Prior deliberately devised literary strategies in his letters that would help...