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‘Des lettres carrées, de belles lettres ovales’ … des lettres quadrillées : matérialité de la lettre chez quelques poètes romantiques anglais

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This article looks at the way in which several romantic poets take the materiality of letters into account: the quality of their quills, the legibility of their handwriting, and above all the weight of their letters at a time when the addressee was responsible for the postage. For a group of poets whose art tries to free itself from the materiality of life and to reach a form of transcendence, the material dimension of letters is often considered as a limit, an obstacle to suffer. Only one poet really stands out among his contemporaries: John Keats creatively plays with these limits and turns them into poetic material; he even offers a distinction between various shapes of letters, oval, round or square.