Not all treasure …

… From Henry James to Virgina Woolf: What You Won't Learn from Writers' Letters : The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… with writers, getting at the inside of things feels like a process of reduction. We read the correspondence, return to the poems, and suddenly a line or stanza that gestures toward universals is a local matter. Equipped with biographical data, the work can be unzipped, but sometimes what spills out is effluvia, cliché, and little else.

Dave also sends along: The Letters of William Gaddis.