To the Editors:

Your review of my book The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge by Jeffrey Meyers (April 2007) has only just come to my attention. Professor Meyers criticized my book for “using only printed sources.” I wonder what other sources he would have me use? Perhaps Meyers is unaware of the fact that the letters, manuscripts, and notebooks of the Romantic poets have all been published. If he is aware of a cache of unpublished material, he should inform the world; I can assure him that this discovery will cause great excitement among scholars of the Romantic period.

Meyers comments that “Sisman doesn’t mention a number of crucial points.” I think that he must have read the book rather too quickly, because all the points he mentions are there in my text. But then Meyers is famous for his speed, penning biographies at a rate unequaled in modern times. He can have little time left for reading.
Adam Sisman
London, U.K.