This series includes Robert Fagles's correspondence with a variety of friends, colleagues, former students, and poets, as well as a small amount of family correspondence. As a whole, much of the correspondence is of a mixed nature, covering both professional and personal topics, and reflects Fagles's close working relationships with his colleagues and fellow classicists and his willingness to serve as a mentor to many former students and younger scholars interested in ancient Greek and Latin literature. Notable correspondents include Louise Glück, Anne Carson, Robert Fitzgerald, Harold Shapiro, James Dickey, Joyce Carol Oates, William Meredith, Francine du Plessix Gray, Rachel Hadas, Robert Hollander, Francis Fergusson, George Steiner, Robert Goheen, and Charles Tomlinson. Letters often regard Fagles's responses to various translations and poems sent to him for comments, as well as recommendations he provided for colleagues and students for various positions and grants; accordingly, some files also contain writings, clippings, and other print materials regarding works of others. Letters from Fagles often contain lengthy discussions of his ideas about the art of translation and his readings of Greek texts. Of particular interest is a large group of detailed and intimate letters that Fagles wrote to his mother Vera Fagles during his undergraduate years at Amherst and graduate study at Yale in the 1950s, which provide insights into his early encounters with translation studies and ancient literature.

Researchers should note that additional correspondence files with Fagles's collaborator Bernard Knox and his literary agent Georges Borchardt can be found in Subseries 3A, as a part of Fagles's publishing and permissions files. Topical correspondence regarding Fagles's own translations and published works is filed with his writings in Series 1, in keeping with the original organization of the papers.