A poison pen letter is a letter or note containing unpleasant, abusive or malicious statements or accusations about the recipient or a third party. It is usually sent anonymously. Poison pen letters are usually composed and sent to upset the recipient. They differ from blackmail, which is intended to obtain something, in that they are purely malicious.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation used poison pen letters as a tactic during their COINTELPRO projects, targeting people such as Martin Luther King Jr. Some politicians, such as Harvey Milk, as well as many celebrities, have often received poison pen letters.
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Famous quotes containing the words poison, pen and/or letter:
“Shall I let in the stranger,
Shall I welcome the sailor,
Or stay till the day I die?
Hands of the stranger and holds of the ships,
Hold you poison or grapes?”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman “other” or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.”
—Terry Eagleton (b. 1943)
“And the one bird singing alone to his nest,
And the one star over the tower.
I thought of our little quarrels and strife,
And the letter that brought me back my ring;
And it all seem’d then, in the waste of life,”
—“Owen” “Meredith” (1831–1891)