638
HELEN McNEIL
Truman as God. This second-rate creature is the adversity. I address
him
but with hostility, hoo-ing the slick trombones."
Stevens' letters to Harry Church about the possibility of estab–
lishing a chair of poetry at Princeton show how deep his conviction
was that the theory of poetry was indistinguishable from its practice.
The chair was to be a tribute to the imaginative powers of the poet:
For this purpose, poetry means not the language of poetry
but the thing itself, wherever it may be found. It does not
mean verse any more than philosophy means prose. The
subject-matter of poetry is the thing to be ascertained. Off–
hand the subject-matter is what comes to mind when one
says of the month of August . . .
"Thou art not August, unless I make thee so."
It is the aspects of men and women that have been added
to
them by poetry.
The "one" who speaks of August to Church is clearly Stevens
him–
self; but in "Asides on the Oboe," the poem he is quoting, the speaker
is the poet-hero, the "impossible possible philosopher's man, / The man
who has had the time to think enough." Just as Stevens in his youth
was his own ephebe, the garret-poet looking out over the city roofs,
so in middle age he could speak in the accents of his own fictional
"central man, the human globe." He created the figure who could
think of the seasons as his own creation, and he used that figure
to
pursue his greatest subject, the moving contour of earth as its changes
are recreated and controlled by the mind of the poet.
Helen McNeil
Broadway and 88th Street
TR 4-9189
