[Rhina P. Espaillat]

Roger, I wish you were the editor of every magazine I subscribe to, if you're making such generous assumptions! Alas, I must tell you right away that I'm swamped with rejection slips: evidently editors are the suspicious type. And maybe just as well: poems should be read as poems, period, not as poems from X or Y.

Jody, I'm with you completely about Housman! He may do anything he wants, and how I wish he were still around to do it, as then we would have more poems by a poet I love dearly.

No, my problem is not with any view of aesthetics at all, but with the notion that poems written in response to this-or-that are ABOUT this-or-that. I don't believe that: I think the poem is about its theme, and uses its subject--a very different thing in many cases--to get its foot in the reader's door. To change the metaphor, the bittersweet I keep yanking out in my garden creeps up all the shrubbery it can find, but it's not doing that for the sake of the shrubs, but for its own sake: it's not about the lilacs at all, but using the lilacs to be about the bittersweet.

Poems are equally opportunistic and stubborn. For the purposes of the poem, the painted scene is pretty much the same as the real bowl of fruit, or lost glove, or dead bird, or....I don't believe that the poem is any "farther" from its theme if the apple is a painted one as opposed to one in the bowl, because the "applehood" of the apple doesn't concern the poem in the first place.

But I certainly don't feel that any aesthetic view--or philosophical view of any kind, is "stupid" by its very nature, and thoroughly enjoy this kind of discussion! I don't think Nyctom was imputing stupidity to Housman's view, or hardness of heart, or narrowness--and certainly neither am I.