Papini

Wallace Stevens responds to Giovanni Papini's Lettere agli uomini del papa Celestino VI  (1947) in his poem "Reply to Papini" (1950), published in the Auroras of Autumn collection. The poem is "[a] defense of poetry, paying the fictitious Pope Celestine VI the compliment of responding seriously to his supposed procurator's directive." [1]  Papini (1881-1956) "was an Italian journalist, essayist, literary critic, poet, and novelist" [2] who perpetrated a hoax in which he wrote letters of a fictitious pope, Celestine VI. These letters are an appeal to all humans who have failed in their Christian obligations to the world, including poets. Stevens, in his rebuttal, tells the procurator,
You know that the nucleus of a time is not
The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind
Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed
As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins . . .. (7-10) [3]
==Notes==
1. Cook 253.
2. Giovanni Papini.
3. Stevens in Kermode and Richardson 382-83.
==References==
Cook, Eleanor. A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Print.
Giovanni Papini
Stevens, Wallace. "Reply to Papini." Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. 382-83. Print.