blueprints

People, Habitat, Poetry | 159
how it encouraged her young son to read poetry “without intermediaries.”
She also saw that the university was devoting more and more of its resources
to science and technology, and she wanted to protect a cultural space for
poetry.
“poetry,” she wrote, “is the food of the spirit,
and spirit is the instigator and flow of all revolutions,
whether political or personal, whether national, worldwide,
or within the life of a single quiet human being.”
Stephan was not the kind of donor who writes a check and disappears.
In addition to her original donation of property, between 1960 and 1972
she made gifts of poetry books, lists of books to purchase, a secretary, a
housekeeper, curtains, furniture, Southwestern art and artifacts, money, and
Walgreen stocks (she was the daughter of Charles Walgreen, Chicago drug
store executive), and she secured a bequest of Walgreen stocks from her
mother. She purchased five additional lots and donated them to the Center,
envisioning construction of its permanent home. She wrote an illuminating
essay on collection development in which she emphasized the beauty and
physicality of the book and the importance of poetry’s roots in indigenous
song and its flowering in world literatures. “The nucleus of the collection,”
she wrote, “should be the acknowledged great poets of all countries in the
world together with the foremost living poets in our country. This is essential
in America whose population is multi-ancestral.”
Stephan lived by the tenets of her vision and remained a fierce steward
of its values. From 1947 to 1949, she and her husband, painter John Stephan,
coedited the avant-garde journal of art and writing The Tiger’s Eye, which
was celebrated in a 2002 exhibit at the Yale University Gallery and which
David Anfam called “a seismograph to the complex cultural moment of the
late 1940s in America.” Stephan traveled to Peru to collect Quechua songs
and tales, published as The Singing Mountaineers in 1957 by the University of
Texas Press. She published two historical novels. She traveled to Japan in
search of a quiet place to write and found herself a student of Zen Buddhism,
publishing the essay “The Zen Priests and Their Six Persimmons” in
Harper’s in 1962 and making the documentary film Zen in Ryōkō-in. Decades