Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)  Modern before modernism, Gertrude Stein’s work stands as one extreme of Twentieth Century Literature.  At Radcliff she studied psychology with William James, and at Johns Hopkins afterwards she studied the anatomy of the brain.  The psychological theories of James and of a closely related French philosopher, Henri Bergson, laid the foundation for her own highly original work.  The idea that consciousness is a stream, rather than a succession of formations, and that underneath chronological memory is an intuitive apprehension of existence, led to certain conclusions of her own that animated bother her prose and verse.

            Chief among them was that sequence and causation were methods of imprisoning the mind.  The object of language, she held, was to bring things and people and words out of stale usage into a state which she variously designated as “the excitingness of pure being,” “realizing the existence of living,” “the intensity of anyone’s existence.”  When asked what she meant by “a rose is a rose is a rose,” she explained that in the time of Homer, or of Chaucer, when the language was new, “the poet could use the name of the thing and the thing was really there.”  But as memory took it over, it lost its identity, which she was trying to recover.  She boasted, “I think in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.”

            Her consciousness of language is all-important.  She says shrewdly, “One of the things that is a very interesting thing to know is how you are feeling inside you to the words that are coming out to be outside of you.”  The naming of things has come to be different from what it was for Adam and Eve.  “As I say a noun is a name of a thing and therefore slowly if you feel what it is inside that thing you do not call it by the name by which it is known.”  For Stein, as well as for the classical, canonical poets of high modernism such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams, the function of poetry is to rediscover what lies behind nouns.  To use repetition and abstraction, linguistic puns and compressed irony, to get to what Pound called the “thing-ness of the thing.”

            The pursuit of intuitive as opposed to apparent life required getting at the rhythm of a personality.  Her rhythms are based on what appear to be repetitions, but she insisted, “I never repeat.”  What she meant was that with each seeming repetition “the emphasis is different just as the cinema has each time a slightly different thing to make it all be moving.”  She discards memory: “We in this period have not living in remembering, we have living in moving being.”  In Stein’s aesthetic, chronological time is superseded as words are mobilized to reach an inner focus.

            Her poems are therefore written in the present tense, frequently without sequence or causality but reaching towards intense essences in seemingly casual words.  In Lectures in America she insisted that her way of writing was distinctly American: “A disembodied way of disconnecting something from anything and anything from something.”  Against the force of traditional syntax and of traditional fixities, she asserted a new freedom.

            Yet she left America.  Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo went in 1902 to Paris.  There she maintained a famous salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, and was regularly visited by Picasso, Matisse, and Juan Gris, who found her literary theories consonant with their artistic ones.  In 1907 she formed what was to be a lifelong relationship with Alice B. Toklas, from San Francisco, and in 1933 published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which the narrator reminisces about Stein and other modernists of the 1920s.

• adapted from Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry

Gertrude Stein, “A rose is a rose . . .” several times over

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. (“Sacred Emily,” Geography and Plays)

Do we suppose that all she knows is that a rose is arose is a rose is a rose. (Operas and Plays)

. . . she would carve on the tree Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose until it went all the way around. (The World is Round)

A rose tree may be a rose tree may be a rosy rose tree if watered.  (Alphabets and Birthdays)

Indeed a rose is a rose makes a pretty plate . . . .(Stanzas in Meditation)

When I said.

A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun.  (Lectures in America)

Civilization begins with a rose.  A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. It continues with blooming and it fastens clearly upon excellent examples.  (As Fine as Melanctha)

Lifting belly can please me because it is an occupation I enjoy.

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

In print on top. (Bee Time Vine)

Now listen! I’m no fool.  I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying “is a … is a … is a …”  Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years. (Four in America)