The Stein Songs and Poetry

This week a colleague of mine pokes some editorial fun at the latest work from the pen of Gertrude Stein. I am quite certain that many a good laugh can be legitimately excavated from her linguistic experiment called Geography and Plays, but I am not so sure that a good laugh is all that awaits the diligent digger in this particular field of sound without sense.

It might be well, first of all, to try to define the task which Miss Stein has attempted. It is difficult and probably impossible for a person like myself to make such a definition in a manner satisfactory to Miss Stein and her defenders, for I confess in advance that I am not sympathetic with what I conceive to be the ends she has in view.

The task she is attempting, as I understand it, is the use of words for the creation of sound patterns without regard to their meanings. She says in the conventional prose: “What you have been attempting is of little more artistic value than the work of a musician who is trying to extract speech or incident from pure music. You are merely programme writers ignorant of the subtleties which await the touch of the real artist. Ignoring all the accepted meanings, connotations, and the atmosphere of the words in our language, I will use these as sound symbols in the creation of a new medium of artistic expression.” If this is not a fair statement of what Miss Stein has attempted, I stand ready for correction.

Granting for the moment the desirability of the creation of such a new form of artistic expression, it seems to me that Miss Stein is building her house of the wrong materials. The basic material she seeks is not to be found in words, but in arrangements of vowels and consonants without relation to their accepted place in spoken language. To ask a person to assume an air of complete detachment towards familiar words and phrases is a demand which the human mind inevitably finds it difficult to grant. It is like asking a surgeon to assume an air of complete impersonality and detachment in the performance of an operation on his mother or his wife. Surgeons do not attempt such operations, because they know that there are times when even a scientist cannot put aside the fact that he is also a man. Why should we be asked to ignore the spiritual heritage of the word “mother” any more than the surgeon to forget that the flesh of his mother awaits the knife?

So much for the theory; now to the practice of this new art. A scientist not so long ago published a book on the theory of poetry. One of the chief of the many unfortunate errors in this volume was the fact that the scientist attempted to prove his theories by putting them into practice. He wanted to show that poetry could be constructed by scientific methods, and he succeeded only in proving that he was not, and never could be, a poet. I would not go so far as to say that Miss Stein has made quite so miserable a failure as the scientist to whom I have referred. She has in her book passages which are rhythmical and which, if divorced from any consideration of sense, have a pleasing syllabification. Possibly if they were read aloud to some one who did not understand English they might produce as marked an effect as has been sometimes made by foreign poets who have come to America to read from their works in languages unknown to their hearers. How much of this effect has been due to the inherent beauty of the language and how much to the inherent capacity of their audiences to intoxicate themselves with exotic potions it would perhaps not be wise to attempt to say. I feel certain, however, that Miss Stein has not achieved any arrangement of sound at all comparable to the work of poets who have been hampered by the restrictions of sense.

One of the best ways of arriving at an understanding of poetic construction is to take some familiar and famous passage and repeat it over and over until the old words resolve themselves in so far as is possible into pure sound elements. The test requires the same power of detachment which Miss Stein apparently asks of readers of her book, but it is more easily achieved through hypnotic repetition than by a deliberate dismissal of all the meaning which surrounds the elements of our speech. Take, for instance, such a passage as the opening lines of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree,
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

or such a passage as the familiar lines from Macbeth:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps on this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time.

Say these lines over and over. Note how surely the syllables flow and how one would submit most in the next line with emphasis of variety and the strength of reiteration. In those magic opening lines of “Kubla Khan” there is not a single sound which does not leave the vocal organs on the threshold of the next. If poets can achieve such utterance in combination with emotion, reason, and sensation, why should they immolate themselves by the elimination of all these aids to understanding? Because a great actor can bring tears to the eyes of the audience by reciting the multiplication table, why should he confine his efforts solely to the recitation of mathematical formulae?

There may be more to be said for Miss Stein’s work than for the labor of those who are trying to catch hold of the coat-tails of immortality by the elimination of commas and the suppression of capital letters, but I confess that when Mr. Sherwood Anderson asks, “Would it not be a lovely and charmingly ironic gesture of the gods if, in the end, the work of this artist were to prove the most lasting and important of all the word slingers of our generation?” I am inclined to suspect that on that distant day to which Mr. Anderson refers the gods will have something better to do with their time than to make charmingly ironic gestures at those of us who still cling to the heaven realities of poetry.


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This review first appeared in The Outlook on June 6, 1923.