SOURCE: "Breaking the Rigid Form of the Noun: Stein, Pound, Whitman, and Modernist Poetry," in Critical Essays on American Modernism, edited by Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy, G. K. Hall and Company, 1992, pp. 225-34.

Poetry, for Gertrude Stein, is painfully erotic. She defines it in "Poetry and Grammar" by means of a series of verbs addressed sexually to what she is pleased to call "the noun": "Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun…. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. … I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun ["Poetry and Grammar," in Lectures in America]. "The noun" becomes on the next page "the name of anybody one loves." Poetry therefore is "really loving the name of anything," which is a generalization to the level of literary genre of the private erotic act of "calling out the name of anybody one loves." Stein repeats that account of movement from private erotic act to generic definition of poetry in a comic and ambivalent parable that narrates a literary primal scene. She and her brother, presumably Leo, found "as children will the love poems of their very very much older brother." Leo, of course, was the dominating, inhibiting, disapproving presence in Stein's earlier literary life, whose replacement on the domestic front by Alice Toklas catalyzed a profound transformation in her writing. This little story of finding love poems is staged within a multiply constraining patriarchal scene: in the company of the close brother who immediately dominates her, she finds the heterosexual love poetry of a "very very much older brother." Here is her account of the discovery:

This older brother had just written one and it said that he had often sat and looked at any little square of grass and it had been just a square of grass as grass is, but now he was in love and so the little square of grass was all filled with birds and bees and butterflies, the difference was what love was. The poem was funny we and he knew the poem was funny but he was right, being in love made him make poetry, and poetry made him feel the things and their names, and so I repeat nouns are poetry.

Poetry is patriarchal; it is written by a "very very much older brother." But Stein can join with both brothers in mocking, leveling laughter: "the poem was funny we and he knew the poem was funny." Furthermore, the poem concerns "a little square of grass." Whitman is a crucially legitimizing poetic precursor for Stein, as she makes clear in this essay. Her very very much older brother might write a ludicrous poem about a little square of grass, but her true literary older brother has written a liberating grass poem expanding to the horizon the boundaries of all little squares.

Stein credits Whitman in this essay with a mode of literary transformation she usually reserves almost exclusively to accounts of her own breakthrough into the modern or American twentieth century out of what she generally calls the English nineteenth century: "Naturally, and one may say that is what made Walt Whitman naturally that made the change in the form of poetry … the creating it without naming it, was what broke the rigid form of the noun the simple noun poetry which now was broken." In "How Writing Is Written," a 1935 lecture also delivered "in America," Stein says definitively "And the United States had the first instance of what I call Twentieth Century writing. You see it first in Walt Whitman. He was the beginning of the movement" [Gertrude Stein, "How Writing is Written"].

Stein, like Whitman in leaves of Grass, has broken in Tender Buttons the rigid form of the noun. In its rigidity, its decline into automatic, reflexive chains of association, the patriarchal noun has lost the ability to "create it without naming it," to make us "feel the thing anything being existing." The modernist poetics articulated by Ezra Pound, particularly in his imagist and vorticist manifestos, also aims at breaking form in order to create it without naming it and to make us feel the thing anything being existing. In important ways, Stein articulates belatedly in "Poetry and Grammar" a modernist poetic credo. I want to investigate both the similarities and the differences in Stein's and Pound's versions of breaking and remaking poetic form.

Stein's tribute to Whitman in "Poetry and Grammar" is as unambivalent as it can be. Pound's early poetic tribute to Whitman, "A Pact" of 1913, almost contemporaneous with Tender Buttons, is highly ambivalent:

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman—
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root—
Let there be commerce between us.

(One wonders whether Stein got her figure of breaking, in association with Whitman and poetry, from this poem.) Where Stein wholly approves of and identifies with Whitman's breaking, considering it the determining act of the new poetry, Pound sees it as only a rough beginning, an artisan's rather than an artist's act. And while Pound's poem ostensibly represents a reconciliation of the newly reasonable adult poet, the "grown child," with the "pig-headed father," the almost deliberately childish formulation "I am old enough now to make friends" calls attention to the "child" in "grown child," still in the relation to the "pig-headed father" of resentful, threatened, overly self-assertive son: four of the poem's nine lines begin with "I," and the poem is charged with anger and contempt. The conciliatory tone of the last four lines actually feeds the poet's assertion of superiority: having established his primacy, he can afford this pact. It will be made on his terms; he will carve where Whitman merely broke new wood; and he closes the poem with a decree in the Creator's voice, which at the same time manages to mock Whitman's American marketplace mundanity and ruefully to acknowledge Pound's own inescapable derivation from it, "Let there be commerce between us."

Pound's ambivalence toward Whitman parallels the ambivalence in his modernist poetics toward breaking the rigid form of the noun. The tone of his imagist and vorticist pronouncements is very much informed by the spirit of breaking, and his "direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether subjective or objective" is very close to, and perhaps one inspiration for, Stein's various formulations for "replac(ing) the noun by the thing in itself and "creating it without naming it." Similarly, Stein's statement that "Language as a real thing is not imitation either of sounds or colors or emotions it is an intellectual recreation" reminds us of Pound's definition of the image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" [Ezra Pound, "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste," in The Modern Tradition]. In "Transatlantic Interview," Stein says, criticizing a word choice in one of the Objects poems of Tender Buttons, "A Piece of Coffee," that "Dirty has an association and is a word that I would not use now. I would not use words that have definite associations" ["A Transatlantic Interview" in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, by Robert Bartlett Haas]. This statement is highly remi niscent of Pound's attack on symbolism: "The symbolists dealt in 'association,' that is, in a sort of allusion, almost of allegory."

It is in relation to the question of rigidity that Stein and Pound most palpably diverge. For Pound, carver of new wood, the rhetoric of the new poetry is very much a rhetoric of domination: "The statements of 'analytics' are 'lords' over fact. They are the thrones and dominations that rule over form and recurrence. And in like manner are great works of art lords over fact, over race-long recurrent moods, and over to-morrow."

Stein describes her method of composition in writing Tender Buttons as a complex simultaneity of concentration on external objects and words recreating those objects as they form themselves in her mind: "I used to take objects on a table, like a tumbler or any kind of object and try to get the picture of it clear and separate in my mind and create a word relationship between the word and the things seen." Boundaries between outer and inner, and among objects, images, words, and mind, become fluid, unfixed, finally invisible, irrelevant, wholly permeable. Stein describes explicitly here the action of breaking the rigid form of the noun, language's prime implement of subject-object separation and domination….

To the extent that she participated in the modernist moment of representation, Stein, like Pound, was ambivalent about the twentieth-century revolution of the word both of them did so much to shape and foment. Unlike Pound, Stein did not reinvent the rigidity of the form of the noun, nor did she work toward domination, containment, compression, or abstract conversion of her erotic-poetic impulse. Stein is writing from the position of the woman modernist: her fearful ambivalence toward the unequivocal assertiveness of her program of breaking and remaking emerges in diction of violence and anxiety.

In a vividly erotic passage I have already cited from "Poetry and Grammar," Stein's negative feeling toward her poetic project erupts in a series of predominantly anxious and violent verbs: "Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. … Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns." Similarly, Stein associates the process of making poetry with a painful intensification of erotic feeling: "you can love a name and if you love a name then saying that name any number of times only makes you love it more, more violently more persistently more tormentedly."

The overall tone of Tender Buttons, as many critics, including myself, have claimed, is one of joyous lightness and miraculous plenitude. That tone is fulfilled in its last line, a utopian invocation of paratactic gender equality: "all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain" [Tender Buttons]. But such confident serenity is regularly punctuated by diction with reverberations of a more tormented sort.

"Sugar"—to use a section from Food that Stein assesses favorably in "Transatlantic Interview" (she finds "unsuccessful" several other segments of Tender Buttons)—begins

A violent luck and a whole sample and even then quiet. Water is squeezing, water is almost squeezing on lard. Water, water is a mountain and it is selected and it is so practical that there is no use in money. A mind under is exact and so it is necessary to have a mouth and eye glasses.

A question of sudden rises and more time than awfulness is so easy and shady. There is precisely that noise.

Stein particularly likes those opening paragraphs. Their overall tone expresses an excitement tinged with violence, not simply in the opening "violent luck" but in the rep etition of "squeezing," counterbalanced by an unexpected "quiet," which reinforces by opposition that violent excitement; also in the slightly disgusting erotic suggestiveness of water squeezing on lard, and in the suggestion of drowning in "a mind under." Again, the energy required for breaking the rigid form of the noun is a threateningly violent force; the erotic charge of that breaking is tinged with disgust.

Unlike the longer sections at the beginning of Food, "Sugar" goes on for just another page, but it is still too long to quote in its entirety. The following excerpts, which continue the tone of the opening lines, taken together represent approximately half of the poem:

A question of sudden rises and more time than awfulness is so easy and shady…. Put it in the stew, put it to shame … A puzzle a monster puzzle, a heavy choking, a neglected Tuesday…. Wet crossing and a likeness, any likeness, a likeness has blisters, it has that and teeth, it has the staggering blindly … Cut a gas jet uglier and then pierce pierce in between the next and negligence. … A collection of all around, a signal poison, a lack of languor and more hurts at ease.

It doesn't take a detailed reading to make apparent the violence and anxiety of Stein's sounds as they hit the ear and of the troubling connotations and resonances that match and support those sounds as they take shape in the reader's mind. "Sugar" ends on a relaxed, affirmative note, "A nice old chain is widening, it is absent, it is laid by," which does not, however, wholly assuage the anxiety about that nice old chain articulated in the body of the piece.

In "Transatlantic Interview," Stein focuses her response to "Sugar" on those first two paragraphs, which she sees as a poetic treatment of water: "'A mind under is exact and so it is necessary to have a mouth and eyeglasses' (the fourth sentence). That impresses any person, so to speak it is part of the water and is therefore valid. It is supposed to continue the actual realism of water, of a great body of water."

Water is an important recurring motif in Tender Buttons, particularly in conjunction with containment and vision. References to water occur throughout; several subtitles in the Objects section (Rooms has no subtitles) concern water either explicitly or obliquely, especially in relation to containment or protection, such as "Mildred's Umbrella," "A Seltzer Bottle," "A Mounted Umbrella," "Careless Water," "Water Raining," "An Umbrella," "A Little Bit of a Tumbler." The opening section of Objects, and therefore of Tender Buttons, condenses (as it were) the motifs of water, containment, and vision: "A Carafe, That Is A Blind Glass" (the second poem of Objects is entitled "Glazed Glitter," continuing the "blindness," or opacity, of the opening glass carafe).

"Sugar" associates water not only with anxious sexuality and violence, as we have already seen, but also with the crucial modernist issues of leveling and annihilation. Water, (traditionally) the feminine, is the enabling medium for the new writing, which breaks and remakes the rigid form of the noun. At the same time, water is the medium that can drown, obliterate, prevent vision: "A mind under is exact and so it is necessary to have a mouth and eye glasses." This sentence connects a drowned mind, the exactness of the symbolic, its exigency ("necessary"), the pre-oedipal mouth that utters the presymbolic and attaches to the body of the mother, the "eye glasses" that protect symbolic vision from presymbolic annihilation, and that also suggest the "glasses" that contain water.

Water is also "a mountain," and involves "a question of sudden rises." Later, "crestfallen" is associated with "open," "mounting" with "chaining," and a "wet crossing" with "a likeness, any likeness, a likeness has blisters, it has that and teeth." At the level of "actual realism," "a great body of water" has waves: mountains, sudden rises, that can become crestfallen. Waves rise in contradiction to the leveling force of water ("water seeks its own level"). Like those of the other modernists, Stein's position in relation to twentieth-century democratic, egalitarian leveling was as equivocal as her position in relation to feminine selfassertion. She decried Roosevelt, distrusted "big government," and allied herself politically, if at all, with American "rugged individualism." She was a close friend in the thirties and forties of the collaborationist Bernard Faÿ, whose interventions on her behalf with the Vichy government enabled her and Alice Toklas, also Jewish, to remain miraculously unmolested in occupied France. But, on the other side, "The Winner Loses, A Picture of Occupied France" is a tribute to the Resistance, she excoriates Hitler as "Angel Harper" in Mrs. Reynolds, and, most importantly, she links to the egalitarian-democratic principle of "one man one vote" her notion of the "twentieth-century composition" as a composition in which there is no dominant center, in fact no center at all; each element is as important as every other element, and as important as the whole.

"Crestfallen and open," "mounting and chaining": these water-related conjunctions are perfect representations of Stein's ambivalence. "Crestfallen" has negative connotations but denotes leveling and is associated with "open," which has positive political and literary connotations; "mounting" has predominantly positive connotations but also denotes hierarchy as well as hierarchical, animalistic sex, and is associated with "chaining," which has negative connotations, invoking the constraints of the old order, again both political and literary (chains can suggest linearity). Similarly, "wet crossing and a likeness" links representation ("a likeness") with water and transgression, or at least stepping over (boundaries), going from one side to another. Concomitantly, "any likeness, a likeness has blisters, it has that and teeth, it has the staggering blindly": sucking mouths develop teeth, which enable them to speak as well as to bite; blisters come from (subversive) friction; staggering blindly, again, is the terrifying punishment for the wet crossing.

Rebellion against patriarchal poetry is a dangerous act for a woman writer in the modernist period, generally accompanied by rage and fear. We can admire once again how little Stein was hampered, to what a great extent she actually achieved her project of breaking the rigid form of the noun.