Gertrude Stein‟s Stanzas in Meditation: Wor...

Gertrude Stein‟s Stanzas in Meditation: Word-play on „Meanings‟ in Stanza XV

Author Name : Varuna Yadav

ABSTRACT ‘Stanzas in Meditation' are a collection of poetic stanzas written by Gertrude Stein and published in 1940. Even though they have been compiled together in the form of a book, all these stanzas can be read as individual pieces of poetry that represent Stein's rumination on the very act of writing and reading poetry. As a modernist poet, Stein partakes in the avant– gardegoal of making it novel by curating the poetic language in such a way that the poetic form becomes capable of being substitutively read as the poetic subject matter of the poem. This paper shows, how in the ‘stanza xv’ of the book, the form and the content amalgamate into each other to eventually delineate every sentence as an expression of one’s subjective experience of engaging with Art. Such style of composition further creates the possibility of not just deriving multiple meanings out of almost every word of the poem but also to have multiple modes of readability with regards to the overall poetic structure. The point of departure would be to see Stein’s work as resonating the very experience of modernity in a metropolis, which presents multiple stimulants to the modern man, and at the same time allows him to exercise the agency to subjectively choose the stimulants he wants to respond to and the ones he wants to be distanced from.