SOURCE: "The State of Change," in Saturday Review, Vol. 39, No. 51, December 22, 1956, pp. 21-29.

In the following review, Fowlie praises Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems, noting the power of Stein's poetic rhythms.

The poetry published in Gertrude Stein's volume Stanzas in Meditation was written between 1929 and 1933. It is now presented as the sixth volume in the Yale edition of her unpublished writings. Donald Sutherland, biographer of the writer and one of the editors of this edition, describes in his preface the moment in Miss Stein's career when these poems were composed. For several years before 1929 she had written extensively on painting. Then her preoccupation began to center on ideas of a political and philosophical nature. She was well aware of the weakness of poetry which is simply about ideas and of the need to make ideas coexistent with poetry, intrinsic to poetry. (In fact, she once said, in...