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.

In the following excerpt, DeKoven examines Stein's use of nouns in Tender Buttons in the context of Modernist poetry.

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...