The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Stein, Gertrude. "Sacred Emily." Geography and Plays (The Four Seas Company, 1922).

Note that all parenthetical citations refer to the line number from which the quotation is taken.

"Sacred Emily," published in Gertrude Stein's 1922 Geography and Plays, is composed of a single stanza of 370 lines, with some of the lines being just a single word. Stein's experimental style eschews a traditional reliance on time and narrative in favor of studying language, process, and meaning. Stein wrote in the context of the late 19th and early 20th century Modernist Movement, which sought new forms of representation. Among Stein's influences were her earlier studies in psychology under William James, her fascination with the brain's language centers, and the abstraction and fragmentation found in Cubist visual art. "Sacred Emily" exemplifies what Stein calls the "continuous present" through the stream of consciousness style.

Gender, domesticity, and the impulse to create appear thematically in "Sacred Emily." The speaker includes herself in the category of "wives of great men," and amidst the repetitive din of household management, she sounds out her desire to write poetry.