Analysis Of Portraits And Repetition By Gertrude Stein

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Tender Buttons clearly showed the profound effect modern painting had on her writing. In these small prose poems, Stein meticulously puts images and phrases together, often in surprising ways—similar in manner to cubist painting. Her writing, characterized by its use of words for their associations and sounds rather than their meanings, received considerable interest from other artists and writers. In fact like an artist, she is throwing random colours to paint an object as it is. However, in doing so, her language disintegrates itself, loses its meaning, every individual word seems like a detached, colourful dot. The following quotation from her "Portraits and Repetition," should make evident just how closely Gertrude Stein equated her writing …show more content…
That is why painters paint still lives. You do see why they do. (Stein, P&P 16)
What she wanted to do in her emulation of the cubist painters was to develop, exclusive of the inherent symbolic nature of words, a written art form without a mimetic relationship to the external world except through certain suggestive devices. She wanted to reorder reality in the same way Picasso and Braque fragmented the forms of external objects and painted the fragments on the canvas in a unique relationship to one another. In other words, she wanted the painter's freedom to create her own reality, so that her creation would be subject to no conventions other than those she imposed upon it.
Ezra Pound, the most aggressively modern and the leading flag bearer among these poets, made “Make it new!” his battle cry. In Personae, Pound writes “To leave the old barren ways of men” (LA FRAISNE), and “Free us, for we perish / In this ever-flowing monotony / Of ugly print marks, black /Upon white parchment.” (THE EYES) In London Pound encountered and encouraged his fellow
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Stevens, the aesthete par excellence, exalted the imagination for its ability to “press back against the pressure of reality.” Williams too demands a “New World,” where the imagination, freed from the handcuffs of “art,” takes the lead. According to Williams, the purpose of art is neither to “copy” nature nor to “make” pictures. He celebrates the art or poetry, that considers simple things as its object, with whom readers or viewers are very much familiar, but at the same time it detaches

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