Exchange on Stevens's "Gray Room" in relation to Pound's "The Encounter"

- Did we say that Stevens' GRAY ROOM denied the reader his/her own subjectivity? If we didn't, I'd like to submit that in comparison to THE ENCOUNTER, it does. GRAY ROOM seems to contain more of an ego than does Pound's "The ENCOUNTER.

- Some were arguing indeed that "Gray Room" permits the subjectivity of the observed woman to be observable (and not itself observing--an observ*er*), and that this is suggested in the way in which she directs her attention at truly miscellaneous, ornamental, "things" around her. In other words, the poem's subject (the speaker--or Stevens we might say) looks and the looked-at doesn't get to "re-direct" in the least. Others disagreed. But your idea--about the reader--is new(ish) to the discussion, and I think a fruitful one: the "I know..." seems to close things off for the reader (denying us what Emily would call "possibility"). Others would disagree, and emphasize the self-critical, self-questioning, modernist "What is all this?"

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