In a review of Stein's posthumously published Stanzas in Meditation (1956)--a review published in Saturday Review (December 22, 1956, pp. 20-1)--Wallace Fowlie wrote:

She never relinquishes the strictest, most intimate relationship between her words and her thought. I would say that her poetry comes not from her words but from the intimacy of this contract. The experience of the reader is an awareness of this contract which grows until it becomes an obsession. The poems prepare and create in a strangely powerful way the reader who is destined to read them. He will find himself involved in a relationship far different from the habitual relationship of reader and poem. For this is poetry about poetry.... A word used by Gertrude Stein does not designate a thing as much as it designates the way in which the thing is possessed, or the way in which the thing is destroyed, or the way whereby the poets has learned to live with it.