"It must be the purpose of the poet to make of his words a new form . . . . [I]t was Gertrude Stein, for her formal insistence on words in their literal, structural quality of being words, who had strongly influenced us . . . It all went with the newer appreciation, the matter of paint upon canvas as being of more importance than the literal appearance of the image depicted."
Stein "has completely unlinked [words]...from their former relationships in the sentence....she has gone systematically to work smashing every connotation that words have ever had, in order to get them back clean."