Chapter 3 Taking Place in Love Poems

Abstract

Stein’s landscape writing is a spatial solution to a temporal problem she sought to address in conventional plays, and in this chapter, Voris identifies emergent spatial strategies in love poems immediately preceding Stein’s landscape plays. In “A Sonatina Followed By Another” (1921) and “Didn’t Nelly And Lilly Love You” (1922), Stein examines the displacements of representation and tries instead to express intimacy, even that of long duration, with immediacy and directness. Through close reading, Voris demonstrates that as precursors of “the problem of time in relation to emotion,” these poems participate in the compositional task of the landscape period. Seeking to make love poems convey both immediacy and continuity over time, she experiments with equivalent and multiple arrangements that anticipate the spatial formation of her landscape writing.