A Rose is a Rose is a Hero is a Horse: Naming and Referentiality in the Poetry of Robert Kroetsch and Gertrude Stein

The contemporary Canadian poet Robert Kroetsch claims Gertrude Stein as an important influence on his work. On the surface, there are indeed many similarities between the poetics of Kroetsch and that of Stein. Separated by one generation and one epoch of literary history – from Stein’s Modernism to Kroetsch’s avowed Postmodernism – they are nevertheless both avant-garde poets, with an interest in the relationship of signifier to signified and in the problems and joys of representation. However, the poetry of these two writers diverges radically in meaning-making practices and, finally, philosophical foundations.

Although Stein and Kroetsch share a fascination with the unstable relationship between signifier and signified, Stein’s approach seems to suggest that the instability was a problem and source of anxiety in her quest to represent reality, even inasmuch as ‘representation’ became ‘creation’, while Kroetsch’s poetry and critical writings express a joy and sense of play produced by his awareness of the gap between signified and signifier.

I have reconstructed the metalinguistics of these two avant-garde writers by comparing poems by Kroetsch and Stein at the level of syntax, lexical collocation and coherence, and conception. Their poems share many themes and preoccupations, including conceptions of ‘naming’, the deconstruction of the signifier, and the status of the text. However, differences in technique are the direct reflection of philosophical differences in art movements at opposite ends of the 20th century.