Painting with Words

As I pondered about Stein’s repetitious and circular writing style that paints pictures instead of telling stories, I thought of another member of the Modernist movement, William Carlos Williams, and his poem “The Dance”:

In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling
about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess.

In this poem, Williams attempts to depict the painting the Kermess and capture the movement and excitement of its dancing scene. He uses rhyming words, especially ones that rhyme with “round,” in order to create the sense of repetitive movement from dancing. Furthermore, the poem begins and ends with the identical words: “In Brueghel’s great picture, The Kermess.” Not only are the dancers in the poem going “round and around” in endless circles, but the poem is a circle in itself in which the reader makes a “round” by the end of the poem and ends up exactly where he or she had started. In his effort to depict the painting, Williams attempts to infuse animation into something dead, noise into something silent, and motion into something unmoving. However, while one may go “round and around” in trying to describe a painting, ultimately, words cannot infuse it with the life that is present in its visual form, and the reader can only truly grasp its title and and name of painter.

While Williams tries to depict with words something that is understood through the senses, Stein does not try to accurately match her words to reality. For instance, in Tender Buttons, she does not even try to describe the objects that she lists as entry titles. Instead, she transcends the goal of realistic depiction. Instead of viewing language as a barrier to communication, like Williams, she views it as an endless door to opportunities. She does not try to limit herself to the meanings of language assigned by her social context; instead, she uses language freely, not trying to imitate something sensual by using words. Therefore, on the one hand, her words in each entry seem less connected to the object that she associates them with. On the other hand, they are much closer to the object because they are Stein’s subjective way of communicating about it. Just like Williams, she also uses repetition and rhyme--but not necessarily because they correspond with the object that she is writing about. She is the artist who is creating her own dancing scene based on her own imagination, instead of trying to imitate one from another painting like Williams. It is possible to say that Williams in this poem is trying to do realist painting, while Stein is involved in something more abstract.

Here is the image that Williams attempts to describe: