Time and Space in Yeats and Stein: Reading Meditations in Time of Civil War and Tender Button

Abstract

Yeats and Stein are both modernists. The one lived in Dublin; the other lived in Paris. Both revolutionized poetry and novel in their own way. Yeats’s poetry displays the highest degree of form that gives sense of time and space; he relies on tradition to achieve it, whereas Stein invents a totally new way of writing in order to make new sense in prose. This paper attempts to show how to read Yeats’s Meditations in Time of Civil War and Stein’s Tender Buttons. We see Yeats’s poems in it as well woven embroidery in spatial and temporal terms. The more you pay attention to form in his poetry, the more marvelous, sensuous feel of the poems’ texture you have. In the meantime, in different ways than Yeats, Stein’s prose flows like time smoothly, perfectly, like music; if you take time to think, the making of sense is broken; if you just let yourself feel the sensation that the flowing of words and sentences guide you, sense makes sense makes sense, in Stein’s idiom.