William Carlos Williams Philomena Andronica And Gertrude...

William Carlos Williams â€Å"Philomena Andronica† and Gertrude Stein’s â€Å"Identity, a poem† are both visually and tonally very different texts. However, Stein and Williams have both used similar approaches to literary form in their poems as can be seen in their non-traditional approach to meaning generation and rejection of grammatical convention. The poems also both show an interest in the notion of identity and it’s fluidity, although Stein employs repeated images in her investigation whilst Williams approach lies in his clever use of parenthesis and vignette form. The two texts both take an approach to punctuation and formatting that strays from grammatical convention. The passage from Stein’s â€Å"Identity, a Poem† presents a syntactic exploration of the idea identity and self. By rejecting the form that the reader expects of a poem, Stein guides her readers to an understanding of how language shapes identity. One example of this is the use of a full stop where grammatical rule dictates there should be a question mark, â€Å"and if the little dog is not there is it alone.† The lack of expected punctuation makes the reader question the idea that meaning is dependent on grammatical conventions; why do we need a question mark in order to understand the words as a question? Stein also uses a mixture of prose and poetic voice in her poem. By contrasting lines such as â€Å"I say two dogs but say a dog and a dog,† which is distinctly poetic, with lines with a prosaic tone â€Å"The person