Anthropomorphism and imagination
Stein's poetry allows the reader to explore the philosophical components of her images by portraying them as humanoid with human-like functions. Sometimes there are literal people in her life that make it into the poem, but other times it seems that the human characters in her poetry are actually anthropomorphized ideas, feelings she experienced in her life with other people and then captured in her artistic imagination.
Absurdity and meaning
Gertrude Stein is obviously concerned with the deeper meaning of experience and its potential implications. She recognizes in her sometimes whimsical, sometimes brutal language that she is adding layers of meaning from herself onto a reality that is technically just a field for those experiences. In the opinion of her poetic persona, it seems that poetry is designed to transfigure essentially meaningless daily experiences into meaningful reading experiences.
The limits of social constructs
Stein's poetry is directly opposed to the religious teaching of her culture. Instead of writing about God and creation and religion, she writes about foreigners, different religions, different sexual orientations—she talks through poetic language about homosexuality and the way that social constructs break down in light of the truth about human experience. Instead of responding to our human experience, she feels social constructs serve their own function without caring about how that might affect real humans who see the world in different ways than the social norm.
