For two generations, critics, teachers, and students have been reading Wallace Stevens' poetry with uncommon zeal. The poet's themes are powered by a language that bares the artifices of its own constructions. In Wallace Stevens' Experimental Language, Beverly Maeder uses an innovative rhetorical and philosophical approach to examine Stevens' linguistic exploration. She studies in detail both well-known poems and neglected, more cryptic works, in which Stevens plays with the disruptive development of metaphor, the ostentatious positioning of prepositions and prefixes, and the ruthless use of copular verbs. Maeder argues that these strategies allow Stevens' more radical poems to heighten the self-consciousness of language and test the limits of its non-ontological potential. By insisting on making and unmaking the ongoing patterns of language, such poems belie the temporal--and perishable--nature of both text and poet-persona. Like Stevens' own work, this book is neither systematic nor exhaustive but intriguingly experimental.