From the verbal contortionist who brought us a pitch-perfect insult for bland locations (“There is no there there”) and graced post-World War I writers with the tenderest nickname of all time (“The lost generation”), Gertrude Stein haunts the annals of literary history with a still more inscrutable piece of wordplay: “A rose is a rose is a rose.” Or rather, in its original phrasing—for she would tweak it over the years—“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”

As with all poetry, Stein’s flower tautology can hardly be translated into prose without losing much along the way. Indeed, how to pick apart something that so patently resists explanation, referring only to itself and made up only of itself, like the tightly packed petals of the very thing it names?

Yet pick it apart we must, if only to bring us closer to what is unspeakable in it. For that, in essence, is what Stein is doing: banging us repeatedly against the glass window of language to show us the silent world of things on the other side. In Stein’s machine-gun phrasing, we break out of the X is Y of traditional description—a rose is a flower, my love is a rose—and are left with only the pure X is X of iteration, as if to say, “Last stop on the train of language: It’s real life from here on out.” For while language has the power to point outward to the world, it can also grow stale, wall us in, and leave us with nothing but words, words, and more words. By stripping away centuries of semantic baggage—“rose” being so trite and overused it can scarcely evoke the actual object—Stein restored the power of language to mean beyond itself. Thrashing us with the flower in all its petal-patterned freshness, Stein would later boast, “I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.”

While lecturing at the University of Chicago, Stein was asked what she meant by her rose, to which she replied: “Now listen. Can’t you see that when the language was new—as it was with Chaucer and Homer—the poet could use the name of a thing and the thing was really there. He could say ‘O moon,’ ‘O sea,’ ‘O love,’ and the moon and the sea and love were really there. And can’t you see that after hundreds of years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written, he could call on those words and find that they were just worn-out literary words. The excitingness of pure being had withdrawn from them; they were just rather stale literary words. Now the poet has to work in the excitingness of pure being; he has to get back that intensity into the language.”

“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” first appears in Gertrude Stein’s 1913 poem “Sacred Emily” (published in her 1922 collection Geography and Plays ) and reappears with variation in her later poems and writings.

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What makes a work of art original? Theft , says poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot. The only other option is to borrow, return with late fees, and pale, like a cheap photocopy, in comparison. As Eliot’s original phrasing reads, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”

What about the third way—that of pure invention? Impossible, says Eliot. As he explains in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” whenever you try to write, you are influenced, consciously or otherwise, by what came before you. From where else could you get your language? Your storylines? Your imagery? Your characters? Which means you can either be unwittingly guided by the literature of the past—and slip into the dull grooves of cliché—or take it up and bend it to new purposes. Shakespeare cribbed nearly all his plots from Plutarch and Ovid, Boccaccio and Holinshed; what matters is that he made them his own.