Like much of Gertrude Stein’s work, her poem “A carafe, that is a blind a glass” is an example of Modernism, which was a literary movement that began around the turn of the 20th-century. Modernist writers rejected objective reality. For them, each person determined what was real and true—it wasn't a product of the majority or consensus. In a sense, the individual created their reality. Through their thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and emotions, people developed and discerned the world. The focus on the individual and the rejection of coherent reality manifests in Modernism’s preoccupation with fragmentation and stream of consciousness. The world was splintered, and the conscience had to confront and deal with the fractured landscape. Works like Ezra Pound’s two-line poem “In a Station of the Metro” (1913), T. S. Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land (1922), Virginia Woolf’s book-length essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), and Stein’s poem “A carafe, this is a blind glass” demonstrate the centrality of brokenness and awareness. In Stein’s poem, she breaks the carafe into puzzling descriptions that highlight how the speaker experiences the reality of the object. Of course, in the context of Modernism, this reality isn’t universal, so the speaker articulates their subjective perceptions and what the carafe makes them conscious of.

Conversely, Stein’s commitment to experimentation transcends the literary context of Modernism. As Richard Kostelanetz writes in his introduction to The Gertrude Stein Reader (Cooper Square Press, 2002), “Even those readers accustomed to the classic Modernists often find Stein’s work opaque, largely because her innovations are not like theirs.” For Kostelanetz, Modernists mainly experimented with “literary structures” while Stein “concentrated on language.” Stein’s desire to create a unique syntax—“an arrangement in a system to pointing”—separates her from other Modernists, as her keen drive to manipulate words and grammar deprives “A carafe, that is a blind glass” of conventional elements that even Modernists retained.