implicit tribute to Walt Whitman and other American poets, including himself, making evident his pride in the poetic revolution taking place on the North American continent. Indian names are another aspect of Stevens' Americana, as in the title of "Stars at Tallapoosa". Movement away from European influences and toward the responsibility of writing distinctly American poetry may be traced to "Anecdote of the Jar" (1919). Bates suggests that Stevens the American burgher was self-conscious about the poses of aesthete and dandy, writing, It is as though Stevens, having assumed the pose of aesthete, had suddenly caught sight of himself in a mirror; thereafter, his dismay and amusement became an integral part of the pose. The same might be said of his dandiacal poems, for the dandy is by definition someone who lives always as though reflected in a mirror; the dandy's vaunted wit sprang in the first place from an awareness of his own absurd pretensions. Further compounding the aesthetic dandy's self-consciousness, in Stevens' case, was his burgherly sense of his own foppish creations. Allen Tate suggests a different interpretation in maintaining that Stevens' dandyism was "the perfect surface beneath which plays an intense Puritanism". The burgher does not look on with ironic dismay but rather uses the poses to achieve reticence about self-disclosure. The poses allow modulation in revelation of the poet and his world. Tony Sharpe expresses a similar thought when he refers to Stevens as "that exponent of American loneliness". Meaning and syntax Stevens is often called a symbolist poet. Vendler notes that the first task undertaken by the early critics of Stevens was to "decode" his "symbols". The scare-quotes are Vendler's. Color symbolism is a vital part of Stevens' poetic technique, according to the symbolist critic Veena Rani Prasad, who proposes the following color scheme for reading Stevens. blue – imagination;green – the physicalred – realitygold – sunpurple – delight in the imagination Vendler accuses the decoders of producing "some commentary of extraordinary banality", and favors appreciating Stevens' poems by understanding their syntactical novelty rather than by decoding the meanings of their symbols. Stevens lends support to this position, or at least expresses skepticism about 'decoding', when he writes in Adagia, "A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have." The upshot of Vendler's syntactical approach is to situate his poems in the realm of possibilities and potentialities,