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This article seeks to analyse the nature of Gertrude Stein’s poetic language in Tender Buttons. The notion of substance is at the core of Stein’s grammar: the poet does not use language to describe the world’s substance, but uses language as a substance, turns language into a matter that she models as she writes. All landmarks are lost: the syntax often does not make sense, the mimetic representation is deliberately blurred. The reader can barely recognize his own language, the world he lives in: what the text manifests is that language definitely stands on its own.