rose is a rose is a rose

Have you ever wondered what Gertrude Stein was getting at when she wrote “rose is a rose is a rose”?  I did a little digging into it, because I was curious. Did you know there is whole wiki page dedicated to just that one sentence? Here is what it says:

In Stein’s view, the sentence expresses the fact that simply using the name of a thing already invokes the imagery and emotions associated with it…Stein once remarked, “Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying ‘is a … is a … is a …’ Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.”… She said to an audience at Oxford University that the statement referred to the fact that when the Romantics used the word “rose”, it had a direct relationship to an actual rose. For later periods in literature this would no longer be true. The eras following Romanticism, notably the modern era, use the word rose to refer to the actual rose, yet they also imply, through the use of the word, the archetypical elements of the romantic era.

Clarified or more confused? I’m a little of both.