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, according to Beverly Maeder, who credits her with pointing the way.