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".