With a critic like Richard P. Blackmur, who tends to use on each work the special techniques it seems to call for and who at one time or another has used almost every type of criticism …, the difficulty of placing any single way of operating as his "method" is obvious. What he has is not so much a unique method as a unique habit of mind, a capacity for painstaking investigation that is essential for contemporary criticism, and that might properly be isolated as his major contribution to the brew. (p. 239)

As a logical consequence of [Blackmur's emphasis on words], a good part of Blackmur's research is verbal. His study of Cummings, for example, announces the intention of studying Cummings's language as a clue to "the quality of the meaning his use of these words permits." He then goes on to compile a list of Cummings's principal recurrent...