Cummings is one of our society's best haters; functioning as a Juvenalian satirist, he has long attacked our society's worst indulgences in materialism, hypocrisy, "hypercivic zeal," scientific unwisdom and the following of false heroes and tawdry ideals. He most bitterly, in poems like "plato told him …" reproaches us for not taking the words of our philosophers seriously, but rather insisting on mouthing (vulgarizing and debasing) the poetry of their utterances. (p. 287)

["Buffalo Bill's Defunct,"] based on the poet's intense anger, is part of Cummings's broadside assault on several traditions, particularly that of our national sentimentality toward figures like Buffalo Bill. Cummings seems to be saying, with an appearance of flippancy that has often been regarded by critics as rather adolescent, that we as a nation are adolescent in our infatuation for such fraudulent "heroes." Even the subjects of our grief are unworthy. (p. 288)

To understand the poem's irony...