Cummings' depth and poetic vision is intense enough to excite and revivify. He confronts himself with cosmic dichotomies that take him to the core of man's reality. He questions, probes, ridicules. The undercurrent of a Cummings' joy is most often cynicism, betraying to us the lonely man, the man of "helpless pain" beleaguered by a "piercing sense of dislocation."… (p. 3)

Cummings runs away in his cynicism. He flees the hell-bent, tortuous world that offers the evil of man as his own God. He flees the oppressing, lackluster world of scientifically organized man…. He lifts himself above this banality searching for the God of his poetic joy…. He is like Byron following the venturesome Don Juan to a fairy island or Whitman losing himself in the surging rivers and pliant grass. (pp. 3-4)

Cummings breaks the chains that bind him to conventional matters and casts off the "common motives...