Cummings is not significantly a "free verse" poet in the popular sense of that term. From first to last, he was a poet thoroughly in the tradition of English prosody; he experimented freely with given forms, but it will be seen that he molded traditional forms to new uses more often than he simply invented new ones. In this he resembles Swinburne as much as any other predecessor, and it is possible that he was heavily influenced by Swinburne's metrics. Second, though there are no important "periods" in Cummings' life, as there are in the lives of poets like Eliot and Yeats, it is not true that there is no development in his poetry. He has been accused of such a lack of development, partly because he did not move from one clearly-defined "position" to another—politically or otherwise—during his lifetime. This has been somewhat unusual in...