The career of E. E. Cummings, from his first appearance at Harvard to his last, has been the consistent statement of an attitude toward authority. His entire work raises the question whether this attitude can much longer continue to be a creative one, or even a possible one for the artist. The question remains unanswered, but merely to have raised it so sharply as he has done is a peculiar achievement.

It involved first the definition of a world in which poems, Cummings's kind of poems, might be written…. And this meant a rigid, wilful ordering of experience according to a moral standard, a reduction of all things into the two categories of the lyric affirmatives (flowers, kisses, children, birds, love) and the sterile negatives (machines, money, advertisements, respectability, death). In a world thus ordered, it then became the poet's task to find means of asserting with finality...