Semansky has published widely in the field of twentieth-century poetry and culture. In the following essay, he considers "i was sitting in mcsorley's" as an example of cummings's notion of unrealism.

"i was sitting in mcsorley's" is a painterly poem that embodies cummings's idea of what he called "unrealism." Like so many artists and writers at the beginning of the twentieth century, Cummings wanted to make his writing modern. Writing modern poetry meant to "make it new," as Ezra Pound said. This involved challenging the status quo, which at the beginning of the twentieth century was realism and its offshoots.

Realism, a literary movement rooted in the nineteenth century, uses the everyday world as its subject matter. Practitioners of literary realism considered language a tool to show readers the world as it was rather than how it should be. Realistic writing often had a reportorial feel to...