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Each printed page discloses such violation of order that the reader is shocked: words are stretched out vertically and horizontally; capital letters jump up where they do not belong; punctuation marks intrude irregularly; lacunae appear within and between lines. Because order has been violated, it is concluded that meaning, its dependent variable, has been destroyed at the same time. And a poem without meaning is nonsense.

Cummings's work reveals his denial of external authority in its many aspects, for from every point of view and in every style he expounds the basic idea of individualism, the ultimate value in all his writing

In perceiving the world with full awareness, each man stands in momentary relationship with life, for everything whirls past him in never-ending change. When the moment has passed, it will never be repeated and can never be exactly matched. The poet's responsibility is to set down without falsification this single fragment of time. The difficulty arises in the poet's grappling with the experience of the poem so as to make it as concentrated and intense as possible and yet to produce the immediacy and directness which one would draw from the experience itself.