A Survey of Modernist Poetry

These essays turn E. E. Cummings' "Sunset" into a test case for modern poetry itself: does experimental verse shut out the "plain reader," or ask for a more active, imaginative kind of attention? What first looks like a joke at the reader's expense is revealed as a carefully made work, dense with fragments, spacing, sibilance, and rhythmic echoes that create motion, mood, and visual pattern without ordinary syntax. By reconstructing the poem in plainer, more conventional forms, the authors show what is gained—and what is lost—when modernist technique is normalized. The rewritten versions become fuller in explanation but flatter in force, proving that Cummings' compression is not gimmickry but a deliberate resistance to stale poetic habits. The discussion broadens into a defense of poetry's invisible formal life, where meaning depends on line, pause, sound, and suggestion as much as on printed words. At the same time, the essays warn against making form into a puzzle or a mechanical system. They compare Cummings with Japanese tanka, French Symbolists such as Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Valéry, and even Pound, arguing that poetry must remain alive, serious, and more than prose in disguise. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.