Books: Manifesto

EIMI—e. e. cummings—Covici, Friede

($3).

Compared with the utterances of Ezra Pound (TIME, March 20), the writing of Edward Estlin Cummings is as simple as ABC. Though to many a lay reader his typographical idiosyncrasies suggest a linotyper's nightmare, he is not really so difficult. Not a writer to be nodded over or dipped into at random, neither does he try to catch the reader napping. If he is read as carefully as he writes, he has few Joycean perplexities (aside from portmanteau words and puns); what looks like a puzzling shorthand will resolve...