Rebel, Misspell, Repeat

Jason Guriel rolls his eyes at the “relentlessly quirky” e.e.cummings:

Cummings’s poems themselves were only superficially new. Beneath the tattoo-thin signifiers of edginess—those lowercase i’s, those words run together—flutters the heart of a romantic. (Is there a correlation between typographically arresting poetry and emotional arrestedness?) He fancies himself an individual among masses, finds the church ladies have “furnished souls,” opposes war. He’s far more self-righteous, this romantic, than any soldier or gossip—and far deadlier: he’s a teenager armed with a journal.