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8 April 2005: Cummings's poetry more and more seems to me to be to traditional poetry what traditional poetry is to prose. This not (quite) the idle put-down of traditional poetry that mine enemies will take it as, but has a firm basis. Consider, to put it in the simplest terms, that prose uses words for their denotations mainly, traditional poetry for their denotations and connotations, and Cummings for their denotations, connotations--and infra-denotations and infra-connotations! That is, for the denotations and connotations of the smaller works, and near-words, that his breaking words apart disconceals.
Consider, too, that prose is for speed-readers, whereas traditional poetry is set up, in good part, to slow readers. Hence, whereas readers of prose take in its matter in clumps of words at a time, traditional poetry forces them to take in its texts a word at a time. But Cummings slows his readers to fragments of words, or even single letters, at a time.
Then there are all the extra devices Cummings uses in his work--as many more than traditional poetry's, my impression is, as traditional poetry's is more than conventional prose's.
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