E. E. CUMMINGS.

By Barry A. Marks '47.New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1964156 pp. $3.50.

A certain routine and uninspired competence is likely to settle over a publishing enterprise like Twayne's United States Authors Series. In E. E. Cummings, the 46th volume of the series, Barry Marks has escaped the standard mediocrity. He has produced a book which from beginning to end is a labor of love, as well as of knowledge and insight. One finishes it with a livelier appreciation of a former enfant terrible of American poetry who has become a modern classic.

Mr. Marks has the patience and the keenness to follow even the most fantastic of Cummings' verbal and typographical antics. He shows how what appear to be mere perversities - the fracturing of words and the massacre of grammatical or logical continuity, for example - have a purpose both in individual poems and in the poet's artistic credo. He is admirably concrete in his method, with his eye always on Cummings' text; it is through the text that he moves to larger and more general questions, such as Cummings' characteristic treatment of childhood and sex, and his relation to a peculiarly American tradition of individuality and revolt.

Mr. Marks is fully aware of the hard things that can be and have been said against Cummings, and has provocative answers for all of them. If his own devotion seems at times almost too generous, this is a fault to which we owe an enlightening and winning book.

Professor of English