Most people were puzzled by E.E. Cummings. Having written poetry from the age of eight, he was lauded after his death as one of America's great modernist writers. Yet his poems were unlike any others seen before. Often short and occasionally scurrilous, they used lowercase letters and lacked punctuation, "may i feel said he/(i'll squeal said she" is how one famous poem begins. Many seemed more like nursery rhymes or nonsense verse than serious work. "What is wrong with a man who writes like this?" asked one exasperated critic.
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