["X LI Poems"] continues in almost every phase the tradition which Mr. Cummings established for himself two years ago with "Tulips and Chimneys." No long poems are here, but there are Songs, Portraits, Chansons Innocentes, Sonnets, and, war-pieces; and always the same man is writing, with the same unquestionable power and the same unnecessary tricks. The tricks are unnecessary because without them the power would be quite as apparent as it is now, if not a little more so….

Essentially Mr. Cummings is an educated poet. For all his surface radicalism, for all his insistence that his mind is "a big hunk of irrevocable nothing" which performs "squirms of chrome" and executes "strides of cobalt," for all his warning to the timid reader that he will "utter lilac shrieks and scarlet bellowings," he is saturated with Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare—to name only three of the great poets...