SOURCE: Thompson, William E. “Intensity: An Essential Element in e. e. cummings’ Aesthetic Theory and Practice.” University of Windsor Review 16, no. 2 (spring-summer 1982): 18-33.

In the following essay, Thompson discusses Cummings’s attempt to compress images and words as tightly and succinctly as possible to affect the strongest intensity of feeling upon the reader.

Intensity was a cornerstone in cummings' vision and a primary element in his aesthetic theory throughout his career. In his Dial review of T. S. Eliot's Poems (June 1920), cummings stressed that “every [Eliot] poem impresses us with an overwhelming sense of technique.”¹ In a 1925 review, cummings used the circus as a metaphor for his idea of what Art should be. At the circus, the spectator/reader is continually amazed by the “unbelievably skilful and inexorably beautiful and unimaginably dangerous things” which are “continually happening” in the circus poem. There should always be such an intense...