Randall Jarrell Quote

The round-square may be impossible, but we believe in it because it is impossible. [E. E.] Cummings is a very great expert in all these, so to speak, illegal syntactical devices: his misuse of parts of speech, his use of negative prefixes, his word-coining, his systematic relation of words that grammar and syntax don't permit us to relate—all this makes him a magical bootlegger or moonshiner of language, one who intoxicates us on a clear liquor no government has legalized with its stamp.


Fifty Years of American Poetry, p. 321 - The Third Book of Criticism (1969)


The round-square may be impossible, but we believe in it because it is impossible. [E. E.] Cummings is a very great expert in all these, so to speak, ...

The round-square may be impossible, but we believe in it because it is impossible. [E. E.] Cummings is a very great expert in all these, so to speak, ...

The round-square may be impossible, but we believe in it because it is impossible. [E. E.] Cummings is a very great expert in all these, so to speak, ...

The round-square may be impossible, but we believe in it because it is impossible. [E. E.] Cummings is a very great expert in all these, so to speak, ...