It is here important to understand the close connection between Paul Valéry and E. E. Cummings, and the question of impressionism. The chief claim of impressionism is that the realistic truth about anything may be conveyed better by the impressions it gives the observer, however disjointed or irrelevant these may seem, than by systematic reasoning or study. Impressionist poetry describes an object by creating in the reader the indefinite feelings he would have on seeing it, not by giving definite facts about it. This is a method in poetry first formally recommended by Poe, borrowed from him to justify and explain the things that began to happen to French poetry with Baudelaire, and re-imported into America when French poetry had carried Poe’s theory far beyond his intentions, which had to do more with the sentiment than with the technical theory of poetry. Poe defined poetry as a combination of music and an idea, resulting in indefinite feelings. But this is, after all, only a re-statement of the most historically familiar definition of the aim of poetry: to create a pleasant effect on the reader; while formal impressionism aims at a technical correctness--it wishes the reader to have the same frame of mind as the poet had when he wrote, to help the reader to rewrite the poem for himself with the poet’s mind. These so-called ‘indefinite feelings’ of impressionism, therefore, must be expressed in painstakingly precise images, since the whole effect of the poem depends on an accurate identity of the reader’s feelings with the poet’s.