This _Sunset_ poem of Mr. Cummings, then, is not, strictly speaking, Mr. Cummings’ poem, but the poem of anybody who will be at pains to write it. What at first sight strikes the plain reader as external peculiarities that hindered him from approaching the meaning of the poem--its oddness of form--now appear to be the poet’s means of avoiding that conventional form which generally does stand between the reader and the poem. Indeed, if we look upon form as something distinct from the subject-matter of a poem, in this sense true impressionist poems are usually without form; or rather they are capable of having a new form with every reader. The poet blends the subject of the poem with the feelings that the subject arouses into one expression. This unity makes the poem a living whole; it is impressionistic, but not because the subject and the feelings it arouses become indefinite in the combination. They make a blend, not a blur. Looking on impressionism as one of the earliest manifestations of the general modernist tendency to overcome the distinction between subject-matter and form, we realize that Valéry draws the same old-fashioned line between _music_ and _idea_ that Poe did; that he subscribes, in fact, to the historically most familiar conception of poetry. He is a classicist in the musical associations he gives his poems, all intricately designed to create the indefinite feelings that he desires to arouse in the reader. Although in his choice of the images through which he conveys poetic ideas he is a modernist, the images apparently intended, that is, to arouse _definite_ feelings, these feelings are really more like the physical sensation a thing gives than the idea of itself it gives. To these definite feelings provoked by the images, or, we might say, the thought, of a poem of Valéry’s, the indefinite feelings provoked by the _sounds_ of the words form a musical background. In fact, paradoxically, it is in this musical background that the ideas are suggested rather than in the logical thought of the images. Valéry deliberately suppresses Reason in poetry; but he allows the musical background to make the logical connections between the images. And this is what we mean by calling him a classicist in form and a modernist in the thought-content of his poems. He handles the modernist problem of achieving a unity between form and subject-matter by letting form suggest the subject of the poem and thought-content do all that form is ordinarily supposed to do. The only reason for calling this method impressionistic is that it does not and could not succeed in arriving at an ingenious balance between the two sets of feelings, definite and indefinite, which are supposed to combine to give the poetry meaning; all it results in is the vague blur that impressionism has come to stand for in its most derogatory sense.