It must be concluded from this that even more strictness is to be demanded of the long poem than of the short poem. A long poem must give good reason for its length, it must account strictly for every line. Often the greater part of a long poem would be more properly put in a prose footnote. The apology of a long poem should be: “I am really a long _short_ poem”. Poe was the first modern critic to explode the dignity of the long poem of major poetry. In his _The Poetic Principle_ he writes: “That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length. After the lapse of half an hour, at the very utmost, it flags--fails--a revulsion ensues--and then the poem is, in effect, and in fact, no longer such.” Although he saw that the long poem was of necessity weak in structure, that length in itself was destructive of poetic form; by form he meant that regular form imposed on subject-matter which we have here been questioning in both the short and long poem. Modernist poetry seems to be composed chiefly of short poems--_The Waste Land_, one of the longest modernist poems, is only 433 lines long. But this is not because of a belief in the short poem _per se_ as against the long poem. It is rather a result of a feeling that form and subject-matter are structurally identical; which affects the short and the long poem alike. Well-controlled irregularity instead of uncontrollable regularity makes _short_ and _long_ obsolete critical standards. The very purpose of this ‘irregularity’ is to let the poem find its own natural size in spite of the demands put upon poetry by critics, booksellers and the general reading public. CHAPTER III WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND E. E. CUMMINGS: A STUDY IN ORIGINAL PUNCTUATION AND SPELLING THE objections that are raised against the ‘freakishness’ of modernist poetry are usually supported by quotations from poems by E. E. Cummings and others which are not only difficult in construction and reference but are printed queerly on the page. The reader naturally looks for certain land-marks in the poem before he can begin to enjoy it: as the visitor to Paris naturally sets his mental map of the city by the Eiffel Tower and, if the Eiffel Tower were to collapse, would have a difficult time finding his way about for a few days. Modernist poets have removed the well-known land-marks and the reader is likewise bothered. The reasons given for this removal are that land-marks tend to make paths, that paths grow to roads, that roads soon mean walls and railings, and that the pedestrian or motorist, who must keep to the roads, never sees any new scenery. because you go away i give roses who will advise even yourself, lady in the most certainly (of what we everywhere do not touch) deep things; remembering ever so ... etc.