with-ered unspea-king: tWeNtY, f i n g e r s, large which, quoted detached from their context, seem to support any charge of irrational freakishness, but in their context are completely intelligible. Moreover, Mr. Cummings is protecting himself against future liberties which printers and editors may take with his work, by using a personal typographical system which it will be impossible to revise without destroying the poem. It may be that he has learned a lesson from the fate that has overtaken Shakespeare’s sonnets: in which not only have changes in spelling and pronunciation been used to justify the liberties that have been taken in ‘modernizing’ the texts; but certain very occasional and obvious printer’s errors in the only edition printed in Shakespeare’s lifetime have been made the excuse for hundreds of quite unjustifiable emendations. Mr. Cummings and Shakespeare have in common a deadly accuracy, and that accuracy makes poems difficult rather than easy. It is this accuracy that frightens Mr. Cummings’ public, it was Shakespeare’s accuracy that provoked his editors to meddle with his texts as being too incomprehensible as they were written. Actually we shall find that Shakespeare is more difficult than Mr. Cummings in thought, though his poems have a more familiar look on the page: Mr. Cummings expresses with an accuracy peculiar to him what is common to everyone, Shakespeare expresses in the conventional form of the time, with greater accuracy, what is peculiar to himself. Let us print two versions of a sonnet by Shakespeare, first the version found in the _Oxford Book of English Verse_ and other popular anthologies which have apparently chosen this sonnet from all the others as being particularly easy to understand, and next the version printed in the 1609 edition of the Sonnets, and apparently, though pirated, printed from Shakespeare’s original manuscript. The alterations, it will be noticed in a comparison of the first with the second, are, with a few exceptions which we will point out later, chiefly in the punctuation and spelling. By showing what great difference in the sense the juggling of punctuation marks has made in Shakespeare’s original sonnet, we shall perhaps be able to sympathize somewhat with what seems typographical perversity in a poet like Mr. Cummings. The modernizing of the spelling is not quite so serious a matter, though we shall see that to change a word like _blouddy_ to _bloody_ makes a difference not only in the atmosphere of the word but in its sound as well. I