the moral to be drawn from the character of lust (_i.e._ _to shun the heaven that leads men to this hell_). The character and the moral of lust the whole world well knows, but no one knows the character and the moral really well unless he disregards the moral warning and engages in lust, no one knows lust well enough to shun it because, though he knows it is both heavenly and hellish, lust can never be recognized until it has proved itself lust by turning heaven into hell. The effect of this revised punctuation has been to restrict meanings to special interpretations of special words. Shakespeare’s punctuation allows the variety of meanings he actually intends; if we must choose any one meaning, then we owe it to Shakespeare to choose at least one he intended and one embracing as many meanings as possible, that is, the most difficult meaning. It is always the most difficult meaning that is the most final. (There are degrees of finality because no prose interpretation of poetry can have complete finality, can be difficult enough.) Shakespeare’s emendators, in trying to make him clear for the plain man, only weakened and diluted his poetry. Their attempts to make Shakespeare easy resulted only in depriving him of clarity. There is but one way to make Shakespeare clear: to print him as he wrote or as near as one can get to this. Making poetry easy for the reader should mean showing clearly that it is difficult. Mr. Cummings makes himself safe from emendation by setting down his poems, which are really easy as poetry, so that their most difficult sense strikes the reader first. By giving typography an active part to play he makes his poems fixed and accurate in a way that Shakespeare’s are not. In doing this he loses the fluidity Shakespeare got by not cramping his poems with heavy punctuation and by placing more trust in the plain reader--by leaving more to his imagination than he seems to have deserved. The trouble with Mr. Cummings’ poems is that they are too clear, once the plain reader puts himself to work on them. Braced as they are, they do not present the eternal difficulties that make poems immortal, they merely show one difficulty, how difficult it is for Mr. Cummings or for any poet to stabilize a poem once and for all. Punctuation marks in Mr. Cummings’ poetry are the bolts and axels that make the poem a methodic and fool-proof piece of machinery requiring common-sense for its operation rather than imagination. The outcry against his typography shows that it is as difficult to engage the common-sense of the reader as his imagination. A reviewer of Mr. Cumming’s latest book, “is 5”, writes: