I know artists are always saying that a good painting looks as well upside down as any other way. And it may be true. The question now arises: does the same principle apply to a poem? But it is not necessary to answer the question; if a poem is good, people will gladly stand on their heads to read it. It is conceivable, if not probable, that the favourite poetic form of the future will be a sonnet arranged as a cross-word puzzle. If there were no other way of getting at Shakespeare’s sonnets than by solving a cross-word puzzle sequence, I am sure the puzzles would be solved and the sonnets enjoyed. But what about Mr. Cummings? Can his poems surmount such obstacles? Well, perhaps if they cannot survive as poems they can survive as puzzles. This may be the immediate verdict on Mr. Cummings’ typography; but one thing Cummings can be sure of that Shakespeare could not have been sure of, is that three centuries hence his poems if they survive (and worse poets’ have) will be the only ones of the early twentieth century reprinted in facsimile, not merely because he will be a literary curiosity but because he has edited his poems with punctuation beyond any possibility of re-editing. The Shakespeare to whose sonnets this reviewer makes a rhetorical appeal is the popular Shakespeare of the anthologies and not the facsimile Shakespeare. How many of those who read this had ever before read sonnet 129 in the original? So few, surely, that it is safe to conclude that no one is willing to stand on his head to understand Shakespeare, that everyone wants a simplified Shakespeare as well as a simplified Cummings. Indeed, very few people can have looked at Shakespeare’s sonnets in the original since the eighteenth century, when the popular interest in Shakespeare’s more high-spirited comedies sent a few dull commentators and book-makers to his poems. In 1766 George Steevens printed the _Sonnets_ in the original and without annotations apparently because he thought they were not worth them. Twenty-seven years later he omitted the _Sonnets_ from an edition of Shakespeare’s works “because the strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service”. People were certainly not more ready to stand on their heads to understand Shakespeare in that time than in this and Malone, who undertook in 1780 to justify Shakespeare to an apathetic public by simplifying the difficult originals (cross-word puzzles, if you like), was considered by Steevens to be “disgracing his implements of criticism by the objects of their culture”. Steevens’ view was the general one; (Chalmers reaffirmed it in 1810), and if Malone by his emendations, which have become the accepted Shakespearian text, had not overridden the general critical opinion of the _Sonnets_ and presented them fileted to the plain man, the plain man of to-day would undoubtedly be unaware of the existence of the _Sonnets_. Unlike Cummings’ poems, Shakespeare’s _Sonnets_