Cummings, then, writing according to what would seem to the reader to be a very carefully constructed poetic system, refrains from delivering a critical key to his poems except as a semi-prefatorial confidence. Indeed the more independent poems become, the less need or sense there is in accompanying them with a technical guide for their understanding. This would seem to imply that, the more difficult poems become, the less chance there would be of understanding them. But in fact it would only mean that the reader was becoming less and less separated from poetry by the technique that had formerly been concentrated on connecting him with it. Technique itself has then taken on a different character; it is no longer the way a poem is presented to the reader, but the way it corresponds in every respect with its own governing meaning. For in making a poem the poet may be said to be governed by this meaning, which may only be the necessity of the poem to be written: in this foreshadowing, inevitable meaning the poem really exists even before it is written. This it is that Cummings should mean by ‘the obsession of making’ and this it is that the reader will have to reckon with if poetry continues in its present tendency of forcing him inside the framework of the poem and making him repeat the steps by which it came to be. So that technique in the modernist definition does not refer to the method by which a poem is written but that evolutionary history of the poem which is the poem itself. The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk in literary terms are: “Do you write poems with a prearranged technique?--No, I write them with a pen.” Meaning: the question of technique in the writing of a poem is irrelevant to the writing of it. If one talks about poems as being mechanically put together by the poet, then the pen is the thing that does it. Like the brick, it is the only practical answer possible to a theoretical question conditioned by an irrelevant practical qualification.