On the chance that at this point the reader may wish to try the experiment which has been suggested, I postpone to a later page Mr. Cummings’s original arrangement of the words. If you will compare his printing of the poem with that above, you will see how the tininess and the quick little repeated nibbles of the mouse at the grain-sack are suggested by the short, broken lines; how ingeniously the shooting-star is made to interrupt the poet’s revery; how the effect of flare, streaking, and slower fading is conveyed in the printing of “bursts”; and how the new simile of the alarm-clock impinges upon the retinal image of the meteor.[53] But--“the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted.” After scrambling up a hundred or so of these typographical escarpments, I found that there was seldom a view from the summit commensurate with the discomforts of the climb, and my interest in the new sport began to flag. It is hard to imagine a mature artist interesting himself for long in this sort of preciosity. Though each individual’s inner life is in a measure unique, the mere attempt to convey some fraction of it to others by written or printed words presupposes a certain shared and common ground of human experience. Freshness, piquancy, gusto, can be properly savoured only when they are delicately blended with “human nature’s daily food.” The importance of a common understanding upon essentials is clear in the sphere of our personal relationships, which become rich and satisfying only with the mutual recognition of things that may be _taken for granted_; oddities and varieties are most engaging in those with whom we already own a fundamental bond. Now the forms and conventions of poetry may be regarded as so many aids to the speedier establishment of such understanding between reader and poet,--the indispensable means by which an original experience is so shaped and clarified that it has significance for others. No one of these conventions, naturally, is absolutely fixed or static, and skilful manipulation of their elements is constantly yielding new and unsuspected possibilities of æsthetic pleasure, and even of social comprehension. For this reason we may look with a tolerant and not unfriendly eye upon such experimentation by some of our younger poets as I have described.[54] Nevertheless, it is imperative that persons who wish to modify or to replace the accepted vehicles of poetic expression should have a clear understanding of what convention in literature or art is _for_. Adequate treatment of this subject would require a separate book, and here I must content myself with a mere statement of faith: that some set of assumptions as to the experiences most valuable and important for mankind--in other words, of universals in the Aristotelian sense--is as necessary in the establishment or the maintenance of an æsthetic convention as in any purely social or political activity. Indeed, the most promising