Taken together, the poems and paintings show nearly analogous techniques of ambiguity: figurative in the painting, thematic in the poems. Flickering in and out of view, these ambiguities tease the viewer’s eye and mind to see first one view or meaning, then another, but not one or the other exclusively. By balancing their perceptual force, Cummings keeps both possibilities simultaneously present....

...[Cummings] sought to make his works more "feelable to the eye,"...and less recognizable to the mind; to emphasize the sensuous elements that intensify perception of all the parts, and to obscure the figures that elicit recognition of only part of the whole.

The first half of this aesthetic solution, that of making works "feelable to the eye," helped to generate many of the visual techniques for which Cummings’ poetry is best known: the busted lines, broken words, ideographic punctuation, and sprung syntax that move vertically and diagonally, as well as horizontally, on the page. As these devices slow one’s recognition of thematic meaning, they acquire their own perceptual importance as fragments. Any linguistic element, no matter how lowly, could be made to carry an immediately perceptible, sensuous charge. Thus punctuation and capitalization, lowly servants to words, could act ideographically as well as functionally....

...To achieve the second half of his aesthetic solution, that of retarding recognition of figures in an abstract painting and of themes in a poem, Cummings considered omitting the figures and themes altogether from his work and constructing pure abstractions....But pure abstraction ultimately proved unsatisfying to the painter, and impossible to the lyrical poet. For Cummings was too much in love with the sights and smells and sounds of the phenomenal world, too devoted to nature, to abandon it in abstractions.

A happier solution was to admit nature, but to hold it in check: that is, to include the figures and themes on which the paintings and poems are based, but to diminish their perceptual dominance by concealing them in perceptually ambiguous structures; to hide them among the sensuous planes and to divide them between competing arrangements of syntax.