[Here Kidder discusses "fragmentation and fusion, simultaneity, and bilateral symmetry" as formal features "which show up consistently in [Cummings’] painting as well as in his poetry."]

Fragmentation and fusion appear in the visual arts in the work of the Divisionists, who, after analyzing their subject into discrete spots of color, synthesized these spots into an image.

In the work of the Cubists, and in [some] Cummings drawings and paintings...the process often emphasized analysis over synthesis....

In poetry, fragmentation and fusion consists in the breaking up of the conventional arrangements of stanzas, lines, or words into smaller units and in the combining of them into larger ones. In Cummings’ poetry this rearrangement takes two forms. First, there are those poems in which he so orders an entire stanza that it takes on a significant visual pattern....

[Second is] the "splintered / normality" that fractures words into syllables, nonsyllabic entities, and single letters, and its counterpart, the fusion of words into larger units....

[Kidder defines Cummings’ interest in simultaneity in art as "the simultaneous presentation of various points of view in a visual image" and proceeds to discuss how this feature is used in poetry. One way is through creation of "double meanings," another is through interweaving "various threads of narrative into a garble," and yet another is the insertion into words of parenthetical words or phrases.]

The point of this simultaneity is not (as it was in Cubism) to show more than can usually be seen, but to allow language, for all its inefficiencies in portraying pictorial images, to express as much as the visual arts. The effect, in other words is to construct a parallel in poetry for painting.

This interest in the simultaneity of of disparate impressions produces, in many cases, a third formal feature of Cummings’ poetry and painting: bilateral symmetry. Cummings, it seems, thought in terms of "opposites," whether they "occurred together" as in burlesque or not. No Hegelian, he did not always demand a resolution for his thesis and antithesis. He was often content simply to present binary structures, with some attention to various ideas he had learned from studying composition in the visual arts--the balancing of equivalents, the distribution of emphasis, the repetition of forms.