Another poem which contrasts institutional thinking with the plight of the individual is ‘i sing of Olaf glad and big’. Again there is a strong rhythm and deftly placed rhyme, employed to make the message clear. Olaf is a principled individual, probably a second-generation Swedish American from the Mid-West farm belt, brought up in the Lutheran church. He is a heroic figure who dies for his beliefs after enduring barbaric treatment, including the ultimate obscenity with red-hot bayonets.

Dear Sir-- please let your readers know that the author of  "Space being(don't forget to remember)Curved" considers it a parody-portrait of one scienceworshipping supersubmoron in the very act of reading(with difficulties)aloud,to another sw ssm,some wouldbe explication of A.Stone&Co's unpoem                                                  

The curvature of space is...one aspect of the theory of relativity.  Maxwell's structure laws for the electromagnetic field brought events very close to each other in space and time, and Einstein's theory crystallized from the proximity.  Hence "electromagnetic Einstein," if I understand the syntax.  Newton's law, which fails to take time into account, was thereby expanded to the concept of a space-time continuum (see Einstein and Infield, The Evolution of Physics, 1938, especially pp. 255, 259).

Take the famous grasshopper poem, for example--

[Here he quotes the poem]

The whole poem is an attempt to deal with words visually, and to create art as a single experience, having spatial, not temporal extension: to force poetry toward a closer kinship with painting and the plastic arts, and away from its kinship with music.  It is a picture of an action rather than a description of it; word-clusters representing each psrt of the action (take-off, leap, landing) are to be received simultaneously, not as words occurring one at a time.  In the penultimate line, for example, the arranging and the becoming are simultaneous processes.

The motions of a grasshopper are suggested by various permutations of the letters of "grasshopper" and other typographical gestures . . . Typographic jumbling, dispersion, rearrangement, and, finally, stability enact the transformation of the motionless grasshopper into a leaping blur of energy, which suddenly comes to rest. The poem also dramatizes the act of looking at the grasshopper and not realizing what it is (the grasshopper may be camouflaged in the grass as the word "grasshopper" is camouflaged in the first line) until it leaps into the air and into attention and recognition.

By way of conclusion let me briefly deal with e. e. cummings’ poem "r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r" which bri1liantly combines the three chief poetic ways of iconic signification I have discussed so far, namely spatial configuration, sequential motion, and successive change.

[quotes poem]

In his poem...E. E. Cummings cumulates different kinds and levels of rhythm in order to suggest the complexity of superimposed sensuous and mental impressions. The most striking pattern is obviously the revolution of the seasons, which is indicated by the rotating list of their names. With each of the abstract terms the poet associates a natural phenomenon characterizing the particular season on the sensuous level of human experience so that one may stand emblematically for the other: sun -summer; moon -autumn; stars - winter; rain - spring.

Cummings’ most important structuring devices in this poem are refrains and repeated grammatical patterns. Two of the refrains are strings of four nouns, the first series referring to the seasons ("spring summer autumn winter," line 3, then those same words in a different order in lines 11 and 34); and the second series refering to more specific natural phenomena, all related to the sky ("sun moon stars rain" in lines 8 and 36, and a variant order of these nouns in line 21). Another refrain, "with up so floating many bells down" (line 2) is repeated exactly in line 24.

An example in 50 Poems is Poem 29, of which the first stanza reads:

[Here he quotes the first stanza]