A prevalent assumption about Cummings' poetry has been that it lacks a history—that it shows no growth, as if a man had been treading water for thirty years. This is a serious thing to say about a body of work which not only has become legendary in its time, but can also boast a respectable number of poems widely praised as first-rate. Early in Cummings' career it was brought home to many of his readers that he would use, to the borders of extravagance if he so liked, a profusion of technical devices sometimes difficult, sometimes eccentric, sometimes of no apparent usefulness at all. It was also made clear that he would take attitudes which, whether defensible or not, were not to be confined within the limits of what the world regards as either rational or decorous. One risk taken by any artist when he chooses at the beginning of his creative life to be perceptibly “different” from his traditions, is that, whether he actually adheres to it or not, he will ever after be read by the light of his divergence. And Cummings has not escaped this fate. He has too often been read as if he had stopped growing in the mid-1920's, and had turned into that most depressing of all literary freaks, the artist who parodies himself. The main end of this essay will be to demonstrate the injustice and the falsity of such a view.