Flutterby™! : next to cummings America I

Slate today offers, for no particular reason, a meditation on the works of e.e.cummings, who after all these years years enjoys a particularly strange position in letters. Everybody knows of him, we all read his poems in school, and his style is instantly recognizable. Yet he doesn't come to mind when we discuss the great poets of the last century. anybody who tries to fiddle with the typesetting for effect looks not daring but rather derivitive of cummings. And in a world where the real vigor in poetry is coming out of the performance and slam arenas, his "inaudible" work is useless. Which, I suppose, makes him unique. Maybe that's honor enough.