"To my way of thinking Cummings is, within his field of personal emotion, the lyrical field, one of the inventors of our time. He puts his inventions down with an unexpected refurbishing of phrase and a filigree delicacy of hairbreadth exact statement that is a continual challenge."--John Dos Passos

"No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive both to the general and the special reader; since the early twenties, Cummings has been more widely imitated and easily appreciated than any other modernist poet."--Randall Jarrell

"He has more control over language than any poet since Joyce. . . . Everybody delights in reading him."--Karl Shapiro

"E.E. Cummings is a concentrate of titanic significance, 'a positive character'; and only ingenuousness could attempt to suggest in a word the 'heroic' aspect of his painting, his poems, and his resistances. He does not make aesthetic mistakes."--Marianne Moore