BOOK REVIEWS
OFF THE SHOALS
The Enormous Room. By E. E. Cummings. 12mo. 271 pages. Boni and Liveright. $2.
WHEN the American Chicle Company brings out gum of a new shape and unfamiliar flavour gumchewers are delighted and miss their subway trains in rush hour and step on each other's heels crowding round slot machines in their haste to submit to a new sensation. Frequenters of cabarets and jazzpalaces shimmy themselves into St Vitus dance with delight over a new noise in the band or a novel squirm in the rhythm. People mortgage their houses to be seen in the newest and most bizarre models of autos. Women hock their jewels and their husbands' insurance policies to acquire an unaccustomed shade in hair or crêpe de chine. Why then is it that when any one commits anything novel in the arts he should be always greeted by this same peevish howl of pain and surprise? One is led to suspect that the interest people show in these much talked of commodities, painting, music, and writing, cannot be very deep or very genuine when they wince so under any unexpected impact.
The man who invented Eskimo Pie made a million dollars, so one is told, but E. E. Cummings, whose verse has been appearing off and on for three years now, and whose experiments should not be more appalling to those interested in poetry than the experiment of surrounding ice-cream with a layer of chocolate was to those interested in soda fountains, has hardly made a dent in the doughy minds of our so-called poetry-lovers. Yet one might have thought that the cadences of
"Or with thy mind against my mind, to hear
nearing our hearts' irrevocable play—
through the mysterious high futile day
