Influential avant-gardists rarely achieve a wide readership, and it's rarer still to maintain that readership for a century, yet Cummings has become hard to find in book reviews and scholarly conversations.
But I think the turn away from Cummings has to do with a kind of exhaustion at his preoccupations and stylistic quirks, which were consistent across his 58 years of published poetry. You'll almost always find variant punctuation, prefix play, the persistent uncapitalized "i"-once humble and porous, but that now feels like a text message-and an extraordinary faith in romantic, erotic love.
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