E. E. Cummings is here using the typewriter to provide a poem with a musical score for choral speech. The older poet, separated from the print form by various technical stages, could enjoy none of the freedom of oral stress provided by the typewriter. The poet at the typewriter can do Njinsky leaps or Chaplin-like shuffles and wiggles. Because he is an audience for his own mechanical audacities, he never ceases to react to his own performance. Composing on the typewriter is like flying a kite. The E. E. Cummings poem, when read aloud with widely varying stresses and paces, will duplicate the perceptual process of its typewriting creator. How Gerard Manley Hopkins would have loved to have had a typewriter to compose on! People who feel that poetry is for the eye and is to be read silently can scarcely get anywhere with Hopkins or Cummings. Read aloud, such poetry becomes quite natural. Putting first names in lower case, as "eddieandbill," bothered the literate people of forty years ago. It was supposed to. Eliot and Pound used the typewriter for a great variety of central effects in their poems. And with them, too, the typewriter was an oral and mimetic instrument that gave them the colloquial freedom of the world of jazz and ragtime. Most colloquial and jazzy of all Eliot's poems, Sweeney Agonistes, in its first appearance in print, carried the note: "From Wanna Go Home Baby?" That the typewriter, which carried the Gutenberg technology into every nook and cranny of our culture and economy should, also, have given out with these opposite oral effects is a characteristic reversal. Such a reversal of form happens in all extremes of advanced technology, as with the wheel today. As expediter, the typewriter brought writing and speech and publication into close association. Although a merely mechanical form, it acted in some respects as an implosion, rather than an explosion.