Introduction For years, E.E. Cummings has been the “bad boy”, the nonconformist, the rebel with a cause, confusing librarians by giving his volumes uncatalougable titles like is 5 (1926) with the end given making readers pay attention and believe. Having seen action in World War I and been incarcerated in a French concentration camp, Cummings turned to poetry and came up with his first volume Tulips and Chimneys. In the said volume “the songs and love sonnets proved that Cummings was already one of the most accomplished poets of his generation. But the characteristic Cummings typographical devices have already begun to appear… In using these tricks, he was not merely trying to divert the reader momentarily from “spring electricity Coney Island” (in his explanation of his verbal acrobatics). He realized that at this age we take in more by the eye than by ear. To make his rhythms felt and his words audible, he called on the printers for help. Let the eye see and then the ear might listen”. (Thorp, 1960, p. 215) We shall now dwell on such deviations from orthodox poetry as we go along. Cummings’ verbal acrobatics The first syntactical violation we can point out is Cummings’ failure to capitalize the first word of the first line which is also the beginning of the first sentence, this is due to his “ineluctable preoccupation with ‘the verb’”. (Thorp, 1960, p.214). The second of his verbal acrobatics is his spelling kitty, a proper noun, in small letters. Could kitty be a derivation from coitus – Kitty’s occupation? We do not presume to read the poet’s mind, but we can conjecture that he wishes to point out to the reader the low stature of kitty in the hierarchy of human beings since she has chosen an ugly way to earn a living. Another reason could be that the poet likens her to a kitten – a lively, cute, playful young animal. Each time Kitty decides to say “yes” to a customer, she has had to consider her options since she knows that pursuing the business she is in ultimately leads to disease and death. The words must and shall means survival for herself. She is prepared for no other work other than that which is the oldest profession in the world. The third stanza In the third stanza (if we may call it a stanza), Cummings fails to capitalize the morpheme skilled which marks the beginning of the line. But we have the sudden capitalized Unspontaneous in the middle of the line that contains adjectives that best describe Kitty. She has been quite a while in the sex trade that she has learned to be automatic in her actions. A morphological deviation can be found in the third stanza (one line) wherein the poet coins a new word to his advantage – unrepute. He could have resorted to oft-used expressions as disreputable or of ill repute, but he is a law unto himself. When he invents the new word unrepute, he is trying to stress Kitty’s being amoral, not immoral. At the tender age of sixteen, Kitty has dim ideas of right and wrong. She doesn’t know any better. She is also poor and cannot differentiate between one scent or another. Cheap perfumes that signal the preferences of her kind, will do the trick of attracting prospective clients. The next two lines continue to describe Kitty – a sweet slow animal. Her l