Despite several mini-revivals and publishing events over the years – including last year's newly reset edition of The Complete Poems (first published in 1991) – E.E. Cummings has still not garnered the same attention from scholars of modernism as have his slightly older peers, such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot. The most frequently cited reason for this neglect is the popularity Cummings enjoyed during much of his career. His poetry continues to sell well, he is frequently anthologised, and perhaps most prohibitively, late in his career Cummings read to crowds that often numbered in the thousands. This popularity is seen to be at odds with the hermetic difficulty of those other high modernist writers (which perhaps says something about what we talk about when we talk about modernism). This is not to say that Cummings was not experimental or formally innovative or even that he was not difficult and obscure in his own way, as a glance at a page of his poetry will evidence. But these typographical oddities are seen more as playful and populist than forbidding or in need of gloss. In many ways, Cummings's poetry has all the trappings of difficulty without actually being difficult, a kind of would-be high modernism for the masses.

R. seeks to redress this persistent neglect and adjust our perception of Cummings by returning to the site of his apprenticeship, those years he spent at Harvard as an undergraduate (1911–1915) where he first studied the classical literature of Greece and Rome. Recognising this link between the classical tradition and Cummings's own growth as a poet is, for R., key to understanding Cummings as a modernist. As R. points out, ‘Modernist literature repeatedly drew authority from its own assertion of ownership of the classical tradition’ (p. 239).

Previous scholars have noted the importance of Cummings's debt to classical literature, but none has thus far used this debt to argue so strongly for Cummings's modernist bona fides. According to R., the uniqueness and, at times, apparent simplicity of Cummings's verse is belied by a deep engagement with these writers, particularly Sappho, Homer, Aristophanes and, especially, Horace – who, according to R., was ‘the author with whom he had the deepest relationship’ (p. 41). This engagement ranged from the look of the words on the page (for example, the use of white space that visually echo tattered manuscripts to the scriptio continua of Catullus’ verse), to the themes of war, sex and death that were dominant themes for all these ancient authors. R. provides lengthy expositions for each theme as a way of showing how deeply Cummings was grounded in the classical world even as he sought to understand the world around him, beyond the ivy-covered walls and Harvard syllabus.

The time spent at Harvard studying these classical texts was deeply formative for Cummings's later poetry, but, as R. goes on to show, these studies did not happen in a vacuum. While at Harvard, Cummings was also acutely aware of the modern poets who were busy transforming the landscape of twentieth-century poetry and prose. Early on, Amy Lowell, the daughter of the Harvard president and early promoter of Imagism, introduced Cummings to the modernist movement and at one point even wrote him a job reference (though she expressed little faith that he would ever amount to a poet, let alone a modernist one). It was also during this time, that he came across Pound's Cathay, which modelled how translation could be used to create a unique and contemporary poetic voice. His relationship with Pound would be long and complicated.

R.’s most important contribution, though, is archival, having unearthed previously unpublished writings, mainly early poems and translations done during these Harvard years, as well as an early parody of The Waste Land (not previously recognised as such), thus rigorously supporting her argument about the connection between the Classics and Cummings's modernist aspirations. These additional writings are an invaluable contribution to our understanding of Cummings during these key formative years, as are the close readings that R. provides of Cummings's early poems, seeing them in their proper classical context and breathing new life into familiar works. The result is an important and often wonderful study that will prove influential for its fresh perspective of one of the twentieth century's most loved poets.

There is nothing particularly new, though, in tracing the connections between modernism and the classical tradition. This kind of scholarship has dominated modernist studies for generations, ever since Stuart Gilbert, working from a schema circulated by Joyce himself, traced the connections between Homer's Odyssee and Joyce's Ulysses. Imagism itself owed its terseness as much to archaeological recoveries of Greek poets such as Sappho as it did to the radical new ways of seeing that we purport to get, for example, in ‘In a Station of the Metro’. Pound's translations – from Greek, from Latin, from Chinese etc. – were as much him learning his craft as they were the preservation of the past made more urgent by the onset of war (see his Spirit of Romance, Guide to Kulchur or ABC of Reading or especially the essay ‘Translators of Homer’ for the ways that Pound repeatedly centred the classical tradition in his own work).

All of which makes me wish that R. had engaged more directly with the transformations that have occurred in the field of modernist studies in recent years. It is worth pointing out that Cummings's neglect among modernist scholars has largely persisted through the recent recasting of the field, a point that R. does not sufficiently address and which has bearing on her larger argument. In addition to expanding the geographical reach of modernism, the new modernist studies, now almost a decade old, also sought to collapse the distinctions between high and low cultures so firmly established both by practitioners and critics alike. This approach would seem to be directly relevant to much of Cummings's verse, which leaves us wondering, why still this neglect? R.’s decision to instead focus on the classical background of Cummings to gain him entry to modernism seems anachronistic, as if modernism was still an arena where classically trained young men sought solace in a world that has passed and a language that needs a university education to transmit. In many ways, R. adheres to a version of modernism that is as distant to us as was Swinburne to Cummings.

I come away from this volume greatly impressed by Cummings whose novelty shines through all the more brightly, knowing it is grounded so firmly in classroom exercises and a deep and lifelong engagement with the past. I also come away from this study impressed with R.’s scholarship and the serious attention that she gives to an author she clearly loves. But the volume also reveals the difficulties that arise when single-author monographs interface with period studies, as scholars find the ground of their field shifting beneath them.