Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
In the last twenty years, Cummings's line ‘he danced his did’; has been at the centre of almost every major discussion of the deviant language of literature. In the last two decades, hundreds of pages and scores of articles have been written which have attempted to assess and motivate its linguistic status and aesthetic success. Without question, ‘he danced his did’ has been more closely scrutinized and extensively analysed than any other single phrase in English literature.