What are the major characteristics of E. E. Cummings's poems?

There are two aspects of the poetry of E.E. Cummings that
make him significant:

1. He was on the "cutting
   edge" of the Modernist, experimental movement.  His poetry is new in its typography, its
   syntax (he uses nouns for verbs and vice versa), grammar, and punctuation, introducing
   audiences to the innovations of verse and prose in the early parat of the twentieth
   century.


2. Cummings was an effective satirist and
   intense lyric poet.  His targets for satire are often hypocrisy and the submergence of
   the individual in the military and in society  because of the "mass mind of the mass
   market."  His lyric poems celebrate love and the truth of the moment, herald
   individuality, exalt a child-like love for nature.  In an age that was reserved in its
   feeling, Cummings was personal and unapologetic about his lustful feelings and
   individual desires.

Possessing a highly
personal and idiosyncratic style, Cummings appeals much to youth in his giving of new
life to the ideas that have always been.  His poetry exists in the present,  in the
aliveness and pure essence of the state of being without regard to the flow of time. 
His poetry is existential and romantic both:

readability="18">

Spring is like a perhaps
hand

(which comes
carefully

out of Nowhere)
arranging

a window, into which people look
(while

people stare

arranging
and changing placing

carefully there a
strange

thing an a known thing here)
and

changing everything
carefully....

In these lines
from the poem "Spring is like a perhaps hand," Cummings demonstrates the
existentialism--coming out of Nowhere--and romanticism--nature/Spring that is "like a
perhaps hand" that people watch appreciatively through a windo. The odd use of syntax in
"perhaps hand" is apparent as is "arranging and changing and placing
carefully."