As with any symbol system, especially a rich and flexible one like English, you have to differentiate in receiving posts between the intention to communicate genuinely but with a creative flourish, as in Tex' cummings-like poems, and the kind of insitutionalized attitude of neglect and indifferent passive-aggression which someone else might demonstrate by typing in all lower case because he "just didn't care" to use a convention. Similar symptom, totally different cause, and what is really interesting is that we can and do detect the difference with a fairly high degree of accuracy. When we get it wrong, and start treating a poetic flourish as a case of disrespectful ignoral of standard conventions, then, of course, we can really embarass ourselves. So perhaps it is a wise course not to be overly judgmental and condescending until the rights of the matter are really clear.

And e.e.cummings was not being pretentious, IMHO; he was being genuinely poetic in a direction not taken before. Bear in mind he preceded the Beat generation and their experimental typefaces by 20 years or perhaps a bit less; and I believe that his experiment was actually a success in that it opened a new modality to poetry.

A