Abstract: Abstrac: E. E. Cummings, an American modernist poet, is well-known for his visualized concrete poetry. Existing studies in the academia have fully illustrated the “painterly” quality of his poetry, but largely ignored the influence on the modernity of cummings’ poetics from the art of stage performance. cummings’ worship of the “circus” is a non-neglibile element of his modernist poetics, especially his concrete poetics. cummings’ “circus adoration” should not be simply perceived as the intervention in poetics by the popular culture, for it is, in essence, a critical stance toward modern theater, as well as a retrospective look at the “anti-stylization” of the ancient Greek drama. By focusing on the body of the “acrobat”, cummings attempts to regenerate the Bakhtinian experience of primitive carnivals, while at the same time rejecting the dominant position of “language” in the modernist poetics. In cummings’s view, the art of concrete poetry is an art of “intermediality” with a sort of untranslatable “performativity”, so it is the circus performance, rather than painting, that emblemizes, more precisely, the essence of the modernist poetry

Key words: Cummings, circus, theater, concrete poetry, intermediality