But the early printers avoided Roman letters except to create 
the illusion of the fake antique, of the old Roman letters 
beloved of the Renaissance humanists.

     It is strange that modern readers have been so slow to 
recognize that the prose of Gertrude Stein, with its lack of 
punctuation and other visual aids, is a carefully devised 
strategy to get the passive visual reader into participant, oral 
action. So with e. e. cummings, or Pound, or Eliot. Vers libre  is 
for the ear as much as for the eye. And in Finnegans Wake  
when Joyce wants to create “thunder,” the “shout in the 
street” indicating a major phase of collective action, he sets up 
the word exactly like an ancient manuscript word: “The fall    
(bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonn
erronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohooardenenthu
rnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and