Joseph Cornell's work was in the new art of sculpture called the assemblage, the art of joining unlikely objects or images together in a single context. Cornell’s boxes have been described as “star maps of a private universe” and include, among many themes, references to French symbolist poetry, American movies, dime-store merchandise, Renaissance art, and astronomical mapping. In Cornell's "poetic theatre of memory" a blue swan may cohabitate with a Medici princess. Preserved in Cornell's boxes are items as divergent as drinking glasses and a cork ball; a clay pipe and a diagram of the orbits of earth and the moon. Cornell fuses his work with poetic intensity. For art, collage (French, pasting) combines images so as to create pleasing or provoking visual experiences, hardly expressible in words and rarely based on words. What collage is for art, confections are for the design of information. The collage technique, that art of reassembling fragments of pre-existing images in such a way as to form a new image, is the most important innovation of this century. Charles Simic from Dime-Store Alchemy