The career of E. E. Cummings, from his first appearance at Harvard to his last, has been the consistent statement of an attitude toward authority. His entire work raises the question whether this attitude can much longer continue to be a creative one, or even a possible one for the artist. The question remains unanswered, but merely to have raised it so sharply as he has done is a peculiar achievement.

It involved first the definition of a world in which poems, Cummings's kind of poems, might be written…. And this meant a rigid, wilful ordering of experience according to a moral standard, a reduction of all things into the two categories of the lyric affirmatives (flowers, kisses, children, birds, love) and the sterile negatives (machines, money, advertisements, respectability, death). In a world thus ordered, it then became the poet's task to find means of asserting with finality the truth and beauty and goodness of the former category and the falseness, ugliness, and evil of the latter. For Cummings there are two ways of doing this. His perceptions are lyrical, almost mystical. If he can restate them in wholly lyrical terms, they become valid truths in so far as they succeed as poetry. But the lyric impulse lags: its strength is fitful and capricious. And the poet's chosen world is an infinite dualism containing the denial of poetry as well as its affirmation. When lyricism fails him, he has the other method left, the assertion of himself, a conscious, willing self, as the supreme authority, and the appeal simply to that.

These, of course, are the methods of romanticism, and no one will deny that Cummings is a romantic poet. He shares much with the romantic poets of the past. (pp. 643-44)

[It] is to American romanticism in particular that he is most closely related, that type which is above all didactic…. His confident and continual preaching is truly Emersonian…. But not all the native attitudes in Cummings are out of Emerson. The exclusiveness of his individualism suggests Thoreau. His metaphysical impertinence recalls, again and again, Emily Dickinson. And in celebrating "my body when it is with your body" or "the poetic carcass of a girl," he becomes remotely Whitmanesque. To suggest any of these names as literary influences is beside the point. Cummings, in a different century, is preaching and practising the way of life for which they stood. His career presents, in peculiarly sharpened terms, a test case for romantic individualism long after romanticism's day.

This underlying attitude, which can best be characterized, perhaps, as a denial of external authority, determines every aspect of his writing. It is there in his technique as a consistent rejection of the authority of form, or rather an assertion of the authority of self over material and convention. By such a process he worked out his highly personal typography, distractive to a perennial crowd of readers and critics. It is surely not of central importance to his poetry. He neither stands nor falls thereby. Yet one can say that, using it, Cummings, at least part of the time, controls his poems to a greater extent than other writers. He has orchestrated them, choreographed them upon the page to such a degree that our reading, when we have recovered from the first shock of visual strangeness, must approximate his. (pp. 644-45)

More pertinent, certainly, is the question of his vocabulary. Over words, the real material of verse, Cummings again asserts the individual authority…. [If] Cummings's poetry at its worst is a destructive violation of language, at its best this same poetry is a new affirmation of the vitality of our speech. And here too he is allied with an American tradition. The history of our poetry, that part of it which has enduring life, could be told almost entirely in terms of its continuous experimentation with the fluid, native vocabulary. And it is with this vocabulary wholly that Cummings works. By virtue of his delicate bullying of words and grammar, punctuation and typography, he achieves a remarkable poetic freshness—catches, at times, the most elusive shadings of sensation. He can impart to language, which in his hands is forever, to be sure, in danger of its life, a rare, pervasive excitement.

But it is in his implacably individualistic approach to experience that Cummings's final predicament is uncovered. The hundred years since Emerson's Self-Reliance have altered the validity, or at least the practicability, of this romantic way of life…. [Cummings] is put on the defensive from the start. His whole career has been a long process of digging in. From Tulips and Chimneys, whose very title suggests the dualism, to No Thanks, labeled with a rejection, the poetry has grown steadily sharper, more dogmatic, more bitter. Affirmations are necessarily less frequent, and belligerence becomes the poet's customary manner. (pp. 646-47)

A platform of moral isolation like this does offer certain advantages to the artist. From it, for one thing, he can speak with a private intensity; he can muster a heady indignation. Also, a quiet room, with all the doors shut and windows barred, is a good place to tell the heart's secrets, to celebrate the lone things which happen only to the man alone. This is the proper business of the lyricist, and surely no contemporary poetry is more thoroughly lyric than Cummings's. But in such a place the danger is that one may forget what is going on outside, how men speak to each other and what happens to men together. When a poet's attitude distorts his perception of the outer world, it begins to deny the possibilities of poetry. Here, one supposes, is the likeliest source for all the obscurity in Cummings's work. (pp. 647-48)

[However] sensitive he may be, obvious values escape him when they are outward values. Affirming only the authority within himself, he has been forced, by the logic of his position, into a rejection of social authority. His two prose works show, no less than his poetry, what has happened. The Enormous Room remains one of the best books of the last war, largely because of its magnificent human sympathy. The author's consciousness is open to embrace his fellow prisoners, Zoo-loo, Surplice, Jean Le Nègre, and all the rest. But between that and Eimi, the closing which Cummings hates has taken place. Lenin's tomb reminds him only of Coney Island, and Russia is viewed entirely from a far cold point of isolation. The attempted affirmation of "I Am" with which the book is labeled sounds like an old-fashioned tune grimly whistled in the dark. There is not enough humanity left. Rejection has become the poet's habit until he has rejected the one food that might nourish him. Here is perhaps the last irony of individualism: that it must in the end be loveless.

Cummings has worked desperately and long to escape a natural heritage. He was born into it, a New England clergyman's son, and it proved at the last inescapable…. To him, as to so many of the young literati of the 1920's, this force was stultifying and restrictive. It was a death force. Taking his cue from a prevailing drift of the '20's, Cummings tried to abuse this threatening conservatism out of his path. He became the enfant terrible of a generation of terrible children. (pp. 650-51)

Since 1933 he has acquired another antipathy. That was the year of the Russian travel diary, Eimi. Whereas in 1926 he had noticed that "the communists have fine Eyes." he now burst out bitterly against the "Kumrads."… As satire or invective the poems of this later political bias are greatly inferior to the scornful sting of the earlier attacks on native conservatism. Their accents are shrill, almost fanatical. And the mere assertion of a romantic abstraction, "life" or "love," is inadequate as a positive platform from which to utter these sweeping denouncements. But the most striking consideration of all is that in these poems Cummings, on slightly different grounds, is fighting the very battle of conservatism. He is joining the New England merchants and politicos in the angry assertion of their free, individual rights against the remotest threat. Like them, he is a champion of moral laissez faire. (pp. 651-52)

I have tried to suggest the remarkable unity of Cummings's work. In spite of a surface versatility, in itself consistent, and in spite of abrupt shifts of direction such as that just noted, the poems, the prose, and for that matter, the pictures of CIOPW, the play him, and the ballet scenario Tom are all strongly of a piece. Their unity derives from the basic romantic premises on which he has worked out his particular creative experiment. If this experiment is a failure, it is largely these premises which are at fault. Cummings brought to it an extraordinary talent and conducted it with uncompromising honesty. A possible conclusion is that, in poetry as elsewhere individualism of the nineteenth-century kind, no matter how we may translate it into twentieth-century words or disguise it with contemporary gestures, remains tragically out of date. The lonely gospel of isolated manhood can no longer nourish man. (pp. 652-53)

Put against the background of contemporary verse in America, his work takes on one other elusive quality. It is a quality so important to the well-being of poetry that merely to mention it seems hardly adequate. It is the thing which is central to such of his poems as those about Buffalo Bill, death's poker game with love, niggers, or Jimmie's goil. It informs most of his conceits and it peoples his volumes with mice and elephants, grasshoppers, tough guys, and busted statues. Cummings's poetry has—what today's poetry sorely needs—the rare quality of fun. (p. 653)