E. E. Cummings, particularly in The Enormous Room, assumed the multiple task of demonstrating not only the discrepancy between language and experience but also the corrosive effects of this discrepancy on the human psyche, and, perhaps his most significant achievement, offered a means for overcoming it in the creation of new relationships between language and experience. (p. 646)

[Principles] for restoring value to a benumbed and misleading language were displayed by Cummings throughout his work. His characteristic device was the manipulation of contexts, associating symbols with their functional referents rather than traditional ones. Such a device, however, in the spare and unelaborated idiom of his poetry was actually a source of confusion…. In the poetry … Cummings' assault on the traditional values of words appears to be little more than evocative eccentricity. Within the more flexible bounds of prose, however, Cummings was able to build up new contexts, to provide the precise associations upon which a creative and functional use of language depends.

In The Enormous Room, Cummings' creative use of language is most successful because it is most integral to the form and theme of the novel. His attack on the traditional symbols, his portrayal of the distorted values and behavior arising from the tyranny of these symbols over reality and his ultimate creation of a language which accurately describes and thereby recreates his world serve as a paradigm for the experience of the narrator. For the novel traces the narrator's disenchantment and betrayal by a world that contradicts its own cultural tradition; it follows the slow erosion of his personality, and his gradual awakening as a creative consciousness.

The major technical problem of a narrative which involves such complex objectives is point of view. Primarily, Cummings' point of view is retrospective. The narrator serves as the persona of Cummings-past, so to speak, through whom the author re-enacts his self-development. The ironic detachment of much of the novel is accounted for by Cummings' having used the innovations in perception and language which were the product of his entire experience. (pp. 647-48)

The Introduction, written in 1932, focuses on the opposition around which the book is structured. In a dialogue between an anonymous interviewer and Cummings, the author opposes a member of what he calls the "everyday humdrum world" and the artist…. (pp. 648-49)

Cummings establishes through this dialogue that the artist, by which he means anyone who creates symbols in wood, music, paint or words, achieves identity or selfhood…. It is, if you like, the hypothesis of The Enormous Room, evolved during his writing of the novel ten years earlier. (p. 649)

The central problem of the book … was a subjective one, the solution to which allowed the book to be written. Before Cummings could perceive and create a viable correspondence between language and experience, he had to rescue himself, a perceiver or identity, from the dehumanizing pressures of his environment. During most of his stay in the Enormous Room, the problem of selfhood was latent. He resided in a limbo between the loss of the official or external and the discovery of the essential self. Deprived of the possibility, indeed, the necessity for motivated action, Cummings functioned simply as an intensely aware and receptive but frozen intelligence. Since it was, as Cummings discovered, through his art that he was able to become himself …, his search for an authentic self was a search within for a nucleus of creativity, the artist's Archimedean point.

Basic to this self-discovery was a condition which characterized his entire imprisonment: a suspension of time. The temporal order is another external structure which, by tying the individual to his own past, introduces the confusion between the self and what is merely an accumulation of experience or events. Consequently, after a detailed description of one day's schedule in prison, Cummings discards the temporal as even an organizational device…. Having established his truancy from time, he confines himself to an empirical present…. (pp. 658-59)

Cummings remains in this state of suspended animation until the departure of his companion "B," the last link with his own past and culture. With this event, the dissolution of external bases of identity rapidly increases and intensifies…. In his indifference to a set of Shakespeare which he receives in the mail, Cummings recognizes the failure of intellectual or cultural affinities as possible bases for self-definition, for they, like one's past or friends, are only external points of reference…. Finally, his physical appearance deteriorates, and with it the most superficial but conventional basis for a definition of self in the objective world, the last external symbol of a social being…. Gradually, the "Machine of decomposition" … destroys the surface layers of Cummings' identity until he is reduced to an almost prenatal passiveness: "I felt myself to be, at last, a doll—taken out occasionally and played with and put back into its house and told to go to sleep."… What appears here as a total defeat by the official structure is in fact the most crucial point in Cummings' self-realization. In this total apathy he no longer depends upon his environment or his accumulated experience for either a vision of self or an interpretation of events.

Cummings makes the first positive gesture toward self-realization when he responds to a natural phenomenon directly rather than through a perception cluttered with inherited, non-functional symbols. The instrument of this response is the imagination, and its awakening marks the emergence of the artist, the basis of his authentic self…. (pp. 659-60)

In establishing the imagination as the inviolable point of reference for understanding his world, Cummings defines his identity as an artist. Whenever he articulates his personal vision of the world, whenever, in other words, he assigns symbols to experience, he both re-creates that world and affirms his identity. The whole process has something of the magical self-generation of the phoenix in it. In order to create, one must have a sense of selfhood; selfhood is affirmed through the act of creation. The ultimate significance, however, of the creative act is contained in the final self-surpassing goal: words, symbols, language. (p. 661)

Like the creative writers of the war generation, he was preoccupied with the failure of traditional symbols in representing the critical experience of his time. But Cummings did not seem to respond in either of the two fashions which characterized these writers. He neither denied the world, excluding it from his proper artistic concerns; nor did he defy it, assuming the self-defeating posture of protest. Rather, he incorporated the world within himself, interpreted it in personal terms, and arrived at a separate, private but communicable peace. Like the semanticists, Cummings' approach to language was functional or empirical. But the goal of the semanticists was social: a community of understanding based upon universally verifiable experience. However admirable this goal may have been, it could not be attained. The semanticists were either caught in debate over the universality of their definitions or imposed new orthodoxies to escape from the morass of whether X should equal Y, Z or buttercups. Cummings escaped both these dilemmas by resisting the claims of society on his art and himself. Experience had shown him that the only possible and authentic gesture was in the preservation of self through a creative act, the making of symbols, which could be as minimal and only as social as conversation. (pp. 661-62)

With the imagination as his source of value, Cummings' ultimate allegiance is to an aesthetic norm which is not restricted to art, one with social, political and ethical implications. Like an earlier devotee of the imagination, Cummings found a liberating and enlarging ideal in the Beauty that is Truth, and Truth that is Beauty. While the truth which he pursued may be more mundane than Keats', it is also more concrete and therefore more available. The beauty, however, that is its measure is encompassing, including the entire range of the living sensate world and everything which animates it. The Enormous Room then, on almost every level—language, form, theme, character—may be considered as a metaphor for the Edenic experience of the creating imagination. (p. 662)