SOURCE: Docherty, Brian. “e. e. cummings.” In American Poetry: The Modernist Ideal, edited by Clive Bloom and Brian Docherty, pp. 120-30. Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1995.

[In the following essay, Docherty discusses the paradox of modernism and traditionalism in Cummings’s poetry.]

e. e. cummings is at once the most modern of traditionalists and the most traditional of Modernists. This ironic paradox runs through both his life and his poetry. Born in 1894 to a family of impeccably New England Puritan stock, his life as a writer was to some extent a negation of his background. Like Ezra Pound, cummings never held a ‘normal’ job, but lived true to his principles, devoted to his art even at the expense of so-called material success. His father was both an academic, who became America's first Professor of Sociology, and a Unitarian minister at Boston's fashionable Back Bay Church. Two conspicuous features of cummings's work are a hatred of rationalising intellectual types and a virtual absence of orthodox Christian faith, Puritan or otherwise. This is not to imply that he was in any way estranged from his family. It was his father who secured his release from a French prison in 1917 (this adventure is related in The Enormous Room), and there are some beautiful poems to his parents, obviously written out of a deep love, notably ‘my father moved through dooms of love’. (Most of cummings's poems are untitled, so first lines have been taken as titles in this chapter.)

Like Pound, cummings enjoyed the benefits of a sound classical education, studying Greek and Latin at high school before going on to Harvard in 1911. cummings was part of probably the last generation to be educated in precisely this manner, and his training shows through in the poetic strategies he adopted. He shared Pound's desire to ‘make it new’, but not the obsession with the Provençal troubadours and the Eleusinian mystery religion. His interest in classical language is also different from that of, say, H. D., who valued those qualities we think of as ‘classical’: clarity, hardness and precision. cummings set out to write a vernacular American, and succeeded as well as William Carlos Williams in capturing the true vulgarity of American speech. He did it by treating English as if it were a foreign language, full of wonder and freshness, and by writing English as if it were an inflected language like Greek or Latin. Some of the perceived characteristics his detractors have objected to can possibly be blamed on his Harvard education. Harvard is, of course, one of the world's great universities, but it is fair to say that nobody there at that time had any conception of literary theory. ‘English Literature’, as an academic discipline in its own right, was the invention of F. R. Leavis, William Empson and I. A. Richards in England, and the ‘New Critics’ in America.

cummings was largely taught by classics scholars, a body of men who often believed that reading and criticising modern literature was the sort of thing any intelligent man could do in his bath. Although cummings believed in self-discipline in an Emersonian sense (and rejected all external standards), he never learnt self-criticism as a writer, although he worked hard, being a careful and meticulous craftsman. Perhaps a dose of Leavis-style ‘close reading’ would have helped him to distinguish between successful and unsuccessful poems. A published output of some 800 poems would seem to mark a determination to get everything into print, rather than the ‘distillation’ or ‘essence’ theory favoured by other poets. This is characteristic both of the Puritan obsession to save and use every scrap, in any activity, and of cummings's own temperament. He is primarily a poet of spring, overflowing with life and vitality.

Like Walt Whitman, cummings has sometimes been accused of lacking a sufficient sense of evil or a tragic vision of the world. This view ignores the fact that cummings perceives certain aspects of the modern world as tragedy in the making, or more accurately, as grotesque farce. His perception of the world as it is, and not as he would like it to be, either by a reconstitution of past order and wholeness, or as the stage for a revolution of visionary utopia, makes cummings a poet of hate as well as a poet of love. (And it serves to distinguish him from, on the one hand, Pound and Eliot, and on the other hand, Whitman and Ginsberg.) Even in his hates, however, cummings is a generous poet, willing to say some things other poets shied away from, with a kind of stiff-necked New England honesty. Since cummings took his Emersonian transcendentalism seriously and conscientiously, his concept of love was not determined by Christianity of the ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’ variety. For cummings, an honest man could only be a good lover if he was a good hater. His hatred is reserved for political tyranny, of both left and right, for the ill-treatment or torture of individuals, for bureaucrats, politicians, salesmen, people unable to think for themselves, and bigots. By his willingness to take up the stones of castigation, cummings confronts his readers with the follies, abuses and evils of the modern world, and most people's willingness to close their eyes, turn their back, or cross the street.

‘Humanity i love you’ (CP [The Complete Poems], 53)¹ is an example of his technique of paradox. After five stanzas of wry acceptance of the compromises people employ in their daily lives, the last line, ‘i hate you’, is a shock the reader is not prepared for. cummings appears to suggest that while acceptance of such compromises keeps the world turning, intelligent consideration would lead to rejection of such attitudes and practices. The implication is that if we all start to hate compromise, a more honest society might be possible. ‘a man who had fallen among thieves’ (CP, 256) is a version of the biblical story of the Good Samaritan, condemning the hypocritical upright citizens who refuse to help this unfortunate man, robbed of both his money and his dignity by whoever sold him drink. cummings's contempt for the by-passer is coupled with a love for the individual strong enough to let him help the fallen man even though he is ‘banged with terror’ (CP, 256).

‘next to of course god america i’ (CP, 267) is a satire on both the cliché-spouting patriot and the gullibility of his audience. cummings includes most of the clichés politicians mouth at election time, and his point is that while anyone who dared to criticise any of these concepts would be labelled un-American and a commie subversive, it is politicians like this who have muted the voice of liberty. His general attitude to politicians is expressed succinctly in ‘a politician is an arse upon’ (CP, 550), a two-line epigram in the best classical tradition. Politicians of the liberal, compromising variety are condemned in ‘THANKSGIVING (1956)’ (CP, 711), one of his relatively new titled poems. It is a disciplined exercise in rhymed four-line stanzas designed to be heard loud and clear. The Russian state is stigmatised as a ‘monstering horror’, and the Soviet leadership as ‘a which that walks like a who’. Hungary is praised for having the bravery to stand up for freedom and liberty, while both the United Nations and the United States are criticised for failing to come to Hungary's aid when it is invaded by the forces of Communism which ‘Western democracy’ professes to oppose. Individuals in Europe and America who failed to condemn the invasion are included in his critique, and liberal democracy is shown to be impotent in the face of Stalinist aggression.

uncle sam shrugs his pretty
pink shoulders you know how
and he twitches a liberal titty
and lisps ‘i'm busy right now’

(CP, 711)

The implication is that America is run by homosexuals, whom cummings regarded as decadent perverts who were probably fellow travellers anyway. The persona in the poem echoes the rantings of the crazed bigot Senator McCarthy, who ruined many people's lives in the 1950s with his anti-communist witch-hunts.

Homosexuals feature in another hate poem, ‘flotsam and fetsam’ (CP, 492). This little gem is perhaps aimed at W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, who arrived in America in early 1939, some months before the outbreak of the Second World War. The poem criticises gays, middle-class intellectuals fleeing the coming war, and left-wingers with the means to insulate themselves from the economic realities of life. While advocating the principles of communism, they are themselves insured by Lloyd's. Left-wing dogma is also condemned in ‘kumrads die because they're told’ (CP, 413), an attack on what cummings views as the de-individualising effects of collectivist philosophies. The rhythm is strongly marked, and rhyme is again employed to point up the message that collective attitudes constitute a form of indoctrination which has the most disastrous consequences; ‘and kumrads won't (believe in life) … because they are afraid to love’ (CP, 413). These lines represent one of cummings's strongest critiques of the modern state, and the de-personalisation caused by acceptance of dogma and obedience to orthodoxy.

Another poem which contrasts institutional thinking with the plight of the individual is ‘i sing of Olaf glad and big’ (CP, 340). Again there is a strong rhythm and deftly placed rhyme, employed to make the message clear. Olaf is a principled individual, probably a second-generation Swedish American from the Mid-West farm belt, brought up in the Lutheran church. He is a heroic figure who dies for his beliefs after enduring barbaric treatment, including the ultimate obscenity with red-hot bayonets. American democracy and freedom suffer grievously at the hand of their supposed defendants, ironically described as ‘(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)’, while the pacifist traitor is lauded as ‘more brave than me: more blond than you’ (CP, 340). cummings is impartial in his attitude to regimes where correct attitudes are instilled and maintained by force. America and Russia are two faces of the same coin as far as he is concerned.

‘a salesman is an it that stinks Excuse’ (CP, 549) is an attack on commercialism in a modified sonnet, a hate poem on the negative side of America, expressed in a form traditionally reserved for love poems. The colloquial language of the salesman offers a further ironic contrast to the formal qualities normally expected of a sonnet. By its willingness to say anything and sell anything to make a quick profit, the whole of American life has been debased. Capitalism is rotten to the core, and so corrupt that democracy can be bought and sold like any other commodity. cummings says let the buyer beware, since only ‘subhuman rights’ are on offer here, not freedom or liberty. Rights belong to the free individual as typified by the lover, because in cummings's world only the free individual can be a lover, and only the lover is free.

Because he is such a good hater of what he perceives as the faults of the modern world, cummings is both a great lover and a great love poet. Poems about love or lovers make up some 25 per cent of his output, some 200 poems. His concept of love as a healing force in the world is more rigorous and less chauvinist than the often vacuous effusions on ‘love’ emanating from the poetry and music of the 60s counter-culture. Some 50 per cent of his poems on love are sonnets, modified and modernised in various ways, with a significant mixing of linguistic registers from traditional to formal to colloquial to standard Harvard to comic. This is cummings's largest subject area and it is appropriate that his versatility should be fully demonstrated in the subject which mattered most to him. ‘my love’ (CP, 33) is a surprisingly traditional tribute from the poet to his lady, addressed in the archaic ‘thy’ form, employing jewel and fertility imagery to make a poem rather like an Imagist Keats. ‘it may not always be so and i say’ (CP, 146) is a regular sonnet, a formal but tender address to his lady with a rather posed rhetorical quality. Some readers may not be completely convinced by the poet's demonstration of generosity towards his rival, but it is nevertheless a lovely and moving poem which shows cummings's mastery of form.

‘i like my body when it is with your’ (CP, 218) is a modern, more relaxed exercise in sonnet form with modern language to match. It is a celebration of the joys of physical love, a contemporary version of John Donne without the metaphysical overtones. It is both a young man's poem and an adult poem, enjoyment of the natural attributes without prurience, salaciousness, or a need to dominate the other person. It is entirely in the Whitmanian tradition, celebrating love, and opposed to the Platonist and Pauline attitudes to sexual pleasure. cummings upholds the modern post-Freudian view that to be spiritually happy, humans must be sexually fulfilled. (It should be noted, however, that generally cummings was not sympathetic to Freud.) ‘she being Brand’ (CP, 246) is one of the better-known poems, mainly because cummings's detractors hold it up as an example of his typographical eccentricities. In fact, critics who call attention to poems for this reason merely advertise their failure to come to terms with an important element of Modernist poetry from Pound onwards, the use of the capabilities of the typewriter to provide a score for the speaking voice. This is another sex poem with the emphasis on performance, the description of a new car being driven for the first time being a metaphor for a young woman's first full sexual experience. The poem also provides an illustration of the American obsession with automobiles, and the frequent equation of women and cars in American popular culture. (The American love affair with the car is documented in the lyrics of songwriters such as Chuck Berry and Bruce Springsteen.) Far from being eccentric or careless, the line lengths, word divisions and the stanzaic patterning are carefully designed and laid out on the page to give the reader a precise guide to the cadencing of the poem when read aloud. cummings's practice as a painter no doubt influenced his writing here. The visual devices are employed for non-visual purposes, and this poem is a reminder that nearly all of cummings's poems are speakable, with only a small handful offering real difficulties, although some rearrangement of the poem's element is sometimes necessary.

‘if i have made, my lady, intricate’ (CP, 307) is another sonnet, a lyric to his lady on a traditional theme, the poet's inability to write poems which do justice to her beauty. cummings's debt to the lyric tradition in English literature is plain here, yet the tone of the poem has a calm and tender beauty unique to cummings. It is entirely typical of his work as a poet of love and spring, whose April lies in a different world from that of Eliot's The Waste Land. ‘may i feel said he’ (CP, 399) is a high-spirited comic poem on a serious subject, the games people play which end up in adultery. As usual, cummings has a serious point to make in the last line, ‘(you are Mine said she)’. In his poetic world, people always have to face the consequences of their actions. Most of the love poems, however, involve relationships between free individuals, which accounts for the lack of guilt, violence or recrimination in the poems. ‘sweet spring is your’ takes up the theme of the ending of ‘if i have made, my lady, intricate’, in rhymed four-line stanzas. For cummings, April is the gladdest month, full of new life and new energy after the long hibernation of winter, when the world belongs to lovers. Nature as process and rebirth is symbolised in that the last stanza is identical to the first, an affirmation that love does indeed make the world go round. The poem is not frivolous or irresponsible since this attitude, lived seriously, implies that people have no right to destroy the planet's ecosystem for profit, kill animals for their skins, or restrict other people's liberties. cummings's attitude to time, of living fully in the present and making the most of your time, is expressed in ‘if everything happens that can't be done’. It is a celebration of growth and movement, and love. ‘i carry your heart with me / i carry it in’ is another lyric sonnet on a traditional theme, that of love as the motive force in the poet's life. Love and life as a cyclical process are again emphasised by making the last line identical to the first, an unusual device in a sonnet.

As well as personal and sexual love, cummings is a love poet in a more general sense. There are notable poems to his parents and poems about praiseworthy individuals, such as ‘rain or hail’ (CP, 568). There are also many sonnets on the nature of love. ‘love's function is to fabricate unknowingness’ (CP, 446) announces cummings's anti-rationalising philosophy in its first line. It is a poem where death is accepted as a natural process because love can transcend death and time. ‘love is more thicker than forget’ (CP, 530), in four short rhymed stanzas, gives a definition of love and the conditions under which love is encountered. Love is the permanent source of life and energy. ‘nothing false and possible is love’ (CP, 574) is another modernised sonnet, employed to define the truth of love and lovers. Love is the positive force in the world, with its own moral laws, ‘love is a universe beyond obey / or command’. ‘true lovers in each happening of their hearts’ (CP, 576) is a sonnet where the normal form is only slightly modified by half rhymes. True lovers enjoy the secret of life, and heart wins over the mere mind's ‘poor pretend’. The effect of ‘loves own secret’ is the subject of ‘if (touched by love's own secret) we, like homing’ (CP, 659). Mundane reality is negated by love and most people are ‘contented fools’ unable to ‘envision the mystery of freedom’. The ordinary time-bound world is dismissed as a mechanical hoax. ‘being as to timelessness as it's to time’ (CP, 768) is a sonnet of affirmation, of faith in a world where love is a real presence. cummings's cyclical view is again on offer, but the second stanza answers a question some readers may wish to put to the poet,

(do lovers suffer? all diversities
proudly descending put on death pull flesh:
are lovers glad? only their smallest joy's
a universe emerging from a wish)

(CP, 768)

The third stanza is a series of paradoxes designed to illustrate the all controlling, all conquering nature of love, and the poem ends with another swipe at intellectuals, whom cummings considers fools.

Many of the love poems are also a celebration of nature or the external world, and poems about nature make up some 20 per cent of his output. One of the best known, ‘in Just’ (CP, 27) celebrates the arrival of spring from a children's point of view and introduces the satyric lame balloonman, perhaps cummings's best-known creation. ‘Spring is like a perhaps hand’ (CP, 197) presents spring as the renewer of life made dull and familiar by winter, gently rearranging the world while people stare, as their faculties are awakened. ‘may my heart always be open to little’ (CP, 481) illustrates what cummings takes to be a proper attitude to nature, while ‘anyone lived in a pretty howtown’ (CP, 515) shows the townspeople living according to the natural procession of the seasons, with ‘anyone’ contracted to ‘noone’. ‘i thank You God for most this amazing’ (CP, 663) is a sonnet of praise, one of the very few cummings poems in which God is addressed directly. It expresses delight and wonder ‘for the leaping greenly spirits of trees’, and alludes to the death and rebirth myth of Osiris, of which the Christ story is a version in anthropological terms. Nature is taken as proof of the existence of God, and the poem represents a precious moment of transcendent awareness.

Many more examples could be given, as very few of cummings's poems are located indoors, although some are spoken by drunks or set in bars. The most striking absence from his output is poems about work and routine. In this respect, more than any other poet of his generation, more so than either Pound or Hart Crane, cummings is one of Trotsky's ‘bourgeois bohemians’. He probably regarded most work as useless toil, something which made individuals into most people or unpeople. For this reason cummings is not a social poet in the way Williams is. He is concerned to celebrate the lover and the individual, and attacks anyone or anything which threatens people's ability to achieve their full potential as individuals. The other striking absence is poems of meditation, since, apart from hate poems and love poems of various sorts, descriptive poems and poems of praise make up nearly half the total. Satire is also well represented, making up some 20 per cent of his output, with poems of reflection and persuasion representing smaller groupings. A typical cummings poem might well be a sonnet praising lovers and Spring.

cummings's language is probably the most varied of any modern American poet, yet he is often regarded as a comic or burlesque poet. He has, in fact, three main types of language, the mock or burlesque, a neutral register, and a formal or archaic tone. cummings is skilled at mixing linguistic registers within poems, and varying the effects within forms such as sonnets, and types such as satires. He is also famous for his use of typography, mixing capitals and lower case, and splitting phrases and words in unusual places. This is not an aberration, or an attempt to shock the reader. Although he has possibly the most highly developed visual sense of any modern poet, he breaks and remakes the visual mould of the poem for primarily auditory reasons. cummings has a scrupulous concern to aid the reader in realising the sound of the poem. A poem such as ‘she being Brand’, or ‘ygUDuh’ (CP, 547) is laid out for the purpose of giving the reader a precise guide to the sound of the text. ‘ygUDuh’ is spoken by an aggressive drunk, and is an exact portrait of the sort of bigot we all hope never to meet in a bar, and cummings presents this stream of bigotry without editorialising or comment. Poems like this show that cummings had a strong grasp of localism and objectivism, and could be as much the Modernist, in that sense, as the next poet when he chose.

cummings is also well known for the liberties he took with the English language, which fall into three main categories. The first is his characteristic variation of the normal subject—predicate—object word order in sentences. This is sometimes done for metrical reasons, although he very rarely resorted to old-fashioned poetic inversion: ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’, is a good example. If the second line ‘(with up so floating many bells down)’ (CP, 515) is reconstituted as ‘with so many bells floating up [and] down’, it not only destroys the rhythm but confuses the meaning. cummings's arrangement has rhythmic intensity, a visual image of the moving bells, and an idea of many different bells sounding simultaneously. We are also reminded that the normal linear word order in English locks our thinking about time and space into a mode which post-Einsteinian science has shown to be non-valid, however convenient for mundane use.

The second of cummings's characteristic strategies is his systematic conversion of verbs into nouns. These grammatical shifts convey both cummings's tone and his attitude to the world, as in ‘he sang his didn't he danced his did’ (CP, 515). In fact more parts of speech, such as adverbs, pronouns, adjectives and conjunctions, are converted into nouns. cummings also employs his conversion technique for rhythmical effects, and effects of rhetorical ambiguity, by inserting adverbs into subordinate adjectival clauses, so we get ‘the slowly town’ or ‘your suddenly body’.

cummings's third strategy is more idiosyncratic, and perhaps derives from his classical education. His English behaves like an inflected language such as Greek or Latin, with their case endings. In these languages the same phrase can be modified and even reversed by the suffixes on each word (hence the old ‘man bites dog’ joke). By using prefixes such as ‘un’, cummings created a distinctive conceptual vocabulary, such as ‘unmind’, ‘undeath’, ‘unpeople’, and ‘fools of unbeing’. The dislocations practised by cummings are carefully calculated and require a corresponding effort on the part of the reader, similar to the demands of Pound's ideogrammic method. Often, reading a cummings poem requires an analysis of the syntax and a synthesis of the poem into ‘normal’ word-order and arrangement. This more active reading process involves the reader in a creative partnership with the writer and was one of the prime aims of the Modernist project. In this sense, cummings's textual strategies are analogous to those of Bertolt Brecht's alienation effect, or the Russian Formalists whose notion of ‘ostranenie’ or making strange, a technique of defamiliarisation, was intended to renew both literature and the world for the reader. Like the French Surrealists, cummings was a profoundly serious artist, who employed wit and satire in his assault on the bourgeois value system most people were compromised into accepting. The view of cummings as the comic poet of Romantic humanism is finally a limiting one, although at times he appears to resemble W. C. Fields in his outrageous misanthropy.

cummings's love for the natural world and those free individuals who are able to love and be loved, makes him a true heir of Emerson, and he represents the end of the New England Transcendentalist tradition. cummings was a radical in his metaphysics and his attitudes to society, like Emerson, but he is also radical in his use of poetic language in ways not available to Emerson. Although an anti-intellectual, a good proportion of his satires are concerned with ideas or concepts, albeit expressed in a playful fashion. cummings revitalised the lyric as a poetic form, and invented both a language and a way of using language which constitute a fresh look at the world. It is an invitation to readers to examine their own lives and the role of the individual in Western civilisation. While making full use of the English lyric tradition, cummings remains in many ways ahead of his time; he is at once the most modern of traditionalists and the most traditional of Modernists.

Note

1. All quotations are taken from e. e. cummings, The Complete Poems, 1910-1962, ed. George James Firmage (London: Granada, 1981), page numbers are given after quotes, e.g. (CP, 515).