The Case of Cummings
[In the following essay, Pagnini argues that Cummings’s poetry was strongly influenced by Russian futurism.]
References to E. E. Cummings's relationship with the early twentieth-century avant-garde are usually rather hurried, and limited to suggesting that the poet felt the influence of Symbolist techniques (absolute metaphor), of Ezra Pound's Rispostes (1912), and perhaps of the linguistic experimentalism of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons (1914); or alternatively, that he owed much to the Dada and Surrealist movements; or again that he was influenced by the lesson of the Cubists, with regard both to the fragmentation of form and to the use of ugly realistic elements that were traditionally considered unpoetic. Futurism is never mentioned: there is at most some passing reference to Apollinaire's Calligrammes. And yet the most superficial glance at Cummings's singular poetic production, from his earliest publications onwards, will be sufficient to gain the precise impression of an experience analogous to that of the manifestos of Marinetti, and above all to that of the far more important period of Russian Cubofuturism. The reasons for the lack of interest in this question are, I believe, of a strictly positivistic nature. Not only did Cummings never speak of such influences, but he often insisted that he had invented everything for himself. We have no documents testifying to readings, to meetings, to sympathies.
It is not enough, however, to trust in the declarations of poets and in an exclusively causal philology. Documentary evidence does not exhaust the complex problems of culture; the view of facts as a chain of proven relationships, of causes and effects, of sources and borrowings, is on the whole, if elected as an end in itself, somewhat ingenuous. There may arise among artists, thinkers and scientists relationships that one might define as synchronically parallel, but which do not lend themselves to objective documentation. This is due to the fact that the diachronic history of a culture is a dialectic of cultural systems, which are at times normatively adhered to, at times attacked and replaced in revolutionary fashion, at times further developed.
In this latter case established systems may be exploited for their inherent, implicit potentialities; and, given certain presuppositions, the possibilities of exploitation and of variation are not infinite: indeed they are limited and even, in a certain measure, predictable, so that authors who are not in direct contact may reach analogous results. For example, once the culture has established that a work of art is the product of ingenuous inspiration, whereby spontaneity comes to be cultivated, as happens with Romanticism, it is a short step to the valorizing of the dream, to the liberating of the unconscious; and only a further step to automatic writing. Or once associationistic psychology, dear to eighteenth century thinkers, has been accepted, one arrives readily at the stream of consciousness; and then, in a period of scepticism concerning the idealistic principles of inspiration, the intuitive logic of associations may disappear altogether, so that what remains is a purely intellectual and craftsmanly mode of composition (as in Pound's Cantos). In the transformation of cultural systems, the same results can be reached by artists who never knew each other and never read each other's writings. Coleridge writes:
On similar subjects or occasions some similar Thoughts must occur to different Persons, especially in men of resembling genius, quite independent of each other. The proof of this, if proof were needed, may be found in the works of contemporaries of different countries in books published at the very same time, where neither could have seen the work of the other—perhaps ignorant of the language. I have my lectures on Shakespeare two years before Schlegel began his at Vienna, and I was myself startled at the close even verbal Parallelisms.
(1936:85)
Coleridge might, in his particular case, have resorted to such a principle in order to vindicate his own originality, even where his ideas give, with reason, the impression of plagiarism. But the substance of his declaration is theoretically unexceptionable.
In a word, it is pointless to deny Cumming's futurist status on the grounds that he does not appear to have had direct contact with the Futurists as such. Personally, I would not have a moment's hesitation in placing his work within that system, even if it could be proven that his only point of inspiration was the coup de dès.
Furthermore, it is even possible, on close examination, to hypothesize that very mode of causal plausibility dear to positivistic philology. Let us take a somewhat less superficial look at the situation.
Marinetti spoke in London as early as 1910. In 1912 his Manifesto appeared in the catalogue of the London exhibition of futurist painting. In 1913 the International Show of Modern Art opened, on which occasion, through an important article by Mabel Dodge, the Americans encountered the work of Gertrude Stein, expatriated in Paris. In the same year Harold Munro dedicated a considerable section of his Poetry and Drama to Futurism (with translations of poems by Marinetti, Buzzi and Palazzeschi). In 1914 Cummings—as a student at Harvard—read Tender Buttons, published by his friend Damon. Here, as is well known, there is a revolutionary elaboration of the formal structure of the sentence, with strings of syntagmatic fragments and exercises in verbal autonomy (of a virtually paroliberista kind; it is obvious that Stein, in Paris, was acquainted with Futurism), effects of “simultaneity,” and the attempt to reproduce “the process or movement of thought instead of the logical word-order of achieved thought,” as Northrop Frye very precisely observes (1967:76). At the same time Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound were founding Vorticism (in the first issue of the review Blast, 1914), and the movement—as Cianci has recently stressed (1979:44ff)—felt the influence of Futurism, even if Pound, who had split with Marinetti, admitted his debts only to Imagism, Picasso and Kandinsky. But then Pound expressed reservations concerning Futurism without denying its importance. In volume 96 of the Fortnightly Review (1914) he wrote:
In the Eighties there were symbolists opposed to impressionists, now you have vorticism, which is, roughly speaking, expressionism, neocubism, and Imagism gathered in one camp and futurism in the other. Futurism is descended from impressionism. It is, in so far as it is an art movement, a kind of accelerated impressionism. It is a spreading, or surface art, as opposed to vorticism, which is intensive.
The vorticist has not this curious tic for destroying past glories. I have no doubt that Italy needed Mr. Marinetti, but he did not sit on the egg that hatched me, and as I am wholly opposed to his aesthetic principles, I see no reason why I, and various men who agree with me, should be expected to call ourselves futurists. We do not desire to evade comparison with the past. We prefer that the comparison be made by some intelligent person whose idea of ‘the tradition’ is not limited by the conventional taste of four or five centuries and one continent.
(p. 468)
Cummings also happened to be in France in 1917-18, as a volunteer in the Red Cross, even if, due to the exigencies of war and to an absurd episode of imprisonment—on the (unjustified) grounds of suspected treason—the young poet may not have had occasion for relevant cultural experiences. However, Apollinaire had already published his Calligrammes (tied directly to the Marinettian experience).
In 1920, after his return to his homeland, Cummings became “first managing editor” of The Dial, and had various opportunities to meet and get to know many people at the centre of the literary and artistic life of New York. Then, continuously between 1921 and 1923, and intermittently up to 1931, he lived in Paris—this time for cultural reasons—where, among other undocumented experiences, he formed a friendship with Larianov, the famous designer of the Red Ballet, and with Louis Aragon, poet and leader of one of the dada factions in Paris. Cummings translated into English Aragon's poem Le Front Rouge, patently inspired by the expressionistic technique of Mayakovskij. It was certainly Aragon, tied as he was to communism, and thus obviously interested in what went on in the Soviet Union, who in 1931, persuaded Cummings to visit Russia. In Moscow, the poet saw Dana, a friend he had met in France (his “Virgil”). This experience, which lasted only a month, was altogether negative. The Soviet world seemed to him a “hell” and as far as one can tell, he made no contact with avant-garde poets there—he maintained, indeed, that genuine art could not be produced in such a country—but met Americans resident in Russia and was invited to the occasional party (as is well known, he noted his impressions in the volume Eimi, published in 1933). These are the years of his first poetic production. Between 1923 and 1931 he published Tulips and Chimneys (1923), And and XLI Poems (1925), Is 5 (1926), the play Him (1927), Viva (1931): a corpus which already demonstrates both the complete maturity of the poet and the deployment of practically the whole range of his formal means.
One is prompted to ask whether, with hypothetically deeper knowledge (which does not appear, at the present state of research, materially attainable), the Dial period, the extensive Parisian experience, the friendship with people closely connected with the world of contemporary Russian culture, and the journey into the Soviet hell itself, might not prove to have brought about interesting and direct ties with Futurism, both western and eastern. The formal similarities—without in any way diminishing the originality of Cummings's version—are quite striking. This is especially so in the case of Russian cubofuturism, with, for example, the publication in 1914 of the first journal of the national futurists, in which one comes across poems such as those of V. Kamenskij, very similar to the works of Cummings; not to mention the fact that in 1920 Sersenevich published an imaginist volume, 2 × 2 = 5, whose title sounds very close to one of those chosen by Cummings.
But, as has already been stressed, what interests an historian of the synchrony of cultural systems, beyond specific documents, is above all the existence of analogies, similarities, correspondences. In a now distant (and precocious) essay on the poetry of Cummings (published in Studi Americani, 1958), among assumptions which in part I still hold and which in part call for correction (as is inevitable at a distance of more than twenty-five years), I made a rudimentary mention of the “semasiological” issue (this was my seed-like lexical definition of what was later to flower as semiotics) whereby the poetic practice of Cummings evidently revealed an affinity with the impulse that the early twentieth century had given, and was still giving, to reflection on the nature of the linguistic sign. (It might be of interest to note that in America Charles Peirce had already founded his semiotics, that E. Sapir had published, in 1921, his Language, and that The Meaning of Meaning by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards appeared in the same year, 1923, as the first substantial collection of poems by Cummings, Tulips and Chimneys.) The importance of these publications does not require comment for anyone who has the least interest in the basic tendencies of the new linguistics, concerned with the profound knowledge of the sign. In America, as in Europe, only generic information was available as to what had been and was being produced in Slavic countries, both in the field of poetic experiment and in the extremely important theoretical reflection carried out by linguists, which the activities of the poets accompanied and from which they received their inspiration for their maturer experiments of later years. (The spokesman of Russian Formalism, Victor Erlich, was to publish his Russian Formalism only in 1954). Today, in the light of much wider information, the phenomenon of correspondence appears still more considerable and interesting.
Some useful historical data: in 1911 Russian futurism was founded; in 1912 Krucenych published his first “auto-written” book; in the same year the Russian futurist Manifesto appeared; in 1913 the first “transmental” poems were written, again by Krucenych; in 1914 the first futurist newspaper was issued. And 1915—a fact of great significance for the study of poetic language—saw the foundation of the Linguistic Circle of Moscow, and the following year of the OPOYAZ, whose work was to continue until the middle of the twenties.
Cummings shared the basic interests of the international artists and theorists connected with futurism (in the artistic field, naturally): the attention they gave to the phonic-graphic structure of the Signifier, to the Signifier-Signified relationship (no longer considered as arbitrary or conventional), to the conception of the work of poetry as “artifice” and as “defamiliarization” (ostranenie), and thus to the attack on the status of the Signifier, which, no longer regarded as “transparent,” blocks attention onto itself, revealing the reintegration of the form/content dichotomy. Cummings himself came to forge a peculiar lyric message which, at the distance of more than half a century, appears a veritable laboratory comprehending the entire phenomenology of language.
I would at once like to point out that Russian futurism is quite distinct from the Marinettian brand, even if it was originally inspired by the latter, and that while Cummings had little affinity with Marinetti and his followers, including Apollinaire, he had considerable affinity with Soviet cubofuturism. The Russians—unlike Marinetti who proclaimed, for example, in the Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista (1914), that the new poetry ought to express the modern sensibility, with the “celebration” and “mirroring” of industrialism, of technological progress, and even of the war—assumed, like Cummings, a position of violent dissent towards the ruling culture, and conducted their revolution against the Signifier not in order to offer a language appropriate to the great metropolis, and to the mechanical era, but in order to destroy the cultural models of the past and inaugurate a new vision of the world, in decisive contrast, and indeed at war, with the principles of the alienating technological civilization. The Russians affirmed that the material treated had little importance, and that the poet should turn his attention to language, since only its manipulation could give rise to new content.1
The poetry of Cummings, analogously, is characterized by an extreme poverty of content, and by as insistent a repetition of themes as one can find in a lyrical production worthy of historical attention, while his concern for the physicality of the linguistic means and for the effects produced by his idiosyncratic treatment of of them is immense. It should be mentioned, moreover, that while western futurism is limited almost exclusively to operations regarding typographical iconicity, and to exercises of an ingenuously onomatopoeic nature, both Russian cubofuturist poetry and the poetry of Cummings go far deeper, with more intense effects, in exploring the suggestiveness of a non-conventional treatment of the Signifier.
What we have stated so far derives from a close scrutiny. But it is worth reconsidering the phenomenon, also, from a more panoramic point of observation, taking into account the whole western, and especially anglo-saxon, avant-garde, according to global behavioral models. The theoretical thesis of this second line of enquiry lies in the assumption that it is possible—still leaving aside the diachronic cause/effect chain—to construct synchronically the paradigm that connects and unites the various cultural systems of a given period. When this is possible—as it often is—we have what Yurij Lotman terms “structural” code complex (1969:120).
For this reason one might take into consideration two factors that lie side by side with Futurism: on the one hand Imagism (and with it, Vorticism), on the other Cubism. On close inspection the three movements have two elementary traits in common: the fragmentation of the normal structure of the expressive means and the recomposition of the fragments in ways quite different from traditional modes, and in particular with the marked tendency to realize what language denies by its very nature, namely simultaneity. Futurism operates above all on the phonic-graphic make-up of language; Imagism devotes its attention to wider complexes, especially to clause and sentence structure. The former thus tends to defamiliarize the phonic-syntactic tissue, the latter the transphrastic logic of discourse, whereby what is produced on the one hand is a mosaic of phonemes and morphemes, on the other a mosaic of syntagms, with parallel attention to sound and graphic form and to syntagmatic composition respectively. The resulting poetic biases—towards the abstract, autonomous composition of the Signifier, and towards the reproduction of psychological and cognitive simultaneity—find a common ground: both processes are recognizable together, for example, in the work of Picasso, who argued, in perfect harmony with the principle of freed words, that things should be represented “as they are thought” and not “as they are seen” (De Micheli 1964:81).
In brief, to keep within the bounds of the anglo-saxon world, the result is the break with phonetic and syntactic logic that one finds in Cummings on the one hand, and on the other the parataxis of Pound in The Cantos (the earliest go back to 1917), in Hugh Selwyn Mawberley (1920), of Eliot in The Waste Land and of Joyce in Ulysses (both published in 1922, just a year earlier than Tulips and Chimneys).
Along with Pound one must place Wyndham Lewis, who in Time and Western Man argued the case for “space” as the appropriate dimension for the activity of the spirit, polemicizing with the “temporalists” (among whom he counted Joyce himself). The Cantos are substantially constructed through the accumulation of fragments and intertextual allusions, combined by means of an essentialy spatial compositional mode. Their discourse never spreads out in flows of juncturae, but displays its own inlaid texture designed to obliterate time. Pound conceives the ideogram, from which he took his inspiration, as a knot, or Vortex, of concrete ideas, and illustrates the formal process involved in the brilliant metaphor of the magnet: a magnet, above which is held a glass covered with iron filings, will cause the separate and confused particles to be redisposed in a design imposed upon them by energy, equivalent to the “concept.” Pound likens this to a rose. It is, evidently, the compositional method of the entire twentieth-century avant-garde, under the twin signs of collage and montage.2
The specific position adopted by Cummings can be readily seen as an integration of these two modalities, even if—as we have seen—with a decidedly futurist inclination that, within English-language literature, is uniquely his (with the partial and not very conspicuous exception of Gertrude Stein's lyric poetry).
To the presence of Futurism and Imagism should be added the chronologically prior and pioneering influence of Cubism (Picasso's first cubist paintings date from 1908). It should be remembered that Cummings was also a painter, and that certain developments introduced into his linguistic experientalism may have been filtered through his pictorial practice. From Cubism derives his continuous and persistent resort to ambiguity, which consists on the one hand of the invitation to search out, through the recomposition of simultaneous data, a representative order, a syntactic logic capable of constructing a recognizable object in the mind (a process shared by the other two movements); on the other hand this recomposition is continually frustrated by illogical connections, by sudden deviations, which force the reader to start the labour of reconstruction afresh. The result is that the object (or rather the subject) of the recomposition is once again disintegrated, removed from what we might term a mimetic vision to an indistinct and confused impression. And the function of this same ambiguity concerns precisely the traditional perception of the real which it undermines. It provokes the sense that things are perceived and not perceived: in a word, that something has been fractured in the certainty of possession of the world; that the basic parameters of knowledge have ceased to function.
There is an acute observation in a study by Fausto Curi, Perdita d'aureola (1977), which is worth remembering. Curi sees in our culture, and “over more than a century”—the literary archetype is justly traced back to Mallarmé's Coup de dès—the gradual destruction of the “linear model” in philosophy, in science, in literature; and while on the one hand he discerns in Marinetti the “first model of delinearization in the twentieth-century avant-garde,” he acknowledges, on the other, its theoretical statement in Derrida's Grammatologie and identifies as an offshoot, in Italy, the destruction of syntax in the poetry of Edoardo Sanguineti and Nanni Balestrini (pp. 157-159 et passim).
I would associate with the remarks of Curi, still within the Italian context, other related observations by Renato Barilli in Viaggio al termine della parola (1981). Here the main concern is the final result of the processes of disintegration, and the introductory essay is furnished with an anthology of the most recent Italian works. Amongst these one can recognize, here and there, procedures of “intraverbal experiment” that recall Cummings. Barilli writes that “since all possible transgressions and perversions of the semantic and syntactic order have been experimented by the poets … there is no longer a margin for achieving a sufficient dose of originality,” unless by passing over the space of the sentence and working instead on “its essential ingredient,” the word, “subjecting it to successive fractures and segmentations that might consist in splitting the word root, the lexematic core, from its morphological appendices, or alternatively, through ever more savage interventions, in scanning syllables, or in isolating single phonemes, or finally in crossing altogether the threshold of linguistic pertinence, that last limit of conventionality that allows one to recognize in a sound or in a graphic trace the presence of the minimal unit of language, the letter” (pp. 7-8). Obviously the most important moment in this process is represented by Finnegans Wake.
But it should be stressed that all these procedures—of Cubism, of Futurism, of Imagism, of Vorticism—are to be located within a more general systematics which, identified from an even more elevated perspective, offers the historical sense and the ideological substance of the twentieth-century avant-garde as a whole. I am concerned to indicate it in that the most authentic expressions of the general tendency of the century constitute, it is true, a lacerated body, but a body which is not without a soul.
Many twentieth century authors speak of “fragments” or “ruins” (the Romantics already used these terms).3 W. B. Yeats confessed that he felt he was “bursting into fragments.” Gertrude Stein, in her essay on Picasso, said of the century: “it is a time when everything cracks, where everything is destroyed, everything isolates itself” (1938:49). And T. S. Eliot: “Son of man, / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images” (1963:63). The essential ingredients of avant-garde literature in our century—and not only of literature—are to reveal the fragmentation of the world and its reconstruction in particular patterns that reproduce the effort of living and the very frustrations of perception. The world appears as a myriad of impressions, which find form in a cognition that obeys the basic law of perception itself, “simultaneity.” Montages and collages are technical expedients designed to reproduce the formal mechanisms of consciousness, striving to give some sort of order to material at the same time that it is perceived.
In certain authors of the second half of the twentieth century this process has become purely formal. But before reaching this “abstract” and “vacuous” outcome, which in effect undermines the social function of art (and one perceives between the lines of Barilli's comments the melancholy of one who sees the process of fragmentation dear to the historical avant-garde reduced to a simple game, mere bricolage), the avant-garde of the early twentieth century was strongly committed in an ethical sense, being vitally concerned with arousing, as we have said, a new vision of the world. Obviously, art, in its ideality, cannot aspire to the practical operativity of social reforms and political revolutions, but it can, by changing our way of seeing things, denounce the sterility of surviving forms and stir us from cognitive torpor. The procedures of the historical avant-garde, what is more, seemed to represent the only means of saving art from the death that philosophers, politicians and tired disillusioned artists had predicted for it. Benjamin was right in claiming that “only within a pacified and satisfied humanity will art cease to exist.”
2
The locating of Cummings's poetry within the stylistic system of futurism is a generic, typological operation which, among other things, hypothesizes, in the interests of general theory, a possible case of synchronic parallelism in cultural phenomena. But the discussion does not imply that the poet limited himself to an insignificant actualization—conscious and surreptitious or casual and spontaneous—of what the movement had already achieved, or to a superfluous mimicry of expressive modes. Nobody, I am sure, could possibly deny to the work of Cummings a peculiar and lively originality. Within the necessary economy of an essay such as this, what I am claiming can be verified through the internal analysis of at least one of his most characteristic and artistically most mature products. I have chosen the poem which, in Poems 1923-1954, the first complete edition of the Cummings corpus, appears as number 53, belonging originally to the collection no thanks of 1935. Anyone with close experience of international Futurism will make his own mental comparisons, and will realize, for example, that compared to italian Futurism, even if the latter boasts the technical invention of the movement, the futurism of Cummings is something far more important, is not marked by superficiality, is not limited to mere protest. For many futurists—one cannot but agree with Carlo Bo (1969:272ff)—futurism was a missed opportunity.
| 1 | what a proud dreamhorse pulling (smoothloomingly) through |
| 2 | (stepp)this(ing)crazily seething of this |
| 3 | raving city screamingly street wonderful |
| 4 | flowers And o the Light thrown by Them opens |
| 5 | sharp holes in dark places paints eyes touches hands with new- |
| 6 | ness and these startled whats are a(piercing clothes thoughts kiss |
| 7 | -ing wishes bodies)squirm-of-frightenedshyare whichs small |
| 8 | its hungry for Is for Love Spring thirsty for happens |
| 9 | only and beautiful |
| there is a ragged beside the who limps | |
| 10 | man crying silence upward |
| —to have tasted Beautiful to have known | |
| 11 | Only to have smelled Happens—skip dance kids hop point at |
| 12 | red blue yellow violet white orange green- |
| 13 | ness |
| o what a proud dreamhorse moving(whose feet | |
| 14 | almost walk air). now who stops. Smiles.he |
| stamps |
At a first and superficial glance, the reader finds before him an apparently senseless mass of discourse fragments. His interpretation then proceeds through laborious inferences and conjectures. In the first place, he will endeavour to rejoin the disconnected parts of the syntactic continuum and to work out the function of certain grammatical anomalies. A first try-out might reconstruct the following syntagm:
what a proud dreamhorse pulling (l. 1) r wonderful flowers
(ll. 3-4) through (l. 1) this crazily seething of this (ll. 2) raving
city screamingly street (l. 3).
One might note the ambiguity of crazily seething, which is not a verb phrase but an attribute, and of this raving city, which could be, in itself, a regular phrase but is immediately revealed as an apposition of screamingly street; the use of screemingly as an adjective; the elimination of capital letters and punctuation; the particular use of parentheses. One then recognizes unusual and embedded words: smoothloomingly is a neologistic composite that contains the semes of an indistinct apparition, from its slow and easy progress (smooth) to an authentic epiphany: to loom implies something immaterial manifested in majestic and indefinite form; in (stepp) r (ing) there is the separation of the gerundial suffix from its verb.
The first three lines are powerfully onomatopoeic. They imitate the limping gait of a horse and the din of a city. That the horse limps is said later: the who limps (l. 9) where one notes an idiosyncratic substantivization that exploits the deictic nature of the pronoun with the purpose of not giving body to the animal. Smooth, as I mentioned, may indicate the progress of the cart, and its contrast with the rhythm of the hooves, but it also clearly has something to do with the apparition of this kind of ghost: the cart of the florist. At a phonic level the utterance alludes to the sounds of the hooves:
(stepp)thi(ing)crazily seething of this
raving city screamingly street (ll. 2-3).
The onomatopeia is realized through the insistence of phonic combinations of the /ST/, /THIS/, /SITH/, /THIS/, /SIT/, /SK/, /ST/, /IT/ kind, together with the insistence of the vowels /i/, /i:/, in this, ing, -zily, seething, this, raving, city, screamingly, street. The recurrence of the phonic group ing acts as resonance to the marked rhythm of the horse. The articulation cannot fail to call to mind lexemes of the ringing, ring, ding kind. The din of the city, also expressed semantically—seething, raving, screamingly—is echoed phonically in the stree of street. Still at the level of onomatopeia and phonosymbolism, one should note the sequence /u/, /u:/, that marks the effort of the gait:
pulling(smoothloomingly)through (l. 1)
The limping rhythm pervades the entire lyric, and is corroborated, further on, by the line-end breaks (with effect of enjambement):
this / raving (ll. 2-3)
new- / ness (ll. 5-6)
kiss- / ing (ll. 6-7)
green- / ness (ll. 12-13)
and by the spatial isolation of stamps (l. 14) which mimics the last beat of the hoof.
In line 4 the limping gait is rendered through the rhythm of the diphthong /ou/:
And oh the light thrown by Them opens
to which is added also the rhythm of /a:/:
sharp holes in dark places (l. 5)
Still in line 4 one notes a particular function of the capital letters (And, Light, Them), which take on an emphatic value, expressing the emotion at the sight of the flowers.
In line 5 the metaphoric function appears on the surface: the flowers, with their violent colors perforate the zones of darkness:
(opens) sharp holes in dark places
while the light of the colors:
paints eyes touches hands with new- / ness
The enjambement makes the reader linger over new, and then creates a surprise effect of disambiguation: is it an adjective? Immediately after one learns that it is not, but, in any case, the first impression is not altogether cancelled.
The rhythmic gait of the horse, now irregular, continues:
sharp holes / dark places / paints eyes / touches hands /
… piercing clothes / thoughts / kissing / wishes / bodies (ll. 5-7)
The clause of line 6 is completed in line 7:
and these startled whats are (l. 6) squirm-of-frightened shy (l. 7)
and again ostend acts of grammatical violence: whats is a substantive pronoun (and as such can take the plural suffix). It is the flowers that are referred to. The abuse is motivated by the search for a new impressionistic effect: they are paint spots, not immediately perceivable as distinct flowers. What is a syncategorematic term, and so usable because of its lack of semantic body. We have already seen the case of the who, and it may be useful to note that the ghost cart is quite dematerialized by incorporeal signs.
In the following line, an iconic sense of contorsion (squirm) is linked to the release of a timid fear:
squirm-of-frightened shy (l. 7)
The flowers were “holes”, or something that “pierces,” and the holes are transformed into “lips”:
(piercing clothes thoughts kiss / -ing wishes bodies) (ll. 6-7)
In line 8 there is another grammatical anomaly, parallel to that of the whats, and with an analogous function:
are whichs
The pseudoclause are whichs small its should be broken down into are whichs, comma, small its. It, as well, represents a process of impressionistic substantivization.
Note, now, the parallelism:
Is happens
hungry for Love (l. 8) s thirsty for only (ll. 8-9)
Spring beautiful
Is is used as a noun. Is, Love, Spring are, in the Cummings idiolect, three recurrent positive symbols, which we will shortly consider. The second triad gives happens and only again as substantives. The basis of the noun happens is, naturally, verbal, and indicates—like Is—the action of taking place, in the third person.
Then:
there is a ragged r man
beside the who limps (l. 9)
The rhythm of the utterance takes up again the halting progress. By the animal there is a ragamuffin who is evidently leading the cart (note: a “concrete” man—without any grammatical emptying—leading a “dream”). The ragamuffin yells into the air words that cannot be heard in the din of the city: thus he yells “silence.”
crying silence upward (l. 10)
The three lexemes of the floral experience are represented in reverse order. The earlier passage read: Happens, Only, Beautiful; and now:
to have tasted Beautiful (l. 10)
to have known (l. 10) Only (l. 11)
to have smelled Happens (l. 11)
three syntagmatic fragments dependent on the distant And o combined impression of the senses and the intellect. These fragments mimic again the rhythm of the horse's gait; but—a fact of high imaginative value—blended into them is an invitation to skip and dance (to the steps of the animal). The invitation is presumably made to a group of adolescents (kids), curious and excited accompanying this extraordinary cart, skipping in the streets of the metropolis (in case it is of interest, probably Paris; in a prose piece celebrating the city, very dear to Cummings, one reads: “In crooked streets young voices cry flowers” Norman 1958:191):
skip / dance / kids / hop / point / at (l. 11) / red / blue
yellow / violet / white / orange / green- (l. 12) / ness (l. 13)
I have divided the lexemes in order to emphasize the rhythm, which has become frenetic. Note the ambiguity of green, which is disambiguated from adjective to noun, with the impressionistic effect already observed in new- / ness.
Line 13, opening with a fragment of the preceding line, concludes with a return, in varied form, of the initial syntagmatic motif:
O what a proud dreamhorse
The rhythm eases out. The pauses, now longer, are indicated by the grammatical periods. The horse slows up and stops—an even longer pause signified by the dislocation of the last word, the last beat of the hoof:
.now who stops. Smiles.he
stamps (l. 14)
From a formal point of view, the return of the syntagmatic motif introduced in the opening line closes the composition in a “circular” fashion: a circularity indicated also by the repetition lavished within the poem:
happens—only—beautiful
Beautiful—Only—Happens
Evident at the level of the signified is an elementary lexematic antinomy:
FLORIST'S CART VS. MODERN METROPOLIS
which permits the following construction of a semic paradigm:
| Nature | vs. | Artifice, Culture |
| Vitality | vs. | Aridity |
| Beauty | vs. | Ugliness |
| Rhythm | vs. | Chaos |
| Silence | vs. | Din |
| Poeticality | vs. | Prosaicality |
It is thus possible to locate the image of the “cart” within a mythical-classical code, thereby indicating another possible—indeed, very probable—textual isotopy. Cummings's horse is a kind of Pegasus. In lines 13-14—(whose feet / almost walk air)—can be seen an allusion to the “winged horse.” The parentheses have here the normal function of an aside, but also that of an insertion onto another plane: the mythical isotopy. For the Greeks Pegasus was the horse which, stamping its hoof, caused the fountain of Hippocrenes (precisely, “fount of the horse”), sacred to the Muses, to spring up. Cummings's horse similarly stamps its hoof—and the poem is made! Evidently the classical reference corroborates the above-indicated antinomy: Poeticality vs. Prosaicality. So that there is no lack of ironic implications: Poetry has, in the world of the Metropolis, a chimeric appearance (smoothloomingly). But then the Cummings macrotext reveals, with its occurrences of the idea of the horse, that the latter is, in his idiolect, a symbol: an antiquated animal, threatened by the precariousness, the absurdity, the Beauty of the modern world.
The man who leads the horse is a ragamuffin (like the poet of the bohemian tradition), who speaks, but whose words are not heard (cries silence upward), do not reach anybody's ears; presumably his merchandise remains unsold. Ezra Pound likewise resorted to practically the same image, to indicate the condition of poetry in our century. In Hugh Selwyn Mauberley England has a “mute” song on her lips: Tell her that goes / With song upon her lips / But sings not out the song (n.d.:181). On the subject of ambiguity, one might recall the other sense of cry (“weep”).
The “limping” rhythm seems to allude to the particularly difficult condition of twentieth-century poetry, whose Pegasi do not have a balanced and harmonious amble.
One or two further clarifications, this time derived from a reconsideration of this lyric within the Cummings corpus: Is, Love, Spring are synonymous—and very recurrent—terms, all subordinate to the idea of the spontaneous, vital and beautiful act through which being and nature affirm their profound reality. Is is the vern-noun that contains the original existential act (and at the same time represents subjective affirmation).
As we have seen, to the first triad examined above is associated—again synonymously—the second: Beautiful, Only, Happens, terms which indicate the status of beauty: the acts (Happens) and their irrepeatability and uniqueness (Only).
Cummings's thematics—apart from certain lyrics inspired by slums, in which, among other things, a realistic and sometimes jargon-filled speech is employed—has as its preferred concerns Nature and Love: a highly delicate love consubstantial with Spring (evocations of freshness, purity, rebirth, innocence, spontaneity, instinct) and Autumn (melancholy, death, fatality, cruelty). It is a very simple, late-romantic—one might say “decadent”—thematics, but one which avoids sentimental fin de siècle languor precisely because of a scrupulous and analytical formal cerebralism that dominates sentiment and, so to speak, “contrives” it (Cummings's verse has been described as an “algebra of the heart”).
Underlying the poet's “naturism” is a subtle philosophical theme—often satirical and bitter—which extols the individual, the subject, the self, as the sole truth and as the source of love. Cummings did not love the “collectivity” (mankind, which through an ironical neologism he called manunkind), and declared himself against all institutions, including, therefore, language. Thus at the basis of his poetics is the opposition NATURE versus CULTURE.
One more observation: the poetry of Cummings aspires, as I have already said, to “simultaneity.” In effect the composition in question is a kind of compression of ideas, of images, of sensations. And the structural principle of simultaneity explains also the paradoxical syntactic distance of
—to have tasted Beautiful (l. 10)
from the interjection
And o (l. 4)
Another indication, finally, concerning ironic undertones. There is undoubtedly something grotesque in the smiling of the horse (Smiles, l. 14), which, at the level of the real, presumably shows its teeth, perhaps in neighing. In the symbolic isotopy, does Pegasus laugh? Or mock? Or deride? Or sneer? It is also ironical that the entire poem of 14 lines constitutes, of course, the canonical structure of the “sonnet.” The shadow of the sonnet is very often discernible within the corpus. On reconsideration, this particular pseudo-sonnet has also, in its own fashion, a rhyming (or better, assonantic) structure:
through (l. 1) / new- (l. 5)
this (l. 2) / kiss (l. 6)
wonderful (l. 3) / small (l. 7)
opens (l. 4) / happens (l. 8) / stamps (l. 14)
green (l. 12) / he (l. 14) / feet (l. 15)
Notes
-
Cf. Roman Jakobson, Novejsaja russkaja poèzija (Prague, 1921).
-
Cf. Guide to Kulchur (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1938), p. 152.
-
Cf. T. McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
References
Barilli, Renato, 1981. Viaggio al Termine della Parola (Milan: Feltrinelli).
Bo, Carlo, 1969. “La Nuova Poesia,” Storia della Letteratura Italiana (Milan: Garzanti), Vol. XI, 272ff.
Cianci, G., 1979. Futurismo/Vorticismo, Quaderno No. 9 (Palermo).
Coleridge, S. T., 1936. Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas M. Raysor (London: Constable).
Cummings, E. E., 1954 [1923]. Tulips and Chimneys, in Poems 1923-1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace).
Curi, Fausto, 1977. Perdita d'aureola (Turin: Einaudi).
De Micheli, M., 1964. Scritti di Picasso (Milan: Feltrivelli).
Eliot, T. S., 1963. The Waste Land, in Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London: Faber and Faber).
Frye, Northrop, 1967. The Modern Century (Oxford: Oxford UP).
Lotman, Yurij, 1969 [1967]. “Il problema di una tipologia della cultura,” in I Sistemi di Segni e lo Strutturalismo Sovietico, eds., R. Faccani and U. Eco (Milan: Bompiani). Italian trans. of “K probleme tipologij kul'tury,” in Trudy po znakovym sistemam Σημειωτιχὴ III (Tartu), 30-38.
Marinetti, F. T., 1914 (1912). “Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista,” in: “Lacerba,” reprinted in Marinetti e il Futurismo, ed., Luciano de Maria (Milan: Mondadori), 77-91.
Norman, C., 1958. E. E. Cummings: The Magic Maker (New York: Macmillan).
Pagnini, Marcello, 1958. “E. E. Cummings, poeta dell'impressione e dell'analisi,” Studi Americani 4, 344-359.
Pound, Ezra, 1914. “Vorticism,” Fortnightly Review 96 (Sept. 1), 468.
n.d. [1920] Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, in Selected Poems, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber).
Stein, Gertrude, 1938. Picasso (Boston: Beacon Press).
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Epiphanies Are Hard to Come By: Cummings’ Uneasy Mask and the Divided Audience
Tulips, Chimneys, &
