SOURCE: Webster, Michael. “E. E. Cummings: Romantic Ideology and Technique.” In Reading Visual Poetry after Futurism: Marinetti, Apollinaire, Schwitters, Cummings, pp. 111-40. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.

[In the following essay, Webster examines the effect of Cummings's typographical experimentation on his Romantic themes.]

Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.

—E. E. C. (CP [The Complete Poems] 223)

A “simultaneity of the radically disparate” describes the poetry of E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) rather well. Critics have long been puzzled by the simultaneous presence in his poetry of romantic sentiments and experimental typography. Early critics like R. P. Blackmur often deplored the romanticism (calling it “incorrigibly sentimental”) while they ignored or suppressed the typographical “peculiarities.” The following is from Blackmur's 1930 essay, “Notes on E. E. Cummings' Language:”

… extensive consideration of these peculiarities today has very little importance, carries almost no reference to the meaning of the poems. … At present the practice can only be “allowed for,” recognized in the particular instance, felt, and forgotten: as the diacritical marks in the dictionary are forgotten once the sound of the word has been learned. The poem, after all, only takes wing on the page, it persists in the ear.

(“Notes” 291)

Blackmur's conception of lyric poetry as overheard discourse (an idea that goes back at least as far as John Stuart Mill) forces him to see Cummings' visual devices as something peripheral to the essence of the poem, as “notation,” and not as a different kind of sign-making. Jonathan Culler notes that concentration on the voice of the speaker may lead to a neglect of the sheer play of sound associations or of intricately patterned verbal and visual design structures often found in poetry (“Changes” 40-41).

Northrop Frye called these two aspects of the lyric melos and opsis, or “babble” and “doodle” (275). For Frye, the “radical” or root of babble is charm: “the hypnotic incantation that, through its pulsing dance rhythm, appeals to involuntary physical response, and hence is not far from the sense of magic, or physically compelling power” (278). The root of “doodle” is riddle:

a fusion of sensation and reflection, the use of an object of sense experience to stimulate a mental activity in connection with it. Riddle was originally the cognate object of read, and the riddle seems intimately involved with the whole process of reducing language to visible form, a process that runs through such by-forms of riddle as hieroglyphic and ideogram. The actual riddle-poems of Old English … belong to a culture in which such a phrase as “curiously inwrought” is a favorite aesthetic judgement.

(280)

We saw how Apollinaire combined incantation (Frye notes the “etymological descent of charm from carmen, song”) with “curiously inwrought” visual riddle-charms in some of his calligrams. Cummings constructs intricate visual patterns that “address the ear through the eye” (Frye 278). His visual effects do not function solely as notations for the speaking voice, however; they interact with the syntax, spelling, and punctuation of the verbal material to produce the whole meaning of the poem. Blackmur demotes these riddling, visual aspects of Cummings' poetry precisely because he cannot see (hear?) poetry as anything other than overheard discourse.

Some critics of the generation after Blackmur tried to rehabilitate Cummings' puzzling orthographic, syntactic, and visual devices by noting their quirky effectiveness in capturing movement. At the same time, however, many of these critics preferred to emphasize the lyrical, meditative Cummings over the satirical, playful enfant terrible. Chief among these is Norman Friedman, who tried to counter charges against the frivolous nature of verbal and visual play in Cummings by showing that the poet had a serious, transcendental message to impart, a message that matured and deepened as he grew older. In his book, E. E. Cummings: The Growth of a Writer (1962), Friedman sought to tame the wild irruption of typographical and visual devices in Cummings' poetry by shunting them into generic categories:

… in general Cummings uses metrical stanzas for his more “serious” poems, and reserves his experiments by and large for his free verse embodiments of satire, comedy, and description. Parody, pun, slang, and typographical distortion are called into being by the urgencies of the satirical mode, which requires the dramatic rendition of scorn, wit, and ridicule. Violence in the meaning: violence in the style. Similarly, as we shall see, the movement required of a descriptive poem calls in turn for somewhat similar distortions. Motion in the mind: motion in the eye.

(47)

Despite the unease betrayed by the quotation marks around “serious,” Friedman clearly distinguishes among greater and lesser generic categories, putting the typographical into the lesser. Of course, one could find exceptions to Friedman's “general” strictures dividing the “serious” from the satirical and descriptive (“brIght” [CP 455] and “o / the round” [CP 606] come immediately to the mind), but that would be to conduct the argument in the same terms of “serious” vs. less serious. I would rather have the satiric and descriptive poems seen as different, but not one whit less “serious” than the more transcendental poems. Equally misguided appear more recent attempts to divide Cummings into two poets: the writer of “minor” lyrics and the major visual “innovator,” “the most inventive American poet of his time” (Kostelanetz, “E. E. Cummings” 230). While it is true that Cummings himself realized certain differences between his “lyrical” poems and some of his more emphatically “visual” ones (“not all of my poems are to be read aloud—some … are to be seen & not heard” [Letters (Selected Letters of E. E. Cummings) 267]), all his poems in whatever style or “genre” use similar, basic syntactical, morphological, typographical, and visual devices. The romantic sentiments, fractured words, dislocated syntax and morphological displacements (“he sharpens is to am / he sharpens say to sing” [CP 624]) occur in “lyric” as well as “visual” poems. The techniques he uses accept no division into lyric and visual, serious and satiric, romantic and experimental. On this technical level at least, we must take our Cummings whole—or not at all.

The reader may have noticed that I have already used the word “whole” twice in this chapter, once to refer to the complete meaning of a single poem and once to refer to the consistent use of technical devices. We will find that after we have passed through the pinhole of the avant-garde, styles usually considered “advanced” or disruptive can coexist quite nicely with a “backward” aesthetic that still sees the work of art as an autonomous, complete, organic whole, as is the case with Cummings. And even his startling technique combines elements of an ideology of Romantic individualism with avant-garde ideals of direct, living creation.

In an early (1920) review of T. S. Eliot, Cummings praises Eliot's “technique” and then proceeds to define technique in a thoroughly un-Eliotish way:

By technique we do mean one thing: the alert hatred of normality which, through the lips of a tactile and cohesive adventure, asserts that nobody in general and someone in particular is incorrigibly and actually alive. This someone is, it would seem, the extremely great artist: or, he who prefers above everything and within everything the unique dimension of intensity, which it amuses him to substitute in us for the comforting and comfortable furniture of reality.

(Miscellany 27)

Here we can see how romantic individualism and extreme experimentalism can be made to co-exist: Cummings' artist alertly hates normality, and his poems (“the lips of a tactile and cohesive adventure”) assert that he is alive. This aliveness, or “unique dimension of intensity” qualitatively differs from “comfortable” everyday reality. For poetry to be alive, individual, and intense, it must alertly and cleverly use new techniques. Norman Friedman has written well on Cummings' philosophy, so we'll let him summarize:

Cummings belongs with Coleridge and the Romantic tradition in seeing the natural order as superior to manmade orders. He, like Coleridge, views nature as process rather than product, as dynamic rather than static, as organic rather than artificial, and as becoming rather than being. And he, like Coleridge, believes that the intuitive or imaginative faculty in man can perceive this natura naturans directly, and so he is a transcendentalist. Specifically, he believes there is a world of awareness—the true world—which is outside of, above, and beyond the ordinary world of everyday perception. The ordinary world is a world of habit, routine, and abstract categories, and hence lies like a distorting film over the true world of spontaneity, suprise, and concrete life. The ordinary world is a world of two-dimensional surfaces, facts, and nouns—it is a second-hand world. The true world is a world of three-dimensional depths, truths, and verbs—it is the first-hand world. For Cummings, it is the poet's function to decry the ordinary world and exalt the true, to represent not what any camera can see, but to imitate the “actual crisp organic squirm” itself.

(Growth 5-6, Cummings quoted from Miscellany 19)

It should be noted that Cummings' transcendentalism is not a Platonic one of abstract essences, but one that recognizes the immanent in the first-hand, actual world of nature. Lloyd Frankenberg noted long ago (1949) that Cummings' separation of the world into “ordinary” and “true” stems from his celebration of the individual (144-45). Hence his satires of science, abstractions, “furnished souls,” and any “collective pseudobeast.” Hence also, “his reanimation of the cliché and the colloquial; his concern with the look of a poem, how it lies on the page, as well as the shape it makes in the ear” (Frankenberg 144). Cummings' techniques strive to enact aliveness, movement, individuality and to deride collective homogeneity.

Cummings' characteristic devices have often been described (see especially Friedman, Art 86-117, and Cureton, “Visual Form” and “A Case Study”) but seldom or only glancingly related to the practices of the futurists, Apollinaire or dadaist poets like Schwitters and Hausmann. Dickran Tashjian included a chapter on Cummings in Skyscraper Primitives, his study of the influence of dada on the American avant-garde. From Tashjian we learn why Cummings is not often treated in this context: there is little or no evidence of positive influence. Tashjian comments mainly on the similarities in attitude between the two, noting similar anti-art stances and insistences that the work of art be coterminous with life (182-87). Tashjian notes that in “i will be” Cummings imitates a flight of birds with capital letters and “creates a sense of simultaneity” by “a judicious use of parentheses” (170-71):

                                                            l oo k-
          pigeons fly ingand
whee(:are,SpRiN,k,LiNg an in-stant with sunLight
then)l-
ing all go BlacK wh-eel-ing

(CP 122)

Technically speaking, however, this passage reminds me more of futurist devices (capitalization, spacing) designed to iconically render an impression. We may note that Cummings uses more small-scale techniques (breaking individual words, capitalizing individual letters, the “sprinkled” punctuation) than the futurists.

At least two early critics of Cummings saw him in the context of the European avant-garde. R. P. Blackmur says that “Mr. Cummings belongs to the anti-culture group; what has been called at various times vorticism, futurism, dadaism, surrealism, and so on,” and whose “general dogma” he avers, consists of “a sentimental denial of the intelligence and the deliberate assertion that the unintelligible is the only object of significant experience” (“Notes” 287-88). According to Blackmur, the “relentless pursuit of the actual in terms of the immediate” causes Cummings to disregard the historical meanings of words and lose himself in private sensations:

Poetry, if we understand it, is not in immediacy at all. It is not given to the senses or free intuition. Thus, when poetry is written as if its substance were immediate and given, we have as a result a distorted sensibility and a violent inner confusion. We have, if the poet follows his principles, something abstract, vague, impermanent, and essentially private.

(“Notes” 311)

Blackmur criticizes Cummings as if he were Marinetti; my second chapter sees a similar gap between Marinetti's intuition and a language used as if it were material. For Blackmur, Cummings' language is naive or obscure because it is not reflective; it disregards “the only method of making the unique experience into a poem—the conventions of the intelligence” (“Notes” 289).

We shall see that Cummings plays off conventions quite intelligently, but let us first look at our other early critic, John Peale Bishop, who sees Cummings in almost exactly the same terms as Blackmur, but this time more positively:

The mind in Cummings has become its own material. The center no longer holds and he ends by becoming fascinated by the speed of its fragments. By sticking strictly as may be to what he knows, by staying within a record of sensations, Cummings has been able to do what a generation of poets in Europe, with considerably less success, attempted to do. Whether they were called Futurists in Italy, or Dadaists in France, or by other names in other countries, their aims have been more completely accomplished by Cummings than by any poet on the continent.

(128)

Both critics emphasize the immediacy, the lack of distance between sensation and the written poem, with Bishop giving Cummings more credit for “sticking strictly” to his sensations. Neither give the poet credit for conscious craft, for making a complete artifact.

No doubt the reader has noticed the echo of Yeats in Bishop's remarks and the strong influence of Eliot on Blackmur's. A theory of poetry that values the impersonal, dramatic, and symbolic might naturally misapprehend the individual, lyric, and metonymic poetry of Cummings. Bishop values Cummings' “lyrical and satirical” gifts, but notes somewhat ruefully that “nothing has made him a dramatic poet” (130). Of course he is right. The drama in Cummings comes from the way words are handled on the page and not from any symbolic maskmaking. Blackmur's “futurist” account of Cummings' style may be harder for the contemporary critic to comprehend. Can Cummings be profitably viewed as a poet writing down his impressions and sensations using futurist techniques, or must we make further distinctions?

Cummings early on expressed his admiration for various forms of the “New Art” as he called it in his Harvard commencement address (see Miscellany 5-11). Richard S. Kennedy notes in his biography of the poet how he admired Cézanne, the cubists, and the futurists, quoting from some notes Cummings made around 1918:

… he was especially taken by Futurism because of his appreciation of movement in art. Balla and Duchamp “paint the fact of motion.” He is ready to declare that “the highest form of composition is the Squirm, it is made of Creeping, Stretching, Gliding, Shrinking, Gripping. As emphasis tends towards angularities, the composition Wags, Hops, Bounds, Fiddles, Sprints, Fumbles, Trembles and Struts.”

(Dreams 180)

Cummings speaks of painting here, and his own early non-representational paintings betray a futurist influence (mainly in their radiating composition), filtered through Joseph Stella and Delaunay disciples (the so-called “Synchromists”) like the Americans Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell. Around 1927, Cummings switched to a more figurative style reminiscent in some respects of Cézanne. (For a reproduction in color of a “futuristic” non-representational painting, Noise Number 13, see Cohen, Poet and Painter 27, Plate 5. For information on Cummings the painter, see the above title and Cohen, E. E. Cummings' Paintings, and Kidder, “Twin Obsessions.”) Cummings soon developed techniques in poetry to write “the fact of motion.” He believed these techniques to be new. Writing in 1920 to his father on the following passage

(Do you think?)the
i do,world
is probably made
of roses & hello:
(of solongs and,ashes)

(CP 66)

he commented, “‘roses & hello’ also the comma after ‘and’ (‘and,ashes’) are Firsts” (Letters 71). The first First, the nominalization of a part of speech other than a verb, was a device that would make Cummings infamous, especially among those who do not like their grammar rules toyed with. Later, he became fond of turning abstract relational words like relative pronouns into nouns, as in “lenses extend / unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish / returns on unself” (CP 554). It's possible that Cummings picked up the use of the ampersand from the futurists, but he could have seen it used by Blake or other 18th century authors as well. Cummings probably had seen very few examples of futurist words-in-freedom. He did, however, have some acquaintance with Marinetti's theoretical writings, taking notes of them as reported in A. J. Eddy's Cubists and Post-Impressionism (Cohen, Poet and Painter 159-160). The second First, the intimate use of punctuation (here the comma softly indicates a fall, a pause, an ashflake) owes nothing to Marinetti or Apollinaire since, as we have seen, neither used traditional punctuation marks as a major iconic device.

It is worthwhile to note that in his first experiments in visual arrangements of words on the page (1916), Cummings did away with most punctuation in order to concentrate on overall visual effect:

Tumbling-hair
                                                  picker of buttercups
                                                                                                                                  violets
dandelions
And the big bullying daisies
                                                                                          through the field wonderful
with eyes a little sorry
Another comes
                                                  also picking flowers.

(CP 26)

This poem imitates Pound's “The Return” in the use of modern diction to treat obliquely a classical subject, narrating the abduction of Persephone (“Tumbling-hair”) by Hades (“Another”). Cummings was impressed by Pound's modern treatment of the classical subject, but he noted, “the inaudible poem—the visual poem, the poem for not ears but eye—moved me more” (quoted in Dreams 106). In “Tumbling-hair,” Cummings suggests motion not by using a telling verb or by manipulating punctuation, but by spatial syntax: “the visual rhythm of the phrasing suggests the wanderings of the picker to the different locations of the wildflowers; the list of flowers is scattered as in a field” (Fairley 26).

Soon, he was combining such spatial effects with various punctuation marks to suggest movement and to reinforce and render iconically the meanings of words (as we saw with the ash-flake). He wrote a friend in 1918, “Note punctuation exemplifying a theory of my soul that every ‘word’ purely considered implies its own punctuation” (quoted in Kennedy, Dreams 183). Cummings refers in this letter to the poem “SNO,” which is a lesson in how to look and listen to a snowfall:

                    SNO
          a white idea(Listen
drenches:earth's ugly)mind.,Rinsing with exact death
the annual brain
                                                            clotted with loosely voices
look
look. Skilfully
.fingered by(a parenthesis
the)pond on whoseswooning edge
blacktreesthink
(hear little knives of flower
stropping sof a. Thick silence)
blacktreesthink
tiny,angels sharpen:themselves
(on
          air)
don't speak
                                        A white idea,
drenching. earth's brain detaches
clottingsand from a a nnual(ugliness
of)rinsed mind slowly:
from!the:A wending putrescence. a.of,loosely
;voices

(CP 99)

Certainly the scattered commas, periods, and semicolons imitate the visual effect of snowfall, while a middle pair of parentheses visually reinforces two verbal meanings: the rhetorically and visually parenthetical pond and the edges of that pond. Note how the thinking trees “surround” the parenthetical edges around “hear … silence.” The snowflakes (“little knives of flower”) are so soft, they strop not “a sofa” but “sof a,” which conflates the indefinite article with the final “a” of “sofa,” creating a softer “soft” that lacks the final alveolar stop “t.”

This curious “sof a” encapsulates two more of Cummings' favorite techniques: syntactical transposition and splitting letters from words to form puns. Indeed, Cummings' visual effects nearly always occur within a linear syntactical context. Very often this syntax is disrupted, either by deleting or transposing words, by visually separating words from one another, or by making one part of speech take the place of another, as in “he danced his did” (CP 515). Cummings thus plays with an astounding number of expectations or assumptions we have when we read poetry: lineation, punctuation, syntax, spelling, word order, word integrity and capitalization. He manipulates spatial, visual and syntactical elements of language as material, creating physical effects on the page. These effects iconically reinforce meaning and emotion. Thus the relatively straightforward (only one transposition) rinsing of “the annual brain clotted with loosely voices” becomes at the end of the poem:

don't speak
                                        A white idea,
drenching. earth's brain detaches
clottingsand from a a nnual(ugliness
of)rinsed mind slowly:
from!the:A wending putrescence. a.of,loosely
;voices

(CP 99)

We see earth's mind being cleansed by this white idea (white implies blankness, a clean slate) as the punctuation marks-snowflakes dance (and descend: “!:..,;”) between the now unclotted, “detached” syntax. The last line “;voices” neatly pairs the nearly silent snow with the now rinsed voices in the brain. Note how Cummings combines purely physical effects with ones that present only an analogy of movement: the parentheses imitate an edge; the scattered punctuation marks imitate the random downward movement of the flakes but not their shape; and the scrambled syntax is only analogous to “unclotting,” itself a metaphor for mental cleaning.

Critics trained in linguistics and semiotics rather loosely term these analogies and resemblances “iconic,” following C. S. Peirce's definition of an icon as something that represents its “object mainly by its similarity” (2.276). I say “loosely” because as Umberto Eco has rather painstakingly shown, “iconism is not a single phenomenon, nor indeed a uniquely semiotic one” (Theory 216). However, these theoretical difficulties should not deter us from what Richard D. Cureton calls “the construction of a practical, critical tool” (“Poetic Syntax” 338). Cureton has worked extensively and well examining the various aesthetic uses of Cummings' iconic syntax, which he defines as the use of “some aspect of the physical form of the syntax, the spatiotemporal ordering of the words … to support the conceptual content of the poem” (“Case Study” 211). We have seen how the scrambled syntax in “SNO” supports the conceit of “unclotting” the mind. (For a more general discussion of iconism in poetry, see Max Nänny, “Iconic Dimensions.” For other linguistic criticism of Cummings see Fairley, Freeman, and Cureton, “‘he danced his did’: an analysis.”) Now our task is to see how Cummings' iconism differs from that of Marinetti, Apollinaire, and Schwitters.

Although it is difficult to pinpoint exact correspondences between ideology and style, one might expect some differences in style between Cummings and Marinetti, considering their differences in ideology. Cummings' experimental styles spring from his consistent individualism, and from his concern that the work of art express the “alive” individual. In 1926 he wrote that the poet cares little about something made, but “is obsessed by Making” (CP 225). And in 1944 he stressed that “nothing which is not alive can be art” (six 68). To be “alive” the poet must write like himself, which is difficult because “nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all the time—and whenever we do it, we're not poets” (quoted in Norman 353-54). Such a philosophy is a far cry from Marinetti's dreamt-of unification with material, and his call for the annihilation of psychology in poetry. Marinetti's style seeks to imitate the chaotic flux of mass movements like war, while Cummings seeks to register an individual, living response to existence. While Cummings the painter was early influenced by Duchamp and Balla and the “Synchromists,” the poet worked out his own methods for liberating “the actual crisp organic squirm—the IS” (Miscellany 19). While Marinetti strings nouns and unconjugated verbs together as if they had the force of chaotic reality, Cummings manipulates spelling, syntax, word order, and punctuation in physical ways which interact with the meanings of the words. Marinetti disparages syntax and punctuation as relics of a too-literary past; Cummings manipulates them to iconic advantage.

There are some similarities, however. Both poets tried to inject life and presence into literature by various typographical manipulations. But whereas Marinetti's life consisted almost wholly of bombastic explosions and futurist propaganda, Cummings sought to render quieter moods:

birds(
                    here,inven
ting air
U
)sing
tw
iligH(
t's
          v
                    va
                    vas(
vast
ness.Be)look
now
          (come
soul;
&:and
who
          s)e
                    voi
c
es
(
are
          ar
                    a

(CP 448)

Here, the parentheses imitate not a pond's edge, but the swooping shapes of birds (they seem to be swallows) at twilight. Cummings composes solely for the eye here, rendering the hesitations of the mind (“come / soul; / &:and”) and the fugitive nature of birdsong in air (“are / ar / a”) by marks that cannot be entirely pronounced. Marinetti uses letters as non-pronounceable design elements in “Après la Marne,” but not in ways that so clearly suggest analogies to movement or sound. These visual “voices” of the birds are scattered in the vastness of the sky, whose shape they mirror. This kind of symmetry, typical even in a poem like this about random voices, shows us another difference between the two poets' concepts of “life.” Like most Romantics, Cummings thought of the poem as a living organic whole, displaying symmetries and warts similar to Nature's. Marinetti takes a more avant-garde position: art must be coterminous with life, so it must be material, not aesthetic. Cummings' aesthetic is closer to Apollinaire's combination of avant-garde and traditional stances.

But of course, again we must qualify our statements. Like Cummings, Apollinaire's visual effects usually occur within the context of a linear syntax (and as we have seen, sometimes the context of stanza and rhyme also). Cummings will often use iconic devices within the context of larger stanzaic structures (most noticeably the sonnet) and very occasionally will hide an insistent beat beneath a confusing facade of misspaced letters. The following description of a striptease,

sh estiffl
ystrut sal
lif san
dbut sth
epoutin(gWh.ono:w
s li psh ergo
wnd ow n,

(CP 445)

relineates to a roughly iambic

she st í ffly strúts all í fs and búts
the póuting whó now sl í ps her gówn dówn

(I am grateful to Cureton, “Visual Form” 253 for this observation.) Notice the interpolated “ono” and the slow, almost drunken diction (“s li psh ergo”) created by the spacings in the last two lines. I have not found a shaped poem by Cummings (he wrote very few of them) that conceals a linear stanza structure as in Apollinaire. We saw with the pond's edge in “SNO” and the swallows in “birds(” that Cummings, like Apollinaire, can use shapes to indicate objects, but he usually incorporates these shapes within a more linear context:

a-
float on some
?
i call twilight you
'll see
an in
-ch
of an if
&
who
is
the
)
more
dream than become
more
am than imagine

(CP 571)

Here Cummings uses a typographical symbol (a parenthesis) instead of a word to represent an object—in this case the crescent moon. He also places a question mark in lieu of the expected “thing” after “some” in order to show “the proper degree of hesitancy” (Friedman, Art 105). Apollinaire represents the moon in similar fashion in his “Voyage” (fig. 32). In this calligram we see four (five if you count the telegraph wires) pictographs: a cloud, a bird, a train and stars in the sky. The moon (a much fuller crescent than Cummings') is isolated in the “c” of “c'est” in the sentence “la douce nuit lunaire et pleine d'étoiles c'est ton visage que je ne vois plus” (“The sweet moonlit and full of stars night it's your face that I will never see again”). The reader should note that the beloved's face is made not only of the night and stars, but also appears iconically stamped in the moon itself (“it is your face”), traditional symbol of faraway, changeable womanhood. Instead of his usual practice of building or tracing an icon or emblem with many words, Apollinaire integrates a pictorial icon at the letter-level, something that Cummings does much more often.

For example, we see the full moon in “mOOn Over tOwns mOOn” (CP 383) and (perhaps more subtly) we see it rise in the sky if we look at the following in reverse of reading order:

O:
m
o
o
n
o
          (ver no(w ove(r all;

(CP 385)

By placing his icons at the letter level, Cummings more firmly integrates picture and syntax, visual and literary. This integration of visual and literary codes into one form will later become a cardinal principle of the Concrete poets: isomorphism.

However, Cummings often embeds his visual syntax in larger, more arbitrary “stanzaic” forms. In “a- / float on some” the lines follow an arbitrary pattern of 1-3-1-3-1-3-1-3-1 (Friedman, Art 105). These stanza-like forms provide an outer shell through which the syntax and visual effects must run, somewhat like the pictograms of Apollinaire. In more traditional poems, they tend to become inventive song-like stanza structures (precision creating movement):

buy me an ounce and i'll sell you a pound.
Turn
gert
                    (spin!
helen)the
slimmer the finger the thicker the thumb(it's
whirl,
girls)
round and round
early to better is wiser for worse.
Give
liz
          (take!
tommy)we
order a steak and they send us a pie(it's
try,
boys)
mine is yours

(CP 513)

Here, Cummings invents a stanzaic pattern that reinforces and highlights the unusual meter of the song (dactylic trimeter, followed by three strong stresses, followed by an amphimacer). The poems cast in these lyrical visual structures (and the ones in more conventional stanzaic forms) tend to rely more on linguistic manipulation than on iconic presentation to achieve their effects. For example, the intriguing line “early to better is wiser for worse” forms a kind of anti-proverb out of three comparative terms (“better,” “wiser,” “worse”) and the Poor Richard saying, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Combine these with the marriage ceremony's “for better or for worse” and we have a complex intertextual statement that parodies thrifty bourgeois wisdom and instead urges a less prudent approach to both sexual and monetary giving and taking.

The strict patterning of lines in “a- / float” and “buy me an ounce” might seem to offer a possible analogue to some of the more formally composed visual poetry of Kurt Schwitters. However, Cummings never wrote visual or verbal non-representational poetry like Schwitters. Cummings' sound poems (if they can be called that) are representational: they render dialect or onomatopoeia. Often the dialect is a stylized and opaque New Yorkese, as in this anti-war poem:

ygUDuh
                              ydoan
                              yunnuhstan
                              ydoan o
                              yunnuhstan dem
                              yguduh ged
                              yunnuhstan dem doidee
                              yguduh ged riduh
                              ydoan o nudn
LISNbudLISN
                              dem
                              gud
                              am
                              lidl yelluh bas
                              tuds weer goin
duhSIVILEYEzum

(CP 547)

Here, spelling and spatial layout do function as notations for reading. For example, we can hear the speaker's nasal intonation in “ydoan o nudn” (“you don't know nothing”) and we can see the common American spondaic stress when swearing in the line breaks of “gud / am” and “bas / tuds.” The wildly distorted spelling and the visual structure of the lines force the reader to work hard to produce the proper sound and meaning. These visual distortions involve the reader more effectively in the production of the dialect (and point of view) of the speaker than merely listening to a recitation would. The poem engages the eye at least as much as it does the ear. In the following excerpt, Cummings renders onomatopoetically a popular art not often discussed in high-brow criticisms of sound poetry, that of black scat-singing:

                              ump-A-tum
                                                                      ;tee-die
                                                  uM-tuM
                                                                                tidl
                                                                                          -id
                                                            umptyumpty(OO———
                                                                                                                                            !
                                                            ting
                                        Bam-
                              :do),chippity.

(CP 426)

The visual arrangement also suggests a soft-shoe tap dance to me, but the intent to represent a certain form of rhythmical nonsense-speech should be clear.

Similarly, when Cummings isolates individual letters, it is not in order to make a non-representational visual structure, as in the “i-Gedicht” or the “Gesetztes Bildgedicht,” but to reinforce and amplify the meaning or iconically represent that meaning, as in this elegy for the music critic Paul Rosenfeld:

o
the round
little man we
loved so isn't
no!w
a gay of a
brave and
a true of a
who have
r
olle
d i
nt
o
n
o
w(he)re

(CP 606)

The isolated o's render Rosenfeld's rotundity, while various word-splittings give us two “o no's” not audibly present in the linear text. The final line isolates the “he” in “nowhere,” showing the reader that Rosenfeld is still “(he)re” in the living poem. Claus Clüver has pointed out to me that Rosenfeld may also be outlined in profile by the shape of the poem, with the “o” at the top becoming a smallish head, and the next eight lines forming a rather full chest and belly, which then taper down to the legs and feet. The reader may also have noted the 1-3-1 line pattern, with some “lines” being made up of single letters only. Although there is no reason to believe that he could have known of it, Cummings seems to be expanding on Schwitters' dictum that “the basic material of poetry is not the word but the letter” (LW5: 190). However, Cummings certainly would not countenance a reduction of poetry to groups of letters alone.

Breaking words into components to form puns constitutes a playing with the linguistic code, but not a displacement of that code into another sign system. Nor does it constitute what I have called a mixing of codes as in Schwitters' “An Anna Blume.” Cummings' semantic, syntactic, and spatial transformations break rules in a consistent manner (usually as a way of overcoding the meaning) and consistently leave other rules unbroken. Richard Cureton has shown how the reader constructs a set of rules for making sense of syntactical transformation (“‘he danced’” 245-53). For example, the reader must assume that grammatical and case markers remain valid: for if Cummings wants to abandon word-order restrictions, he must leave the grammatical markers intact as a guide to the reader. In the following stanza

me under a opens
(of petals of silence)
hole bigger than
never to have been

(CP 634)

we know that the subject of “opens” is “hole” and not “petals” or “me” because, in spite of the syntactic dislocations, the grammatical markers remain in force. As far as I know, this rule remains constant throughout Cummings' work, but when it comes to visual devices, often the rules change to suit the needs of individual poems.

Often, words are split in order to create visual puns (as in the “o / n / o” of the tribute to Paul Rosenfeld), but this same device can also be used for other purposes, as we saw with the “are / ar / a” ending of “birds(” (CP 448). He finds a variety of uses for visual non-grammatical devices like punctuation marks and capital letters. The exclamation point in the following poem differs in semantic function from those we saw in the poem in Rosenfeld (“no!w”) and the one in the scat-singing imitation:

!blac
k
agains
t
(whi)
te sky
?t rees whic
h fr
om droppe
d
,
le
af
a:;go
e
s wh
IrlI
n
.g

(CP 487)

Cummings splits words in this poem not primarily to form puns but to indicate the fragmentary nature of the perception and to mime the leaf's detaching and its subsequent descent. This time a syntactic dislocation and not a word-splitting forms a pun. The change of “a dropped leaf goes” to “droppe / d /, / le / af / a:;go / e / s,” serves to isolate “a:;go,” which tells us that most of the leaves dropped awhile ago. S. V. Baum asserts that the exclamation point at the beginning of the poem stands for a flash of lightning (“Technique” 119). One can find support for such an interpretation by referring to another poem where the context makes the meaning more obvious:

n(o)w
                    the
how
          dis(appeared cleverly)world
iS Slapped:with;liGhtninG
!

(CP 347)

Here too, the sudden appearance of the world is “cleverly” emphasized, this time by parentheses. Often, the context will provide readers with clues as to how punctuation marks should be read within an individual poem. Various parentheses, commas, exclamation points, and spacings always work in a consistent manner within individual poems. But a semantics or grammar of visual marks cannot be carried over from poem to poem. Cummings usually provides enough visual, thematic, and grammatical clues to enable the reader to parse the meaning of items, like punctuation marks, that he has endowed with new semantic content. His practice thus contrasts sharply with Marinetti and Schwitters, who reach the limits of semiotic intelligibility. Occasionally, as in “! blac,” the marks may be open to various interpretations: I would not want to rule out the lightning idea, but I find it a trifle improbable. Here, (as is not often the case with Cummings) we need intentional evidence to make a sure judgement.

Cummings uses individual letters and marks as a logical part of an explicit meaning-structure, the poem. Schwitters uses these individual elements non-representationally, either as visual elements or as vocables in a sound-poem. When Schwitters writes a poem with recognizable words and sentences, he emphasizes juxtaposition of discourses (often found ones) and codes, which contributes not towards a unified meaning-structure but to a mixing of codes, an undecidable “abstract” structure. Even Cummings' asyntactic visual structures function within syntactic linear statements and also within larger literary codes and genres such as description, elegy, satire, and so on. Cummings often carries syntactic and visual play much further than other writers, but can often be depended upon to encode clues to decipherment within the poem.

The experienced reader soon learns the rules of this “ungrammar” of syntactical and visual devices (see Cureton, “Visual Form,” Fairley, and Freeman), some few of which we have illustrated here. His attitude towards syntax and form distinguishes Cummings from his predecessors. Marinetti wanted to do away with both syntax and form and thus impoverished his literary means of expression. Apollinaire wavered between asyntactic juxtaposition and a more formal, ordered art. The calligrams represent something of a hybrid compromise between the two. Schwitters theoretically recognized only non-representational form, allowing the literary content of his works to stand in enigmatic juxtaposition. The visual and sonic poetry of the early three seems to come upon them almost as an accident or by-product of their avant-garde activity; Cummings by contrast explores the use of visual, sonic, and syntactic devices for specifically artistic uses. These devices are not used as part of propaganda for a new art or a new way of living; they are simply ways of enlivening poems. Whatever progaganda they proclaim is implicit in the poetry. The incorporation of avant-garde techniques into a concept of organic form only became possible after the avant-garde had failed to integrate autonomous art with life, failed to “put an end to the production of works of art” (Bürger 57).

These devices were harnessed, invented and elaborated by Cummings in order to render his art more direct, more alive. We have seen how such devices can fail to impress even highly sophisticated readers like R. P. Blackmur, who see them as falling outside of their conception of poetry. In order for Blackmur to read Cummings at all, he had to minimize and even suppress these typographical devices, saying they carry “almost no reference to the meaning of the poems” (“Notes” 291). Blackmur was so convinced that poetry existed for the ear alone that he included this comment in a later (1941) review of Cummings: “if he is trying to write a poetry in symbols—a mere eye poetry—then he is committing the sin against the Holy Ghost” (“Review” 76). Of course, Blackmur is right: historically, poetry was a matter of rhythmically sung, chanted, or spoken sounds. Blackmur feels the avant-garde challenge to tradition, and responds with particular vehemence. We have seen that although Cummings does not belong to the avant-garde as we define it, Blackmur insists on leaguing him with “the anti-culture group; what has been called at various times vorticism, futurism, dadaism, surrealism, and so on” (“Notes” 287). Perhaps Cummings is more worthy of attack than the rest of the “group” precisely because he acts as if it were a perfectly natural and acceptable thing for a poet to split words up over the page, to punctuate iconically and to write a poetry (such as “are / ar/ a”) for the eye alone. Cummings is more dangerous than Marinetti because he claims to be producing an autonomous work within that institution we call “art.” Criticism of Cummings divides between those, like Blackmur, who would exclude him from that institution and those, like Friedman, who search for ways to include him.

I would think that few scholars would take Blackmur's side now, but the struggle illustrates the changed status of art after the avant-garde. (In a review of the posthumously published Collected Poems, Helen Vendler finds Cummings' “unreadable-aloud poems [his] most original and charming contribution to English verse” [324]. While she praises the visual poems as “exquisite and fragile triumphs,” she finds the poet himself to be “abysmally short on ideas.” Moreover, his undiminished “optimism excludes too much,” inevitably sounding like sentimentality [325]. That these strictures contain a measure of truth should not blind us to Cummings' very real merits, both lyrical and visual.) In a “simultaneity of the radically disparate,” how are we to know what is legitimate art and who is to legitimize it? Cummings' life overlaps at each end the old avant-garde and the new. Though he was really very little influenced by the old avant-garde, his use of similar devices for wholly artistic purposes was made possible by the avant-garde's attack on art as an institution. It remains to clarify his relationship with the new avant-garde, represented here by concrete poetry.

In his survey of visual devices in Cummings' poetry, Richard Cureton includes a section on concrete poetry, which he defines as “texts that free the perceiver from the enforced linearity of the spoken word” (“Visual Form” 272). While I have no quarrel with this particular stylistic definition, I should like to add that early concrete texts seek to give the word a spatial, not language-bound syntax and that they present themselves in some sense as “authorless” artifacts, as signs that refer back not to a subject who “tells” us something but to themselves and their own process of signification. We have seen an example of spatial syntax already, the “o no!” in

o
the round
little man we
loved so isn't
no!w

(CP 606)

The reader must jump across intervening linear syntax to form the phrase. As Cureton notes, with Cummings such spatial syntaxes are almost always embedded in syntactically coherent (if not always normally ordered) statements (“Visual Form” 272).

o pr
gress verily thou art m
mentous superc
lossal hyperpr
digious etc i kn
w & if you d
n't why g
to yonder s
called newsreel s
called theatre & with your
wn eyes beh
ld The
                    (The president The
                    president of The president
                    of the The)president of
                    the(united The president of the
                    united states The president of the united
                    states of The President Of The)United States
                    Of America unde negant redire quemquam supp
sedly thr
w
          i
               n
                    g
                         a
                              b
                                   aseball

(CP 392)

The initial “o” stands in for all “disappeared” o's on the left margin. Other o's remain unaffected. The reader soon realizes that this present/absent “o” represents iconically the “supposedly thrown” baseball. This iconic device graphically shows the reader what Cummings objects to in the “progress” of the “socalled newsreel”: the film presents a mediated, unreal event as if it were present, actual, and alive. The newsreel lacks aliveness and spontaneity, as does the empty pomp of the ceremony of throwing out the first ball of the season. Such an event is staged and ultimately extraneous to the “win” and “gab” that constitute “baseball.” Cureton sees an arm in “wingab” that throws the “ball-like o up the left margin, sweeping up the o's in the various words split across the line boundaries” (“Visual Form” 250). Such a visual reversal of normal reading order constitutes spatial syntax. Cureton further notes that the “fanfare” (“The president,” etc.) in the poem can be read downwards and diagonally. Reading outside the parentheses produces another reading of the phrase. He comments: “the strobing audiovisual linguistic forms enact the auditory echoing the passage describes” (“Visual Form” 272).

The repetition we see in the “fanfare” about the President that makes possible multi-directional readings is not common in Cummings' poetry. We see it in what is perhaps his most “concrete” poem, “brIght”:

brIght
bRight s??? big
(soft)
soft near calm
(Bright)
calm st?? holy
(soft briGht deep)
yeS near sta? calm star big yEs
alone
(wHo
Yes
near deep whO big alone soft near
deep calm deep
????Ht?????T)
Who(holy alone)holy(alone holy)alone

(CP 455)

Here Cummings abandons syntax for a numerical (and partially spatial) pattern. As the star emerges from the question marks, the concept “bright” becomes more questionable, transformed into a metaphysical principle. The poem uses 11 words 44 times: each word appears as many times as it has letters (three-letter words are used three times, and so on). The “stanzas” follow an increasing 1-2-3-4-5 line pattern. These numerical patterns may serve to reinforce a sense of a hidden pattern in the universe, but as Cureton notes, this “metaphysical, metatextual” iconism (if we can call it that) differs from the more clearly motivated iconism of the question marks that represent the emerging star (“Visual Form” 270).

We can see this difference clearly when we look at the asyntactic, patterned repetition of a concrete poem like Haroldo de Campos' “branco” (1957, fig. 31). Here the words, in the absence of syntax, are organized not numerically, but spatially and musically. The poem can be read across, down, or diagonally like the “fanfare” in Cummings' “o pr / gress” poem. The repetitions form not a numerical pattern, but a loosely musical one. It is not too difficult to see the vertical rows of words as chords, or to use an analogy that de Campos himself employed, to see the horizontal descending “vermelho” (red) and “estanco” (I stanch, I stop) lines in a kind of visual-verbal counterpoint to the top line of “blanco” (white). As in the “fanfare” (but not so much in “brIght”), the visual structure reinforces and, at times, coincides with the verbal meanings. De Campos comments: “The maximum opening of the page coincides with the maximum blank of the page: a coinformation, at the visual level, with the effect of white color over a white surface in painting, or the word white written in white ink on white paper” (Williams 55). To which comment we must add the irony of writing in black letters a word (“branco”) that signifies its opposite: white.

Claus Clüver notes that one can read “branco” as an attempt to transfer the non-representational, self-contained structure of Mondrian's painting to poetry. For Clüver, the “four verbal elements [are] arranged in a spatial structure which is both static and full of dynamic possibilities” (“Painting” 32). Moreover, the poem is nearly as self-contained as a Mondrian painting: “Just as any path we may follow through the poem will ultimately send us back into the text for another excursion, so do the words out of which it is formed refer primarily to each other or to the space which surrounds them” (“Painting” 32). Cummings' poems are seldom so self-referential as this.

Even in his most repetitious and asyntactic poems (like “brIght”), Cummings never calls attention to the arbitrary sign-function of the poem in this way, for several reasons. For one, he seldom writes poems that can be seen (as “branco” can) as metapoetry, a text about texts. Secondly, he almost always embeds a multi-directional passage (like the “fanfare”) in a recognizable verbal syntax. His spatial syntax works most often at the letter-level and not at the word-level, as in most early concrete poems. Thus he calls attention to the reading process, to the deciphering of the poem as a kind of puzzle, and not to the arbitrariness of the signifier. Working within a linear verbal syntactic frame almost forces Cummings to gain his visual effects by splitting up words, since it would be quite difficult to make the spatial syntax coincide or act in counterpoint with the verbal by distributing whole words about the page. (Mallarmé tries something like this in Un coup de dés.) The concrete poets solved the problem by eliminating all or most of the linear syntax and then arranging a few whole words in a spatial syntax.

The concrete poets relied not only on spatial arrangement to order their words, but on musical devices and analogies to musical procedures like repetition, variation, and spatial “counterpoint.” They used a minimum number of words arranged spatially and “musically,” to make the poem seem like an object. Space and visible and aural language interact so closely in a concrete poem that they form a single gestalt: a semiotically isomorphic construction. This isomorphism eliminates references to an author, making the poem an “open” semiotic entity. The minimal message-content and lack of persona and ordering syntax leave the reader free to make a maximum of associations in interpreting the work.

Cummings' minimalism, even in works that make no overt reference to an author, is of a different kind. Spatial and verbal arrangement interact to create a single form, but words are split to create movement:

l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness

(CP 673)

In a poem roughly contemporaneous (1958) with “branco,” Cummings was more a minimalist than many concrete poets: using only three words, he makes them refer to “loneliness,” “oneliness,” the concept of “one” (repeated in numerical form four times), all the while iconically imitating the leaf's fall. The structure of the poem is not musical, but is based on the iconic fall of letters down the page and on the simple transposition of the initial “l” of “loneliness” to the beginning of the poem. The spatial arrangement of the letters serves only to imitate falling and to isolate the “l's.” While we can read various parts of the poem out of what might be considered normal syntactic order (“one” and even “iness”—Cummings' lower case ego fused through art into a oneness with a single falling leaf), it does not offer as many possible paths to the reader as “branco.” And instead of presenting the reader with an object, Cummings is more interested in writing down a certain physical and emotional movement by means of precise syntactical and orthographical dislocations.

Another poem, written about the same time, enacts a similar merging of poet and landscape; and this time the visual and lexical effects are integrated into a more complex syntax:

dim
i
nu
tiv
e this park is e
mpty(everyb
ody's elsewher
e except me 6 e
nglish sparrow
s)a
utumn & t
he rai
n
th
e
raintherain

(CP 696)

We find hidden in the first word of the poem the dim light and the familiar lower case “i” persona of the poet, who is “nu” (naked and new) to the world. The second stanza sports four lower case “e's” at the corners, emblematic of “e. e.,” the author. The stanza as a whole contains no fewer than 12 “e's” which iconically link the author, e. e., with emptiness and the 6 (the number that looks like an inverted lower case “e”) “e / nglish sparrow / s.” The author appears also in the last two stanzas, as the “he” and “e” that lurk inside “the rain.” (Note that the variations occur at the letter, not word level.) This last “e” may be isolated in order to recall in a shorthand manner the three entities (author, emptiness, sparrows) that were iconically merged in the second stanza. In the last two stanzas, those merged, dim existences are obscured by the rain, which starts in spatters (“t / he rai / n”) and rapidly becomes a downpour (“th / e / raintherain”).

Some readers may find, like Richard Cureton, that in Cummings' visual poetry the “visual prosody” is often at odds with the phonological prosody (“Visual Form” 277). Visual effects like word-splitting and the iconic use of the “e's” in this poem certainly interrupt the phonological reading of the poem. The reader is invited to backtrack, find words within words, and in general linger over the letter breaks in an effort to motivate them. There can be no reconciling this activity with phonological prosody. Here, Cummings comes closest to Apollinaire: both in separate ways initiate visual readings that work against or in counterpoint to phonological, spoken prosody. Cummings knew this as well as anyone: he recorded only those poems in regular metrical stanzas, or those like “plato told” (CP 553) that use visual form to reinforce the spoken reading of the poem. He knew very well (and in defiance of Blackmur's Holy Ghost) that some of his poems were “to be seen & not heard” (Letters 267).