SOURCE: Friedman, Norman. “Epiphanies Are Hard to Come By: Cummings’ Uneasy Mask and the Divided Audience.” In (Re)Valuing Cummings: Further Essays on the Poet, 1962-1993, pp. 83-98. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1983, Friedman reviews E. E. Cummings: The Critical Reception, finding the collection of early reviews of Cummings’s work helpful in gaining insight into the opinions of Cummings’s lesser-known contemporaries.]

I

This book [E. E. Cummings: The Critical Reception] continues the production of scholarly aids to the study of Cummings—which includes Firmage's bibliography and his edition of Cummings' essays, Dupee and Stade's edition of Cummings' letters, Rotella's bibliography of secondary criticism, and Kennedy's biography—and as such is a welcome addition, enabling us, as these other contributions do, to place the published oeuvre in a broader and deeper perspective. The present volume gives a full sampling of the reviews of Cummings' books in the order of publication, shows “what his contemporaries thought of him,” and contributes to that chapter of literary history covered by the poet's life.

Here we have a representative collection of reviews of Cummings' books during his lifetime—from The Enormous Room in 1922 to 95 Poems in 1958. As Dendinger explains, “Most of the newspaper reviews are to be found in the Cummings collection at Harvard University's Houghton Memorial Library. These reviews are in eight scrapbooks kept principally by Cummings' mother, dating from as early as 1912.” I remember these scrapbooks well, for the Cummingses were kind enough to lend them to me many years ago when I began to prepare my first book-length study of the poet. I made and have kept a card file of their contents, and I have made use of this file in various ways. But time, alas, has not been kind to the original scrapbooks. “They are in terrible condition,” Dendinger continues. “The scrapbooks themselves, to say nothing of the clippings, are disintegrating with age. Each time I returned one from the Houghton reading room, it left its outline on the reading table in the powdered dust of its own substance.”

At the very least, then, he has rescued them yet awhile from oblivion. Certainly, many of them—by anonymous and unknown reviewers, and in out-of-the-way papers—could have been allowed to slip silently to their fate, except for the fact that they do help us to understand the poet by allowing us to know “what his contemporaries,” and not just his expert and knowledgeable contemporaries, “thought of him,” and especially by allowing us to understand the very crucial role of modernism in our literary history between the two wars.

II

Dendinger's own introduction provides some useful guidelines. The most frequent and pressing problems raised by these reviews, he indicates, are Cummings' unique way with language, his experimental typography, and the puzzling relationship between his modernism of form and traditionalism of subject. Dendinger makes the telling point that Pound and Eliot also present traditional subjects in experimental forms, and that it was Williams and Stevens who sought “to make the subject as well as the form of poetry new.” They nevertheless all share a common concern “to revitalize poetry and, through poetry, language.” Then, in line with Laura Riding and Robert Graves' much earlier demonstration in their 1927 Survey of Modernist Poetry, he argues that, if you take away Cummings' “tricks,” you take away the poetry. “Form has become subject,” as with the other modernists.

The issue of modernism is crucial in trying to come to terms both with this almost forty-year collection of reviews and, as I have shown, with Cummings himself. These reviews can be usefully treated in terms of two major chronological groups, each culminating and shifting, naturally enough, around the publication of his “collected poems,” the first in 1938, and the second in 1954. Although Dendinger notes some shifts occurring around these dates, he still concludes that “the principal themes of the commentary were established fairly early and the reviewers of the latter two decades largely concerned themselves with topics defined in the first two.” This may be true, as far as “themes” and “topics” are concerned, but there is somewhat more to be said about the difference between earlier and later reviewers in how they handle them.

By and large, the reviewers of the first nine volumes, 1922-1935, are fairly evenly split—although both groups see him as modernist—between those who favor him for his modernism and those who don't. What is on trial is not so much Cummings as modernism itself, a nascent and revolutionary modernism which is just beginning to make its way into the American popular press. Thus Cummings is frequently compared to Stein, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and the like. (The year 1922, the date of The Enormous Room, of course, also saw the appearance of Ulysses and The Waste Land). It is difficult for us today, after Cummings' modernism has come to be seriously questioned, as we have seen, to appreciate how much clearer the issue seemed then: Cummings was deemed to be, for better or worse, among the foremost of the avant-garde and experimental writers and artists. Of course, to a degree, he was more experimental (and less developed in vision) in those days than he subsequently became, so it is only natural for him to have been lumped together with the other modernists.

Nevertheless, what we witness here is the consternation of many anonymous and unknown reviewers, in out-of-the-way papers, confronted by what they don't understand and can't come to terms with. The literary historian might be reminded of the similar baffled reception that certain romantics and pre-Raphaelites received in the previous century. And even at the hands of—as also with Cummings—some then-distinguished literary persons. As one anonymous—but expert and knowledgeable—reviewer in Variety in 1933 put it, “Guys like E. E. Cummings are unfair. They write important books in such a manner as to give unimportant ‘critics’ a chance to puff up and parade their ignorance.” Their reaction to the unfamiliar is not simply defensive; it is, rather, rejecting. As is still the case today—it can happen to any of us—when we are faced with strange and peculiar art forms.

So we read the first words in this book, a review of The Enormous Room by Robert Littell in New Republic: “I feel as if I had been rooting long, desperate hours in a junk heap.” Yet he still manages to emerge admiring the book, a testimony to his underlying critical toughness. Less hardy is William Russell Clark on XLI Poems in the Galveston News, who calls Cummings “the young Lochinvar of unintelligibility.” Or, even more proud of his provincial attitude is J. G. N., reviewing is 5 with heavy sarcasm in the Kansas City Journal-Post: “Highly sophisticated critics, actually living in New York, have advised us [that Cummings is a great poet]—and there are some 10,000,000 people in New York! It is possibly true, as some irreverent person may object, that the 10,000,000 are largely kikes; but size is much, and New York is very big. Etc.”

But an undertone of admiration manages to lurk beneath the surface of even some of these negative reviews, and Cummings is seen as a poet with “genuine lyric gifts,” though he perversely insists upon burying them beneath these annoying modernist gimmicks—a theme to which we will return in due course. In the meantime, “highly sophisticated critics” such as John Dos Passos, John Peale Bishop, Marianne Moore, Malcolm Cowley, S. Foster Damon, Paul Rosenfeld, and so on, are aware that something crucial has been going on in Western culture since the nineteenth century, and especially since the First World War, that this has affected the forms of art, and that Cummings is among the chief representatives of this movement.

.....

Says Dos Passos admiringly of The Enormous Room, in the Dial, “This sort of thing knocks literature into a cocked hat,” echoing Verlaine's “take eloquence and wring its neck.” Bishop writes of the same book in Vanity Fair, “I doubt if any other could have informed physical squalor, beastliness and degradation with so splendid a spiritual irradiance.” Cowley explains, in analyzing the poet's techniques (in ViVa) in New Republic, that the issue is “how, after three thousand years of written literature, to say anything new, or anything old in a new way.”

The problem for readers, then as now, with the modernist movement—which I take to have begun around the end of the nineteenth century and which I believe continues in various forms today—is basically this: to be able to deal with the fragmented, the disagreeable, the difficult, the painful, and the threatening, and to be able to feel that there is somehow something to be gained by so dealing. This is not simply an aesthetic or cultural problem—it is also a psychological, if not a spiritual, one. In speaking of the “untranslatability” of modern poetry, Dendinger rightly says, “This is, of course, true of all poetry, but it is a matter of degree and much more important in those periods where formal considerations take precedence over everything else. And the definitive formal characteristic of the modern period is fragmentation.”

What we are facing—and have been facing since the late eighteenth century—is the challenge, on the one hand, that we can become more human than ever before in history, and the threat, on the other, that we are becoming more dehumanized. As a result, our very relationship to reality—the reality of ourselves, of society, and of the earth—is in danger. If we are to heal this split, we must be able to confront, to begin with, the fragmented, the disagreeable, the difficult, the painful, and the threatening in ourselves. This is the underlying spirit of modernist art, and those who believe we can live comfortably and sanely without such questioning, and who can merely see a negative end to the negative way, rather than spiritual irradiance, can only reject it. Those who see, on the contrary, along with Cummings, that “to create is first of all to destroy” (quoted from The Enormous Room by Gilbert Seldes in his Double Dealer review), who feel that the way down is the way up, can only welcome it.

The issue, then, for the first dozen years or so—although a few modernist critics themselves, such as Edmund Wilson, R. P. Blackmur, Conrad Aiken, William Carlos Williams, William Troy, and Kenneth Burke are not always wholly favorable—is not so much Cummings as it is modernism itself. With the appearance of Collected Poems in 1938, however, the time for serious assessment of the poet had arrived, and the lines among the modernist critics themselves were beginning to be drawn. In other words, since modernism had by then had a chance to establish itself, not only among writers and artists but also in the minds of critics and reviewers, the question became one of whether and how much Cummings was, in fact, a representative figure of that movement. And naturally this leads to questions of what the exact meaning of that movement is in the first place.

III

Dudley Fitts, writing in the Saturday Review of Literature, says, “It was time for this book. Cummings has had more than his share of irrelevant criticism, whether adulatory or scornful. Everyone will talk about him, classify him, define him; few seem to have read him with critical attention.” Doing precisely that, Paul Rosenfeld points out in the Nation the two characteristics of Cummings' poetry which “solidly set it in the category of the modern.” The first is his “similarity to the fauve and cubist painters and sculptors” in his dislocations of language and typography; the second is his blending of the metaphysical and romantic traditions in his unique combination of wit and musicality. S. I. Hayakawa writes in Poetry of Cummings' descent from the paradise of childhood into the hell of the modern city and modern warfare, and suggests that this fact may explain the eccentricities of his technique—as partly a disguise and partly an attempt to achieve accuracy and immediacy of presentation. Morton Dauwen Zabel claims similarly in the Southern Review that they “are integral to the whole intensity and anguish of his senses in the face of ‘the essential horror’ he has confronted.”

Rolfe Humphries, on the other hand, in the New Masses, while granting him “tenderness, a fair ear (about as subtle, for example, as Swinburne's), imagination, invention, and wit,” at the same time asserts that “what he lacked was control, balance.” Furthermore, Humphries says, his anarchistic vision is self-defeating: “Where the idea is that nothing triumphant can be good, it surely follows that nothing good can be triumphant.” W. T. S. (whom I take to be Winfield Townley Scott) in the Providence Journal has it that “the sad thing about him is that his work has become progressively more hysterical and less vital.” And Horace Gregory in the New Republic brings up a charge which is destined to echo down the halls of Cummings' reputation for many a year to come: Cummings has “become the Jazz Age Peter Pan,” “fixed in rigid attitudes of youth,” because of his continuing defiance of the ruling powers and values of the modern world. Gregory continues: “In this defiance, there is less snobbery than evidence of fear: fear of being misunderstood, fear of being less than unique, fear of the many rising against the few and, over all, a complex and contradictory fear of loneliness.” “Part of Mr. Cummings' difficulty in finding an immediate audience,” he adds, “may be traced to the uneasy mask he wears.”

Such contrast between praise and blame among respectable and informed critics may seem to argue for absolute relativism in criticism and make committed deconstructionists of us all. I would suggest, however, that if we acknowledge valid reason on both sides, we might come a bit closer to the whole truth about Cummings. For one thing, while some cogency may be granted to such views as Gregory's, for example, the negative critics tend to miss the artistic complexity of Cummings which the positive ones see, the context and the rationale of the poet's vision and techniques. If we take the anarchism, the youthfulness, and the hysteria and place them in relation to fauvism and cubism, the metaphysical and romantic traditions, the descent into hell, and the need for immediacy of effect, we will be able to see these supposed deficiencies in a somewhat more intelligible framework. That is to say, in response to a certain kind of experience, in terms of certain artistic traditions, and by means of a certain kind of sensibility, Cummings is trying to achieve a certain kind of new combination of elements: “unable to go further with either the sheerly witty or the lyrical, romantic type of poet,” as Rosenfeld explains, Cummings is “making a third, possibly twentieth-century sort by joining the elements of the other two.”

Why, then, do some supposedly modernist critics fail to see this? The other thing is that the answer must be found partly in something about Cummings himself, some weakness not specified by them but which is nevertheless implied by Gregory: Cummings fails of reasonable success in convincing potentially sympathetic and knowledgeable readers of the true context and rationale of his art. Somewhere deep within, he is at odds with himself—and with his audience. What I think this inner conflict means, as I have already suggested and will show in greater detail below in chapters 10 and 12, is reflected in his characteristic attempt to appear joyous and confident, thereby depriving his art and his readers of the true context of inner struggle which gives significance to his vision and techniques.

As for the problem with his audience, the symptoms are clear, as Gregory indicates, in the introduction to these Collected Poems. If the problem with “mostpeople,” as we have seen, is that they cannot accept the way down as the way up, the trouble with Cummings is that he cannot accept them. And yet the other clear message in this introduction, which I take to be his “real” message, is one of openness, acceptance, abolition of categories, and devotion to the living processes of organismic being. The result is an “uneasy mask”: a split in vision leads to a failure of rhetoric, for he does not allow for the possibility that his poems could change the unconvinced—who, of course, have no choice, really, but to reciprocate by remaining outside the charmed circle drawn for them. His deepest fear must have been not simply of being misunderstood but rather of his own difficulty, illustrated precisely in the opening words of this introduction, in being open and accepting, which he therefore projected onto “mostpeople.” This is a projection which polarizes unduly some of his lyrics of joy and many of his satires, as shown above in chapter 5, and thereby deprives them of much of their power to engage the unconvinced. Otherwise, he would not have had always to appear joyous and confident and consequently to surround himself with so many boundaries. The “contradictions” of Emerson and Whitman are in the spirit of inclusiveness; those of Cummings run counter to that spirit.

The issue may be brought into clearer focus if we look closely at the two key reviews in this section. The Partisan Review published a negative piece by Philip Horton, balanced it with a positive one by Sherry Mangan, and entitled the pair, in a nonpartisan spirit, “Two Views of Cummings.” Horton begins by claiming that nothing has changed in Cummings over a period of fifteen years and that “the notorious typography” is a “historical curiosity.” Nor does he approve of the “sexires” or the satires and says that the mingling of the trivial and the serious, the confusion of values, result from “his deliberate rejection of knowledge.” He notes that the introduction, while it appears to embrace and affirm, in fact “reduces to negation and rejection.” The rejection of knowledge can only lead to “the scattered impulses of an immature personality.” Horton's polarization itself commits the either/or fallacy in denying the role of emotions and the body in regulating the personality, and it sounds perilously close to the merely conventional dispraise of Cummings, until we recall that Horton is the biographer of Hart Crane—and also that it is one of the less tenable doctrines of the New Critical version of modernism that the artist must “develop” and “mature” in certain stated ways, a doctrine already reflected in Gregory's review. Yet we cannot easily dismiss what Horton says about the introduction.

Mangan, to her credit, puts her finger right on the sore spot: “The indignation of our literary theologians is comprehensible enough: Cummings's faults stand right out—indeed, what Eliotellus [sic] in eight years has not, for his graduation piece, permanently annihilated him?” Part of the trouble, she says, is that his faults are the faults of his virtues, and also that Anglophile critics have difficulty in accepting the influence of French poetry. Then she raises and answers four specific objections to Cummings. The first is that he fails in exact communication, and her reply is that poetry aims, not at “communication,” but rather at “the perfect recreation of [the] experience in the reader.” Second is that he is pretentious, to which she replies that boasting is a “classic poetic quality”—“iactantia”—and that Cummings' virtues are “gusto, abundance, magniloquence,” and that in these “he is nearly unique.” The question of bad taste is the third charge, which she resolves by distinguishing between good versus bad taste and taste versus no taste: Cummings has a lot of taste; “it is merely regrettable that some of it is bad.” The last issue, excessive limitation of subject, is more serious, and she concedes that if Cummings does not develop beyond “spring, love and death,” “he will remain, regrettably, a magnificent but minor singer.” She opines, however, that his chances look good.

What Horton sees as the ossification of triviality and immaturity, Mangan sees as an inherent potential for growth, and the reason is that she can conceive of other poetic qualities than “knowledge, the chiefest instrument of evaluation and the essential means to maturity” (Horton)—qualities of liveliness, vividness, and immediacy—and therein lies a tale of utmost concern to students of the significance of modernism. Also, her “literary theologians” is a felicitous description, and we shall have occasion to return to it before we are done. Let us see what develops in the next fifteen years or so, before the publication of a second edition of collected poems.

IV

What we find during 1940-1953 is first, that the reviews seem to become generally more favorable; second, that his experimentalism is beginning to be more accepted and understood; and third, that his relation to traditionalism is becoming more and more evident. As Dendinger puts it, “While the debates about form are to continue, there is generally from 1938 on a quieter tone to the discussions.” The period that encompassed the publication of 50 Poems (1940), 1 × 1 (1944), Xaipe (1950), and i: SIX NONLECTURES (1953) was to emerge as Cummings' major phase, in which, as Dendinger says, the “enfant terrible is being transformed into one of the foremost poets of the period, into a poet of the establishment. The prevailing tone of nostalgic acceptance of the prodigal in the 1953 reviews of the autobiographical i: six nonlectures [sic] would seem to indicate that the transformation was complete.” His inclusion of Poems: 1923-1954 under that rubric, however, I question.

Although the reviews of 50 Poems contain some conventional carping, we also find some brilliant writing, such as these anonymous comments from the Santa Barbara News: after linking Cummings to Braque, Klee, and Kandinsky, and commenting on the modernist sense of the failure of common values, the reviewer says, “Each adventure to each art is innocent as sensibility is to phenomena and each onlooker must make his own pilgrimage.” R. P. Blackmur, whose earlier strictures were being quoted favorably by many subsequent negative critics, amazingly says in the Southern Review, “I have been one of his admirers for twenty-one years since I first saw his poetry in the Dial,” and adds, “There is … a sense of synergy in all the successful poems of Mr. Cummings.” Then he concludes, “special attention should be called to the development of fresh conventions in the use of prepositions, pronouns, and the auxiliary verbs in the guise of substances, and in general the rich use of words ordinarily rhetorical … for the things of actual experience.” And Theodore Spencer, writing in Furioso, says “the order of the poem [is] a reflection of the shape of the experience.”

In reviewing 1 × 1 in the Nation, Marianne Moore writes that Cummings' book “is a thing of furious nuclear integrities.” An anonymous reviewer in the Providence Journal calls Cummings “one of the liveliest, and one of the few, poets of our times.” Spencer says, in the New Republic, “he has achieved a special depth of insight which few of his contemporaries can equal.” Peter De Vries writes a very thoughtfully favorable review in Poetry. And so on.

The notices of Xaipe, beginning with Lloyd Frankenberg's in the New York Times, are similarly enthusiastic. Anonymous reviewers in the Dallas News and the Providence Journal are saying things like, “Cummings has been notably unsuccessful in hiding from his loyal if occasionally bewildered public that he is at heart a romantic and gifted, sensitive writer,” and “within his range he has written some of the loveliest poetry in the language.” Henry W. Wells says in Voices, “Both his manners and his technique are more disciplined.” An anonymous writer in Tomorrow notices an increasing complexity of experience in this volume, and the miraculous way Cummings has of giving “seeming trivia their due life.” David Daiches calls it in the Yale Review, “a rich and fascinating volume.”

Of course, there are still a few cavils: Louise Bogan in the New Yorker notes “his deletion of the tragic” as a flaw; Rolfe Humphries in the Nation complains of a certain monotony; M. L. Rosenthal in the New Republic questions his apparent antisemitism; and Frederick Morgan in the Hudson Review wonders about the drastic simplification of vision. Morgan adds, “The extent to which one will be satisfied by Cummings' poetry … will in the long run depend on how wholeheartedly one is willing to subscribe to this attitude.” I think it may also be partly whether one is willing to supply the missing portion of the context of his vision and art so as more adequately to understand it.

Not surprisingly, i:SIX NONLECTURES, in which, as the anonymous reviewer of the Poet says, “The bad bald poet tells all,” seems to have gone a good deal of the way in that direction, for as we read from Kirkus Reviews and on through the unknown and known reviewers (the latter including Samuel F. Morse, Alfred Kazin, Charles Norman, William Saroyan, and Warner Berthoff), we find a practically unanimous chorus of praise. In writing for an actual audience in Sanders Theatre, Cummings seems to have found a more winning stance, reassuring his listeners that, although he still takes his individualism and artistic integrity very seriously, he is nevertheless devoted to wholesome, recognizable, and good-hearted human and poetic values.

Kazin, in fact, looks quizzically in the New Yorker at Cummings' “traditionalism”: “He has always made a point of defying the Philistines, but at Harvard he stood up against our terrible century armed only with his memories and the Golden Treasury.” Warner Berthoff, on the other hand and more tellingly, writing in the New England Quarterly, claims that Cummings has avoided the too-easy relapse into complacency characteristic of so many New England talents: “we meet [in Cummings] face to face the spectre of inverted gentility which since Thoreau has haunted the overbred New England writer. We meet him—and E. E. Cummings kills him again before our eyes.” His weapon, Berthoff goes on to show, is his readings from “his own work and the Golden Treasury of lyric poetry to which he devoted the last third of each nonlecture.” Here Cummings gives living proof of what he could only have “opinions” about in the prose of the nonlectures—his transcendent faith in art itself, and in the freshness and durability of his own art.

V

The romance is over, however, when Poems: 1923-1954 comes out, and the whole battle fought in 1938 has to be fought all over again. Putting the poet's entire oeuvre together at that time into a single volume may have been a serious mistake, for instead of highlighting his growth in the eyes of modernist critics, it seems to have focused them back on his earlier limitations. Randall Jarrell's piece in the New York Times Book Review set an unfortunate tone: “He is a magical but shallow rhetorician,” and “What I like least about Cummings' poems is their pride in Cummings and their contempt for most other people.” Michael Harrington writes in Commonweal that “there is a serious lack of depth in Cummings' romanticism.” John Ciardi says in the Nation that Cummings cannot see relationships between “good” and “bad,” only their differences. G. S. Fraser in the Partisan Review emphasizes Cummings' lack of a tragic sense. Carl Bode in Poetry claims, “He is still a poet who is considerably more talked about than he deserves to be.” Assuredly, a number of favorable reviews are to be found, chief among which are those by Samuel F. Morse, Paul Engle, and David Burns. But here, as before, we can best clarify the problem by studying in a bit more detail a pair of serious and extended opposing reviews.

Heading the case for the prosecution is Edwin Honig in the Kenyon Review. As have several other reviewers, he realizes this is a time for summing up, not only of Cummings but also of modernism itself. It is a time for comparative judgments. “Cummings' poetry contends less intrinsically with human values” than does that of Pound and Eliot, he says. “He doesn't thrive on paradox, like Eliot or Yeats.” His techniques “often cloak attitudes that are cantankerous and juvenile.” He believes that “only what acts is, and only what feels is; what merely thinks is not.” In rebelling against the machine, his techniques make machines out of his poems, “a public confession of opposing selves.” Cummings is an expressionist, and “Unlike his contemporaries he derives little from symbolism or imagism.”

I would say, however, not only that Cummings is divided against himself, but also that modernism itself is. Such critics were having a problem with that part of modernism deriving from romanticism and analogous to certain forms of mysticism and orientalism—and, I might add, symbolism—the transcendental part which holds that there are higher forms of truth than those grasped by knowledge and intellect. I think the New Critics adopted a version of this notion, and then adapted it, under the influence of T. E. Hulme, Richards, and Eliot, to a version of the metaphysical tradition and emerged with a doctrine involving sinewy intellectuality, irony, “maturity,” paradox, the tragic vision, et al. And it is precisely this latter doctrine which Cummings fails to exemplify.

As we have seen however, there are other and more inclusive ways to define modernism. John Logan in Poetry, arguing for the defense, begins by noting Cummings' compassion and his concern with self-transcendence, quoting from i:SIX NONLECTURES: “we should go hugely astray in assuming that art was the only self-transcendence. Art is a mystery: all mysteries have their source in a mystery-of-mysteries who is love.” Logan comments: “we may note the connection between the notion of transcending (‘climbing over’) oneself and the notion of ecstasy (‘standing outside’); the one follows the other: and without both there is neither love nor art.” As far as “anti-intellectualism” is concerned, it “is basically an affirmation of the mystery of things,” and a resistance against those “who insist on limiting the real and true to what they think they know or can respond to. … Cummings is directly opposed to letting us rest in what we believe we know; and this is the key to the rhetorical function of his famous language.”

Logan then examines the charge that Cummings has failed to develop and refutes it point by point. Similarly, he reopens and reexamines the whole problem of the typographical experiments: dadaism, surrealism, and cubism share with the baroque “an interest in dissolving surfaces. Applied to poems, this means that they must not look as we expect poems to look.” Nevertheless, the appearance of the poem is not an end in itself; it is, rather, a way of directing “the evocation of the poem in the mind of the reader,” of expanding the connotative powers of language, and of bringing the reading under the control of the poet. All of which serves “to prevent the reader from resting in what he thinks he knows and what he expects.”

It is surely one of the central doctrines of modernism in general, and not just the New Critical variety, that the work of art must be grappled with in and of itself and not by means of explanation and paraphrase. And it is surely one of the main justifications for such a doctrine that the nature of reality—especially our twentieth-century reality—is too complex to be grasped solely by intellection. In these terms, any modernist critic would have to admit Cummings into the fold. The split occurs when one branch of modernism, primarily the New Criticism, as I've been suggesting, wants to transcend the limits of intellection by complicating it with opposites set in tension, while the other branch wants to transcend intellection altogether in order to achieve a truly whole, pure, and nondualistic vision—an achievement more profound and more noble than the tragic vision itself.

Humanity's schools of thought and religion seem to fall characteristically into three divisions: there are those who try to arrive at the ultimate truth by means of churches, sacred texts, priests, and rituals; those who end up following these forms without any sense of their original purpose; and those who seek the truth apart from such forms, relying instead on their own direct contact with it. It might seem that this model explains Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism; Catholicism, Protestantism, and Puritanism; Hinduism, Buddhism, and Zen; and so on; but it often happens that within each branch itself there develop more formal and less formal tendencies. We seem to be dealing with basic conflicts which exist potentially in all of us, and splitting into factions rarely solves the problem. It is difficult to rely on our own direct contact with truth without feeling the need for forms; it is just as difficult to follow forms without losing a sense of direct contact with truth.

In terms of modernism, for example, I see the New Critical branch, because of its emphasis on knowledge, thought, and maturity, as containing our literary theologians, in Sherry Mangan's words; the antimodernists, because of their distrust of the unfamiliar, as containing our literary ritualists for the sake of ritual; and the antiritualists, because of their reliance on personal experience of the transcendent, as containing Cummings and the mystical tradition he embodies. But the problem is that these categories identify tendencies rather than separate schools. Thus the non-dualistic vision can be found in parts of Cummings, as it can be found in parts of Blake, Whitman, Yeats, Stevens—not to mention Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Browning, Meredith, D. H. Lawrence, Woolf, and so on. And surely the strong strain of orientalism in much of modernism has significantly affected Yeats, Pound, and Eliot, for example, as well.

To call this vision “intuitive,” “emotional,” “childlike,” “sentimental,” “impulsive,” “sensationalistic,” “untragic,” and so on, is to struggle vainly to define a unitary experience in the language of our dualistic tradition. And of course it is even more difficult to achieve than it is to find language for. That is the challenge and the burden of this branch of modernism. It is no wonder that many of Cummings' modernist critics resist it, and they have not been helped by his own resistance to it—in either case, a resistance no less strong than that of the conservative critics to modernism in general. In this sense, we can understand and accept all three, for there is a truth and a cogency to what each is trying to cope with and accomplish.

VI

A coda is in order for the reviews of 95 Poems (1958), the last book published before the poet's death, and hence the last one to be covered by Dendinger. Certain familiar key concerns recur throughout, almost as if there had not been an extended debate going on for over thirty-five years on these same points. John Logan in Commonweal notes, however, “In recent years Cummings has begun to be studied seriously and at length as an inventor, and there is a growing literature of research.” Which reminds us pretty much of the limitations of book reviews, for their writers feel little obligation thoroughly to know what they are talking about or what others have said, relying primarily on their own deadlined reactions to the book before them. The well-worn sentence from Santayana, that to ignore the past is to be condemned to repeat it, comes handily to mind here.

Thus there is fresh puzzlement over Cummings' typographical and linguistic devices, and some head-scratching over whether he has developed or not. Three poems in particular tend to divide the critics: the oriental-looking typography of the opening poem describing the fall of a leaf, the invective of the poem satirizing Uncle Sam's indifference to the Hungarian fight for freedom, and the sentimentality of the “i am a little church” poem. As Sara H. Hays says in the Pittsburgh Press, “His audiences usually fall into two camps: those whose sensibilities are outraged and antagonized by his eccentricities, his verbal and typographical antics; and those who find these same characteristics fresh, exciting, significant, and the stuff of genius.” Or, as W. G. Rogers points out in the Charleston News and Courier, “Cummings … is one of those contemporary creative figures who have managed to collect a small body of followers of utterly unshakable loyalty along with a wide public aware of their work but puzzled, disdainful or aloof.”

Nevertheless, interestingly enough, the reviews included here favor Cummings by three to one. Let us look first at the naysayers, chief among whom are Paul Lauter, John Hollander, and W. D. Snodgrass. Lauter claims in the New Leader that Cummings' universe is so private that “we do not finally know what he is singing about.” Hollander in the Partisan Review agrees “that Mr. Cummings' view of the world will no longer do.” And Snodgrass in the Hudson Review sees him as a case “of arrested development.” On the other hand, Philip Booth in the Christian Science Monitor asks, “And as for growing up, who wants to if we grow up beyond poems?” And Robert Graves claims in the New York Times, “Most poets slowly decay; Cummings slowly matures.” Samuel F. Morse in the Hartford Courant praises the “staggering typography” as “a greater pleasure than ever.” William Carlos Williams in the Evergreen Review likes Cummings' ear for American speech. Winfield Townley Scott—who has apparently gone through some changes—writing in the Saturday Review, proclaims that “Cummings has restored joy to poetry incomparably beyond any poet of our time.” And Logan sums up: “Stevens is more genteel and gorgeous, Eliot more reflective and more religious, W. C. Williams more perfect in ear and cadence, Marianne Moore more academic and more precious, Pound more versatile and more outrageous, Frost more violent and more pastoral. But Cummings is the most provocative, the most sentimental, the funniest, the least understood.”

That “understanding” is on its way, however, is shown most clearly by Anthony Wolff, writing in the Daily Tar Heel of the University of North Carolina. Cummings is difficult, he says, because he writes about the simplest things: “They are, essentially, Love and Being, themselves and inseparable, celebrated as epiphanies in each possible moment, and bitterly, sarcastically, angrily noted in their absence.” This seems to me somewhat more than Dayton Kohler's praise in the Louisville Courier-Journal of Cummings' ability to “sense life with a child's senses,” to sing of it “with a child's strong, clear voice.” Wolff goes on: “And yet, though Love and Being are indeed the simplest things in life—are life itself—‘mostpeople’ find them difficult to apprehend. We are weaned from them, and it is often a difficult process to approach them again, especially as the moments of truth which they are for Cummings. Epiphanies are hard to come by.”

Quite so. There is a lesson in here for all of us. It is not simply conservative reviewers who resist such awareness; it is also many modernist critics as well. And it is not merely these modernist critics; it is also Cummings himself. For he not only aimed at the highest vision, thereby provoking their ambivalence, but he also found it difficult to integrate his own ambivalence, thereby supplying them with ammunition against himself. But we are all in the same boat, and it behooves us to attempt a truer understanding of his faults by seeing them in the context of what he was truly aiming to do, thereby achieving for ourselves a fuller sense of life's possibilities in the context of which we can more fully understand our own faults. And that, in my proud and humble opinion—to borrow a phrase from Cummings—is what art and the criticism of art are all about.