[In the following essay, originally published in 1971, Mullen examines Cummings’s interest in and writings on American popular culture, particularly the art of burlesque.]

It is generally overlooked that E. E. Cummings had an avid interest in various forms of American popular culture, especially burlesque, circuses, amusement parks, comic strips, animated cartoons, and movies. During the 1920's and 1930's, Cummings wrote many essays on mass culture which appeared in popular magazines such as Vanity Fair and journals of the arts such as Stage and Cinema. In these articles and in some of his other prose, Cummings reveals a great deal about his own concepts of art and poetry, and also provides some penetrating insights into American culture as manifested in popular entertainment. To Cummings, burlesque and the other popular arts were alive with a spontaneous, unrehearsed quality. He wanted to capture the same quality of spontaneity in his poetry, both in content and technique. In a limited way, Cummings wrote about popular culture of the 1920's-1930's much the same as Tom Wolfe was writing about it in the 1960's. Cummings was one of the few writers of his day to deal with mass entertainment, and his fondness for it shows through in his poetry.

Burlesque had a more direct influence on Cummings' poetry than the other popular forms. He was a devoted fan of burlesque and went many times to the Old Howard in Boston, and the National Winter Garden and Irving Place Theatre in New York. An article by Cummings about burlesque entitled “You Aren't Mad, Am I?” appeared in the December, 1925, issue of Vanity Fair. In it he discussed burlesque as a true art form because it was “intensely alive; whereas the productions of the conventional theatre, like academic sculpture and painting and music, are thoroughly dead.”¹ This antagonistic attitude toward high art is typical of Cummings and can be considered a part of his general anti-intellectualism. He claims that since burlesque is modern and abstract and loved by the masses, the critics who say that modern art is not for the masses are completely wrong.

In analyzing the art of burlesque Cummings emphasizes its incongruous and paradoxical qualities: “‘opposites’ occur together. For that reason, burlesk enables us to (so to speak) know around a thing, character, or situation.”² In ordinary painting, on the other hand, we can only know one side of a thing. As an example of “knowing around” Cummings cites his favorite burlesque comic Jack Shargel, whom he called one of the “two very great actors in America.”³ Cummings was almost reverential when he wrote that around Shargel “there hung very loosely some authentic commedia dell'arte.”⁴ Opposites occur together when Shargel delicately and lightly tosses a red rose to the floor. It floats downward and when it lands, a terrific ear-splitting crash is heard.

Nothing in ‘the arts’ … has moved me more, or has proved to be a more completely inextinguishable source of ‘aesthetic emotion,’ than this knowing around the Shargel rose; this releasing of all the unroselike and non-flowerish elements which—where ‘rose’ and ‘flower’ are ordinarily concerned—secretly or unconsciously modify and enhance those rose—and flower—qualities to which (in terms of consciousness only) they are ‘opposed.’⁵

Another example of opposites occurring together in slapstick comedy is the trick pistol which instead of giving a loud smoky discharge drops an innocuous sign with “bang” written on it.

Cummings has transferred the juxtaposition of opposites in burlesque into one of his favorite poetic techniques. One of the poems which employs this uses a description of a burlesque strip-teaser to contrast the picture of a famous university professor.

curtains part)
the peacockappareled
prodigy of Flo's midnight
Frolic dolores
small in the head keen chassised like a Rolls
Royce
swoops smoothly
                                                            outward(amid
tinkling-cheering-hammering
tables)
while softly along Kirkland Street
the infantile ghost of Professor
Royce rolls
remembering that it
has for
-gotten some-
thing ah
(my
necktie(6)

The intellectual professor Josiah Royce of Harvard is contrasted to the physical image of the stripper Dolores. The non-intellectual qualities of Dolores are illuminated by the spiritual Professor Royce and vice versa. For the absentminded professor to forget his necktie is humorous, but there is a state of pathos here which arises from his absentmindedness. Dolores is “keen chassised like a Rolls Royce,” but Cummings uses the inversion of this to create a pun and point up the opposite nature of Royce. The pun itself illustrates opposites occurring together in word play which enables the reader to “know around” both the stripper and the professor. This poem also captures the spontaneity and eye appeal of burlesque with the sound image of “tinkling-cheering-hammering tables.”

The verbal comedy of the burlesque comic also appealed to Cummings' sense of the ridiculous. In the foreword to Is 5, Cummings uses burlesque in explaining his theory of technique.

I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz. ‘Would you hit a woman with a child?—No, I'd hit her with a brick.’ Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.⁷

The joke expresses some of Cummings' favorite poetic techniques: movement, incongruity, and surprise. These same elements are inherent in his juxtaposition of opposites, but surprise can arise from other incongruities. For instance, in one of his poems on the effect of science on mankind, Cummings juxtaposes incongruous elements for humorous and satiric purposes. In “pity this busy monster, manunkind”⁸ the line occurs, “Progress is a comfortable disease.” A new understanding of progress is gained by modifying “disease” with a word which is associated with an opposite feeling. Cummings views scientific progress as a morally destructive process. Later in the same poem he says, “electrons deify one razorblade / into a mountainrange.” Again there is the juxtaposition of incongruous elements—electrons, razorblades, and mountainranges—to point up the absurdity of man's self image as the tamer of the universe. The incongruity between man's scientific illusions and the reality of his insignificance leads to Cummings' famous advice in the last two lines, “listen: there's a hell / of a good universe next door; let's go.” Part of the surprise humor in the ending arises out of the contrast between the colloquial tone of these words and the pseudo-technical tone of the rest of the poem, “hypermagical ultraomnipotence.”

Science and technology represent the dead world of nonfeeling and nonloving, and Cummings satirizes them mercilessly. But burlesque was a part of the alive world which he celebrated in many of his poems and articles. In one article, “Burlesque, I Love It,” which appeared in Stage in March of 1936, Cummings analyzed the history of burlesque and how the advent of strippers such as Dolores was brought about. In the early days of burlesque, which Cummings observed at the Old Howard in Boston, there were no strippers, and the women were just trimmings. In the next phase, after the First World War, the comedian became king, and burlesque achieved the status of a true art form. This period was observed by Cummings at the National Winter Garden in New York. After the Winter Garden folded and the Irving Place Theatre took its place, the focus of burlesque changed from the comedian's humor to feminine pulchritude. John Dos Passos took Cummings to Irving Place one day, and Cummings witnessed the strip tease for the first time. The comedian was no longer the center of attention.

Humor, filth, slapstick, and satire were all present, but they functioned primarily to enhance the Eternal Feminine. And when you saw that Feminine you understood why. It was no static concept, that pulchritude. It moved, and in moving it revealed itself, and in revealing itself it performed such prodigies of innuendo as made the best belly dancer of the Folies Bergere entr'acte look like a statute of liberty.⁹

Here again is Cummings' fascination with movement; the stripper who best exemplified movement was June St. Clare.

To see June St. Clare walk the length of the Irving Place stage, or the Apollo stage, or any other stage, is to rejoice that a lost art has been revived. There have been epidemics of women who swam when they walked and of women who floated when they walked. When Miss St. Clare walks, she walks.¹⁰

Cummings transfers his love of movement to the printed page in his poetry. Cummings' poems never sit still; they move across the page in unusual typography, and the words themselves often suggest movement. Marshall McLuhan noticed this element in Cummings' poetry. “The poet at the typewriter can do Njinsky leaps or Chaplin-like shuffles and wiggles.”¹¹ In one poem Cummings attempts to emulate the bumps and grinds of a stripper performing her act. He demonstrated his belief that woman could be the most beautiful expression of movement and aliveness.

sh estiffl
ystrut sal
lif san
dbut sth
epoutin(gWh.ono:w
s li psh ergo
wnd ow n,
                                        r
Eve
aling 2 a
-sprout eyelands)sin
uously&them&twi
tching,begins
unununun?
butbutbut??
tonton???
ing????
—Out-&
                    steps;which
flipchucking
.grins
gRiNdS
d is app ea r in gly
eyes grip live loop croon mime
nakedly hurl asquirm the
dip&giveswoop&swoon& ingly
seethe firm swirl hips whirling climb to
GIVE
(yoursmine mineyours yoursmine
!
i()t)(12)

The letters and words are so arranged as to suggest the mystery and “peek-a-boo,” tantalizing, teasing quality of the stripper. We never see it all, but we see enough to keep us interested. When she slips her gown down she reveals two sprouting islands (“eyelands”), a very sensual image for breasts. The halting and provocative unbuttoning of her gown is suggested by the repetition of parts of the word until they all fall together, and by the question marks at the end of each line. When the stripper grinds, the words grinds (“gRiNdS”). The vicarious participation of the men in the audience almost becomes an orgasm at the end of the poem. Besides the type swooping all over the page, the words also imply movement, “struts,” “slips,” “twitching,” “steps,” “flipchucking,” “grinds,” “loop,” “mine,” “hurl,” “swoop,” “swirl, “whirling,” and “climb.” The words and typography suggest the spontaneity of the burlesque art which the poem describes.

Another popular form of entertainment which delighted Cummings was the circus, and like burlesque it too was noted for movement. In an article in Vanity Fair of October, 1925, he noticed the movement which made it come alive. “Movement is the very stuff out of which this dream is made. Or we may say that movement is the content, the subject matter, of the circus-show, while bigness is its form.”¹³ The circus as an art form has something which even burlesque lacks, a sense of reality. “Within ‘the big top,’ as nowhere else on earth, is to be found Actuality.”¹⁴ There is nothing phoney when the lion tamer faces the lion and when the trapeze artist defies death. Again, there are opposites occurring together as the terror of death is juxtaposed with the antics of the clowns. “At positively every performance Death Himself lurks, glides, struts, breathes, is. Lest any agony be missing, a mob of clowns tumbles loudly in and out of that inconceivably sheer fabric of doom, whose beauty seems endangered by the spectator's least heartbeat or whisper.”¹⁵ The circus appealed to Cummings because it captured the spontaneity of life just as burlesque did. In comparison, the theatre was stilted, confined, and formal.

In discussing the circus, Cummings defines what art means to him:

… let us never be fooled into taking seriously that perfectly superficial distinction which is vulgarly drawn between the circus-show and ‘art’ or ‘the arts.’ Let us not forget that every authentic ‘work of art’ is in and of itself alive and that, however ‘the arts’ may differ among themselves, their common function is the expression of that supreme alive-ness which is known as ‘beauty.’¹⁶

“Aliveness” and “beauty” seem to be the qualities which Cummings seeks in art, and if painting, fiction and drama ever lack them, then they are not art in those instances; but if mass forms of entertainment, the burlesque and circus, have them, then they are appreciated as true art. One of Cummings' poems celebrates the appreciation of live beauty as opposed to intellectual pseudo-artistic concepts of beauty.

mr youse needn't be so spry
concernin questions arty
each has his tastes but as for i
i likes a certain party
gimme the he-man's solid bliss
for youse ideas i'll match youse
a pretty girl who naked is
is worth a million statues(17)

Cummings is saying that beauty should appeal to the emotion, not the intellect. His belief in living beauty is couched in the vulgar language of the common man for the purpose of humor in this poem, but this does not lessen the strength of his conviction. He puts these words in the mouth of an uneducated man to make them more convincing; they would not ring true if an intellectual said them. The reader laughs at the last two lines, yet he cannot help but realize that there is some truth here. The living breathing beauty of a woman is what many artists have tried to capture in paintings and sculpture, but the original model is still the most inspiring of all.

Cummings also saw beauty and aliveness in amusement parks, especially his favorite, Coney Island. “The incredible temple of pity and terror, mirth and amazement, which is popularly known as Coney Island, really constitutes a perfectly unprecedented fusion of the circus and the theatre.”¹⁸ Besides displaying beauty and aliveness, Coney Island performs a unique function of fusing humanity; “… nowhere else in all of the round world is humanity quite so much itself.”¹⁹ The swimmer at Coney Island swims in the populace, not the water, adding to the “spontaneous itselfness.” The performance at this “circus-theatre” is joined with the audience, a fact which is significant for art. The audience participates by doing circus tricks themselves, by riding the death-defying roller coasters and loop-the-loops. To Cummings, “… the essence of Coney Island's ‘circus-theatre’ consists in homogeneity. THE AUDIENCE IS THE PERFORMANCE, and vice versa.”²⁰ Cummings seems to have anticipated the current interest in participatory arts, widely expressed in the “living theatre” and in art which requires the viewer to enter its structure or manipulate it in some way. Having actors embrace members of the audience and using electronic media are not the only ways to involve the audience; the printed page has long been used to make the reader participate in an experience. This is what Cummings attempts to do in his poetry, to fuse the reader with the poem, to make the poem become the reader. He wants the poem to be an emotional experience for the reader. Most of Cummings' poems could be offered as examples of this, especially his love poems and nature poems.

One example of a nature poem will suffice for illustration. Cummings attempts to draw the reader into a scene in nature by making it a transcendental emotional experience.

& sun &
sil
e
nce
e
very
w
here
noon
e
is exc
ep
t
on
t
his
b
oul
der
a
drea(chipmunk)ming(21)

Part of the involvement of the reader is achieved by waiting until the last line to reveal that the poem is about a chipmunk. This surprise is intensified by spreading the words down the page so that the reader has to put them together before he can understand them. The intellectual process involves the reader on one level and leads him to emotional involvement on another level. The reader must put together the key phrase of the poem, “everywhere no one is except on this boulder.” At this moment nothing else exists except the chipmunk. The simple observation of the sleeping chipmunk becomes a transcendental experience for Cummings and the reader. Cummings has transcended the corporeal world of reality and reached a truer world of the imagination through the chipmunk. The reader is supposed to feel the same emotional transference by reading and comprehending the poem.

Another form of mass entertainment which Cummings analyzed was the comic strip. He wrote an article entitled “A Foreword to Krazy” which appeared in the 1946 spring number of Sewanee Review. Before him, Gilbert Seldes had written of George Herriman's comic strip character Krazy Kat in The Seven Lively Arts. The situation between Krazy Kat, Offissa Pupp, and Ignatz Mouse is summed up by Cummings: “Dog hates mouse and worships ‘cat,’ mouse despises ‘cat’ and hates dog, ‘cat’ hates no one and loves mouse.”²² But each of the characters is symbolic, with Krazy as the central symbol. “Krazy is herself. Krazy is illimitable—she loves. She loves in the only way anyone can love: illimitably.”²³ Her love is combined with wisdom; she recognizes their situation and loves anyway. Krazy transcends reality because of her love and wisdom. “Always (no matter what's real) Krazy is no mere reality. She is a living ideal. She is a spiritual force, inhabiting a merely real world—”²⁴ Marshall McLuhan has said of the comic strip as art, “Popular art is the clown reminding us of all the life and faculty that we have omitted from our daily routines.”²⁵ Krazy Kat's love reminds us of the “spiritual force” which is missing from our lives. Cummings' poetry was not directly affected by his appreciation of comic strips, but there is a parallel between his interest in Krazy and one of the main themes of his poetry, love. Like George Herriman, Cummings uses the symbolism of a comic situation to awaken our dead sensibilities to a spiritual awareness of love.

Cummings often used the comic exuberance of youth to evoke an awareness of love in his readers.

Jimmie's got a goil
                                                                                goil
                                                                                          goil,
                                                                                                              Jimmie
's got a goil and
she coitnly can shimmie
when you see her shake
                                                                                          shake
                                                                                                              shake
                                                                                                                                  when
you see her shake a
shimmie how you wish that you was Jimmie.
Of for such a gurl
                                                                      gurl
                                                                                          gurl,
                                                                                                              oh
for such a gurl to
be a fellow's twistandtwirl
talk about your Sal-
                                                                                Sal-
                                                                                                    Sal-,
                                                                                                                        talk
about your Salo
-mes but gimmie Jimmie's gal(26)

The earthly love described here can be a spiritual force to transcend the merely real world, just as a comic strip character can symbolize transcendent love. Some of the fast-paced, visual humor of the comic strip is captured by Cummings' use of rhythm, language, and typography. The rhythm of the poem and the repetition of “goil goil goil” suggests a child's chant of derision. Phonetic spelling, “goil,” “coitnly,” and “gurl,” enables Cummings to approximate actual chants of the streets of New York. The visual effect of spreading the repetitious words across the page is to make the reader say them as a chant. The word fusion of “twistandtwirl” creates the illusion of quickness and agility with which Jimmie's “goil” dances. The comic comparison between the Biblical, mythical Salome and the sexy teenager of the streets not only creates bathetic humor but also stresses Cummings' preference for real earthly sexuality over abstract concepts of beauty. Cummings celebrates the sparkling aliveness, the earthy desires, and the electric energy of youth. These qualities of youth are a part of Cummings' ideal, and he tried to retain some of them all his life. He was often accused of being an “adolescent songster,” and this remark probably gave him great delight because he tried to maintain the aliveness of youth in his adult life. This may partially explain his fondness for entertainments associated with childhood and adolescence: circuses, amusement parks, comic strips, and animated cartoons.

Cummings' love for comic strips was intensified when they took on the motion of animated cartoons. In an article entitled “Miracles and Dreams” in the June, 1930, issue of Cinema, Cummings discussed the benefits of movie cartoons. His fascination with film animation lies in the fact that this is a world where nothing is impossible: animals talk, rabbits save other rabbits from being tied to railroad tracks, trains split in half, people walk on air. Miracles take place when we are in this dream world.

Given this purely miraculous condition, such trifles as impossibility don't trouble us at all; everything (even a banana) being “really” something else. Let contradictions contradict—to the pure all things are impure, but we, by heaven, understand our dream symbols. …²⁷

Here again are the opposites occurring together, and a new awareness and understanding arising from it. The awareness comes about through laughter at the contradictions. At the end of the article Cummings, in addressing the reader, emphasizes the importance of laughter. “And if you—this means you—are an abnormal individual so healthy, so fearless, so rhythmic, so human, as to be capable of the miracle called ‘laughter,’ patronize your neighborhood wake-up-and-dreamery!”²⁸

Cummings often created a dream world, a world where the impossible is possible, in his poems, and laughter was often the vehicle for entering this realm. One of these creations is the world of candy figurines atop a wedding cake.

this little bride & groom are
standing) in a kind
of crown he dressed
in black candy she
veiled with candy white
carrying a bouquet of
pretend flowers this
candy crown with this candy
little bride & little
groom in it kind of stands on
a thin ring which stands on a much
less thin very much more
big & kinder of ring & which
kinder of stands on a
much more than very much
biggest & thickest & kindest
of ring & all one two three rings
are cake & everything is protected by
cellophane against anything(because
nothing really exists(29)

Lloyd Frankenberg says of the poem, “This is a little world to itself. The poem is of a size with the cake; constructed, like it, in tiers of progressive excitement; and all frosting.”³⁰ The whimsical humor comes from the building intensity throughout the poem. The reader is swept along by rhythms and sounds, much as a viewer is moved by the rapid action in an animated cartoon, until he is almost breathless and limp by the time the climax occurs in the last line. Cummings builds the reader up tier by tier through the unreality of the cake and then hits him with a startling metaphysical statement. Our world is separated from reality just as the cake is cut off from the outside by cellophane. We are no more real than figurines on top of a cake. The poem is a statement of Cummings' transcendent vision: the physical world is not the ultimate reality, and we can only reach reality through the imagination and emotions. The laughter evoked by the surprise statement at the end is a vehicle for seeing beyond the physical and into the spiritual.

Laughter is also the central element in another of Cummings' movie favorites, Charlie Chaplin. Cummings was a life-long fan of Chaplin's cinematic creations. Chaplin and Jack Shargel were the two comedians whom Cummings called the “two very great actors in America.” Cummings captures the “Chaplin-like shuffles and wiggles” in the way he places the type on the page. Chaplin's creation “The Tramp” is closely akin to many of the personages in Cummings' poetry, the hoboes, balloonmen, organ grinders, and other social misfits who bring joy into the lives of others. Cummings' technique of combining pathos with humor is parallel to the feeling evoked by “The Tramp.” He is probably the only modern American poet who can achieve to the same degree this fusion of pity and joy. Cummings' Uncle Sol is a victim of circumstances in the tradition of Chaplin's “Tramp.”

nobody loses all the time
i had an uncle named
Sol who was a born failure and
nearly everybody said he should have gone
into vaudeville perhaps because my Uncle Sol could
sing McCann He Was A Diver on Xmas Eve like Hell Itself which
may or may not account for the fact that my Uncle
Sol indulged in that possibly most inexcusable
of all to use a highfalootin phrase
luxuries that is or to
wit farming and be
it needlessly
added
my Uncle Sol's farm
failed because the chickens
ate the vegetables so
my Uncle Sol had a
chicken farm till the
skunks ate the chickens when
my Uncle Sol
had a skunk farm but
the skunks caught cold and
died and so
my Uncle Sol imitated the
skunks in a subtle manner
or by drowning himself in the watertank
but somebody who'd given my Uncle Sol a Victor
Victrola and records while he lived presented to
him upon the auspicious occasion of his decease a
scrumptious not to mention splendiferous funeral with
tall boys in black gloves and flowers and everything and
i remember we all cried like the Missouri
when my Uncle Sol's coffin lurched because
somebody pressed a button
(and down went
my Uncle
Sol
and started a worm farm)(31)

Uncle Sol's pathetic ventures become a comic series of pratfalls in a Chaplinesque vein. The reader laughs at Sol's misadventures, but he also sympathizes with him as an underdog. The quick, unpunctuated flow of colloquial words in the poem suggests the intensity and spontaneity of “The Tramp's” comic movements. The ironic humor of the first line which is not revealed until the last line parallels the surprise effect of Chaplin's satiric situations. Sol is even the type of man who should have been in vaudeville, probably as a comic. The juxtaposition of opposites for humorous effect is also seen in this poem: Sol's “splendiferous funeral” is juxtaposed to his worm farm. The incongruity, futility, and absurdity of every man's life is mirrored and exaggerated in the story of Uncle Sol. There is a deeper meaning, then, just as there is always something serious beneath the antics of Charlie Chaplin in his best films. Other Cummings' poems which reflect Chaplinesque technique and subject matter are “in Just-spring,” “my uncle Daniel,” and all of the poems about Joe Gould, the Greenwich Village beggar.

Cummings' poetry was only indirectly influenced by popular culture, but he definitely absorbed the rhythms and styles of America from 1920 through 1960 as they were expressed in mass entertainment. He considered buresque, circuses, amusement parks, comic strips, animated cartoons, and movies as true art forms, because, at their best, they demonstrate qualities of aliveness, spontaneity, and beauty. Cummings' interest in mass culture shows his own anti-intellectualism. He wanted no part of an art that was just for a small elite; functioning art had to appeal to the masses. Several of these popular arts exhibit techniques found in Cummings' poetry: the juxtaposition of opposites, incongruity, movement, and surprise. The themes of many of Cummings' poems have similarities with mass entertainment: love, women, youth, and comedy. Cummings saw the popular arts as a means of transcending reality, and his poetry often functions in the same way. Thus, Jack Shargel's rose, June St. Clare's walk, circus clowns, Krazy Kat, and Charlie Chaplin in the realm of entertainment and the stripper Dolores, the chipmunk, Jimmie's “goil,” the candy figurines, and Uncle Sol in the realm of poetry are symbolic forces of the imagination which permit the mind to escape the mundane world. Laughter is often a means to this end. Humor runs through all the forms of popular culture which appealed to Cummings, and his own work is made up of many humorous poems. No matter how great or how small the actual influence of popular arts was on Cummings' poetry, there is no doubt that he was in harmony with American mass culture. Thus, Cummings' prose essays on entertainment can be studied by literary critics to better understand his poetry, but they can also be investigated by scholars of American culture in order to gain new perspectives on the artist and his relationship to popular art forms of the 20th century.

Notes

1. E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, ed. George J. Firmage (New York: October House, 1965), p. 129.

2. E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, p. 127.

3. E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, p. 127.

4. E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, p. 293.

5. E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, p. 128.

6. Poems, 1923-1954 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954), p. 169.

7. Poems, p. 163.

8. Poems, p. 397.

9. E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, pp. 294-295.

10. E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, p. 295.

11. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. 230.

12. Poems, p. 320.

13. E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, p. 113.

14. E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, p. 113.

15. E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, p. 113.

16. E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, p. 114.

17. Poems, p. 177.

18. E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, p. 150.

19. E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, p. 150.

20. E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, p. 151.

21. 73 Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963), No. 58.

22. E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, p. 323.

23. E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, pp. 324-25.

24. E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, p. 327.

25. Understanding Media, p. 153.

26. Poems, pp. 170-71.

27. E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, p. 213.

28. E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, p. 214.

29. Poems, p. 337.

30. Pleasure Dome: On Reading Modern Poetry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), p. 175.

31. Poems, pp. 173-74.