[In the following excerpted essay, Kennedy considers the significance to his career of Cummings’s original version of Tulips & Chimneys.]

Sometime in 1919 Cummings had assembled a hefty manuscript of poems entitled “Tulips & Chimneys,” which he gave to his friend Stewart Mitchell, the managing editor of the Dial, asking him to help find a publisher. Mitchell tried six publishing houses without success. Cummings then removed some of the poems that an editor might find either unpoetic or obscene, rearranged their order, and tried again in 1922, through John Dos Passos, to find a home for his wayweary volume. This 1922 collection of 152 poems eventually saw publication, but not all at once. Dos Passos managed to persuade Thomas Seltzer to publish a selection of sixty-six of the poems under the title Tulips and Chimneys in 1923. (Cummings was furious that Seltzer did not use the ampersand in the title.) Lincoln MacVeagh of the Dial Press made another selection from what was left over and published XLI Poems in 1925. What the two editors avoided were the most experimental as well as the most sexually daring of the poems. Cummings was thus reduced to venturing a private publication with the items that remained, to whose company he restored some of the poems he had withdrawn in 1922, and to which he also added a few more pieces he had written when he returned to Paris in 1921, He called the volume & (his ampersand at last dignified into a title) and brought it forth early in 1925.

If Cummings' first version, “Tulips & Chimneys,” had been put before the public in 1919 it would have established, four years earlier, his place in the twentieth-century revolution in literature. It is now possible to see what such a volume would have been like because George Firmage reconstructed and published the 1922 version in 1976. Since this edition represents the stage of development that Cummings had reached by 1919, we should consider its contents in close detail.

The first portion, “Tulips,” contains an immense variety of Cummings' earlier work, including poems that had appeared in the Harvard Monthly; poems that he had written for Dean Briggs in classroom assignments; a long Hellenistic “Epithalamion” that he had composed for Scofield Thayer's wedding; a long tribute (“Puella Mea”) to Elaine Thayer, Scofield's wife, with whom he had fallen in love; and a Keatsian fantasy inspired by Aucassin and Nicolette. This early work, which was divided into the categories “Songs,” “Chansons Innocentes” (which contained “in Just-” and “Tumbling-hair”), “Orientale,” and “Amores,” is, for the most part, a series of free-verse exercises traditional in tone. The only Cummings touch that adds distinction is his manipulation of typography through lowercase and capital letters and his play with spacing. Two of these early poems give evidence that even his classroom exercises disclose a true poetic voice. One is a genuinely singable lyric that begins “when god lets my body be / From each brave eye shall sprout a tree” and ends “and all the while shall my heart be / With the bulge and nuzzle of the sea” (CP [The Complete Poems], 19). The other is a ballad-like piece in the medieval manner that begins

All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.
four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the merry deer ran before.
Fleeter be they than dappled dreams
the swift sweet deer
the red rare deer.
Four red roebuck at a white water
the cruel bugle sang before …

(CP, 15)

Then comes a more untraditional series of poems grouped under the headings “La Guerre,” “Impressions,” “Portraits,” and “Post Impressions.” By their references to both modern music and painting, the categories thus far suggest a mixture of the arts, and one can sense the presence of Debussy, Monet, and Cézanne even in the table of contents. The “Impressions” are, appropriately, descriptive poems, usually with an emphasis on light. The especially delicate “Impression II” uses the metaphor of piano-playing to carry the image of springtime rain before it changes into mist and fog:

the sky a silver
dissonance by the correct
fingers of April
resolved
                                        into a
clutter of trite jewels
now like a moth with stumbling
wings flutters and flops along the
grass collides with trees and
houses and finally,
butts into the river

(CP, 60)

But death still intrudes upon some of these renderings of the diurnal variations of light, as in the opening lines of “Impressions IX”:

The hours rise up putting off stars and it is
dawn
into the street of the sky light walks scattering poems
on earth a candle is
extinguished                    the city
wakes
with a song upon her
mouth having death in her eyes
and it is dawn
the world
goes forth to murder dreams …

(CP, 67)

Among the “Portraits,” along with “bestial Marj,” we have several representations of the seamy side of life expressed in the Satyric style: a drunken woman passed out on the sidewalk (“the / nimble / heat”); a street evangelist (“the skinny voice”); a grubby Greek restaurant (“it's just like a coffin's / inside when you die”); a family in an ugly street scene (“i walked the boulevard”); a prostitute in monologue (“raise the shade / will youse dearie”); five men in a Middle Eastern café (“5 / derbies-with-men-in-them smoke Helmar”), and so on. The settings are frequently crowded with repellent detail. This nightclub scene is representative:

between nose-red gross
walls                    sprawling with tipsy
tables the abominable
floor belches smoky
laughter into the filagree
frame of a microscopic
stage whose jouncing curtain.          ,rises
upon one startling doll …

(CP, 80)

Yet the metaphorical language here compresses the features and actions of drunks into the description of the scene, and the handling of the punctuation suggests the motion of the curtain—so that an aesthetic complex begins to form. Thus in spite of all the repulsiveness we are getting genuine free-verse poems in this section. Moreover, Buffalo Bill and Picasso appear as a couple of bright spots among the “Portraits.”

Next come the “Post Impressions.” As they begin we look at the natural scene again—the sunset, a seascape, cloud cover, and so on—but the forcing of language and the jumbled typography now take us to the far edge of expression. For example, in “Post Impressions II” we are buffeted with the Hephaestian style as adjectives are mismatched with their nouns:

beyond the brittle towns asleep
i look where stealing needles of foam
in the last light
thread the creeping shores
as out of dumb strong hands infinite
the erect deep upon me
in the last light
pours its eyeless miles
the chattering sunset ludicrously
dies,i hear only tidewings
in the last light
twitching at the world

(CP, 104)

Yet sometimes, when it is dealing with an appropriate subject, the style can soothe, as in the poem entitled “SNO,” which carries metaphors of cleansing and of gentle, scarcely perceptible sounds of falling snowflakes:

                    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
black trees think
(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, 113)

Images, space, and oddities of punctuation combine to develop a snowfall breathlessly heard rather than depicted. Color and concept merge in the image of the snow; then the command to “Listen” is suddenly intruded. The space that follows here and elsewhere in the poem allows, each time, for quiet to prevail. The “drenching” of earth makes it a wet snowfall and thus able to do the “Rinsing.” Earth is given a “mind” for the “idea” to cleanse, but its brain is only annual and thus comes to death in the natural cycle because it has become “clotted.” The snowflakes, “loosely” falling, that bring the cleansing death are now “voices” that we have been asked to listen for. The period and the comma are presumably other pauses for listening. Then we are commanded to “look” and perceive that the earth is touched (“fingered”) by a pond, where the snow is melting (“swooning”) and where the contrasting black of the trees is another concept. Now new sound metaphors are introduced: snowflakes as flower petals gently sliding over a razorstrop or as angel feathers. Repetition of the command for silence and the metaphor of the “white idea” cleansing the earth now lead to the visual breakup of words and intrusions of punctuation marks to suggest the dissolving of the clotted brain and an image of a muddy stream of melted snow (“A wending putrescence”) winding into the pond.

There are troubles in expression however. The illogical adjective “exact” has, by now, been so overused by Cummings that it has become a hackneyed term in his poetic vocabulary. The “(a parenthesis / the)” device is an arbitrary item of logographic teasing. In his experiments with expression Cummings can be careless in his early work.

But among the “Post Impressions” we also have glimpses of the human scene, especially in three prose-poems (forms that Cummings learned from Mallarmé and Rimbaud) about an organ grinder and his monkey, about the rush hour in lower Manhattan, and about McSorley's saloon on the lower East Side. The last is especially notable in its attempt to create a collage of sound. What the poem presents in this vignette is a suggestion of evil as it makes its appearance in a bar-room. But of greatest interest is Cummings' play with words that have rhyme and consonance—dint, grin, point, glint, squint, and wink—or words that begin or end with similar consonant sounds—piddle, spittle, topple, dribble, gobble. In addition there is a collage of onomatopoeic bar-room sounds mixed with snippets of the customers' talk. We might call this work a sound painting. Here is an excerpt from the opening of the piece:

i was sitting in mcsorley's.                    outside it was New York and beauti-
fully snowing.
Inside snug and evil.                    the slobbering walls filthily push witless
creases of screaming warmth chuck pillows are noise funnily swallows
swallowing revolvingly pompous a the swallowed mottle with smooth or
a but of rapidly goes gobs the and of flecks of and a chatter sobbings
intersect with which distinct disks of graceful oath,upsoarings the
break on                    ceiling-flatness
the Bar.tinking luscious jigs dint of ripe silver with warmlyish
wetflat splurging smells waltz the glush of squirting taps plus slush
of foam knocked off and a faint piddle-of-drops she says I ploc spittle
what the lands thaz me kid in no sir hopping sawdust you kiddo he's a
palping wreaths of badly Yep cigars who jim him why gluey grins topple
together eyes pout gestures stickily point made glints squinting who's
a wink bum-nothing and money fuzzily mouths take big wobbly foot-steps
every goggle cent of it get out ears dribbles soft right old feller
belch the chap hic summore eh chuckles skulch. …
and i was sitting in the din thinking drinking the ale,which never
lets you grow old blinking at the low ceiling my being pleasantly was
punctuated by the always retchings of a worthless lamp.

(CP, 110)

The second portion of the book, “Chimneys,” is made up of sixty-two sonnets divided into three groups, “Sonnets—Realities,” “Sonnets—Unrealities,” and “Sonnets—Actualities.” Although all are, in a stretch of the term, sonnets, the three groups roughly correspond to the three styles we have already identified in earlier chapters. The “Sonnets—Realities” are in the Satyric style. Their subjects are, as we might expect, street markets, tenements, cheap restaurants, pool halls, nightclubs, and other inner-city settings that are peopled with such figures as card players, vagrants (the “twenty seven bums”), belly dancers, prostitutes, and gangsters. Most of the poems of this group are demonstrations that the sonnet form can adapt itself to “unpoetic” subject matter. For example, this one begins like a description from a police blotter:

“kitty”. sixteen,5′1″,white,prostitute.
ducking always the touch of must and shall,
whose slippery body is Death's littlest pal,
skilled in quick softness. Unspontaneous.           cute.
the signal perfume of whose unrepute
focusses in the sweet slow animal
bottomless eyes importantly banal,
Kitty. a whore. Sixteen
                                                                                          you corking brute
amused from time to time by clever drolls
fearsomely who do keep their sunday flower.
The babybreasted broad “kitty” twice eight
—beer nothing,the lady'll have a whiskey-sour—
whose least amazing smile is the most great
common divisor of unequal souls.

(CP, 126)

But in its fresh use of language, the poem goes far beyond the mere ugliness found in the “Portraits” to create both wit and sentiment. For expressing the idea of rules and duties Cummings uses verbs as nouns: “ducking always the touch of must and shall.” Kitty's role-playing in order to be cute is conveyed by the words “skilled” and “unspontaneous.” A surprise emerges when we encounter “banal” after “bottomless eyes.” The metaphorical compactness of “sunday flower” for the virginity of young fellows who teasingly talk with Kitty introduces a tone of scorn for them, especially when it is followed by their own role-playing: the sudden intrusion of their tough talk, “—beer nothing, the lady'll have a whiskey sour—.” In fact the shifts of tone in the poem from judgment of Kitty to judgment of the “clever drolls” who joke with her but fear her sexuality are rounded out in a final softening look at Kitty's “least amazing smile” and its power as expressed in mathematical terms. The motifs of “sixteen” and “twice eight” are pulled together in the fact that the number eight is the largest “common divisor” of sixteen.

I should digress to point out that the “Sonnets—Realities,” both in the 1922 version of Tulips & Chimneys and in &, reflect an attitude in which sex is something dirty or repulsive, an attitude telling us that Cummings' upbringing led him to be fearful about sex. Indeed, even though he and Slater Brown became quite friendly with two Parisian prostitutes he kept his “sunday flower” until the night before he left Paris in 1917 to sail home—losing it during a not-entirely-satisfactory experience when he had been taken to bed by a waitress from a couscous restaurant on the rue du faubourg-Montmarte. Thus the speaking voice in the “Sonnets—Realities” is an imagined one, such as “meestaire steevensun” in “when you rang at Dick Mid's Place” (CP, 120). As his journals make clear Cummings never visited prostitutes in the United States, nor was he an opportunistic womanizer. On the contrary, he was a virile but rather romantic young man in his treatment of women and was always, in the words of Slater Brown, “a one-woman man.”¹ What we can guess then about the grimy subject matter in many of his poems is that it springs from a double origin: his desire to shock The Great American Public as well as his interest in playing off matter against form as one feature of the revolution in literary expression.

The “Sonnets—Unrealities” contain a miscellaneous mixture of poems old and new. There are love poems; considerations of death; observations on the sea, on a garden, on autumn and winter; a tribute to Froissart; cosmic meditations, and so on. The Hephaestian style is sometimes present here but not always under control. There is a lot of apprentice work in these poems as well, some of which are leftovers from Cummings' college years.

The “Sonnets—Actualities,” mostly love poems written for Elaine Thayer, are a much more satisfactory mix. The Cummings idiom, with its peculiar jargon of mismatching adjectives such as crisp, skillful, brittle, trite, fragile, precise, exact, and clumsy, is more in evidence than most readers would wish, but there are also many fresh and startling images in his descriptions of both city and country scenes and in his tributes to his ladylove. Here, for instance, is one of the monuments he erects for her:

my love is building a building
around you,a frail slippery
house,a strong fragile house
(beginning at the singular beginning
of your smile)a skilful uncouth
prison,a precise clumsy
prison(building thatandthis into Thus,
Around the reckless magic of your mouth)
my love is building a magic,a discrete
tower of magic and(as i guess)
when Farmer Death(whom fairies hate)shall
crumble the mouth-flower fleet
He'll not my tower,
                                                                                laborious,casual
where the surrounded smile
                                                                                                              hangs
                                                                                                                                  breathless

(CP, 165)

On the whole the three groups of sonnets show that Cummings' judgment was faulty when he made his choices of what to include in his first book. Either he did not like to discard poems that he had worked hard to complete, or he could not discriminate his good work from what was poor. These pages offer plenty of evidence that he would sometimes allow himself to publish an item of self-conscious pretentiousness just because he managed to squeeze it into sonnet form. How could he decide to include this poem from his Rossetti period that begins with these lines?

O Thou to whom the musical white spring
offers her lily inextinguishable
taught by thy tremulous grace bravely to fling
Implacable death's mysteriously sable
robe from her redolent shoulders …

and goes on to apostrophize: “O Love! upon thy dim / shrine of intangible commemoration …” (CP, 142). But also to his credit Cummings was a poet who took risks. He often tumbled; yet when he succeeded he achieved that unique quality he strove for.

What is more remarkable is that his judgment was somewhat better than that of his editors. For XLI Poems, Lincoln MacVeagh selected most of Cummings' overwrought sonnets that had a “poetic” tone and rejected the more interesting constructs. Thomas Seltzer did better, and the 1923 Tulips and Chimneys has enough good material in it to be a valuable contribution to modern poetry. But he too was leery of Cummings' poems that were daunting in their typographical high jinks or that were too openly sexual. As a consequence, for & Cummings was left with what he told his typesetter friend, S. A. Jacobs, was his “most personal work.”² Since & was going to be privately published he did not have to worry about censorious editors. Thus he could restore the poems he had withdrawn from the 1919 Tulips & Chimneys. This especially affected the sonnets that appeared in the new volume.

Among the “Sonnets—Realities” in & were such tough-minded poems as “O It's Nice To Get Up In, the slipshod mucous kiss / of her riant belly's fooling bore” (CP, 203) (which played with allusions to a Harry Lauder song that was popular in the English music halls, “O It's Nice to Get up in the Morning”); “the dirty colors of her kiss have just / throttled my seeing blood,her heart's chatter / riveted a weeping skyscraper in me” (CP, 205); “the poem her belly marched through me as / one army” (CP, 208); and “her careful distinct sex whose sharp lips comb / my mumbling grope of strength” (CP, 210). These and other “dark lady” sonnets are cleverly composed and filled with exploding metaphors and clashing grammatical elements. One example can stand for the rest:

in making Marjorie god hurried
a boy's body on unsuspicious
legs of girl. his left hand quarried
the quartzlike face. his right slapped
the amusing big vital vicious
vegetable of her mouth.
Upon the whole he suddenly clapped
a tiny sunset of vermouth
-colour.          Hair. he put between
her lips a moist mistake,whose fragrance hurls
me into tears, as the dusty new-
ness of her obsolete gaze begins to.          lean. …
a little against me,when for two
dollars i fill her hips with boys and girls

(CP, 211)

Among the “Sonnets—Actualities” were more that he had created for Elaine. One outstanding item begins “upon the room's / silence, i will sew / a nagging button of candlelight” (CP, 215). The final sonnet in the group of seven was the finest erotic poem Cummings ever wrote, a response to the oneness of sexual union that is quiet and delicately direct in its phrasing.

i like my body when it is with your
body.           It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body.          i like what it does,
i like its hows.          i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones,and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss,          i like kissing this and that of you,
i like,slowly stroking the,shocking fuzz
of your electric fur,and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh. … And eyes big love-crumbs,
and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you so quite new

(CP, 218)

When we look back over this whole collection of poems we can perceive that as a poet Cummings was pulled in three directions. His unorthodox play with typography, punctuation, and spacing masks this three-way split. Cummings was a lyric poet, ready to sing of love, the moon, the stars, and the beauties of nature, especially flowers. This was the poet who loved the music of Debussy and the painting of Monet. He was also the poet of tough, hard-edged reality, with a leaning toward Juvenalian satire. He liked popular music, the burlesque theater, and the paintings of the “Ash-Can” school. But then too, he was the aesthetic constructionist in poetry who wanted to push language to its outer limits and to introduce visual features into literary expression. He liked the music of Stravinsky, the paintings of Picasso, and the sculpture of Brancusi. As we shall see, these diverse tendencies and tastes persisted throughout his career in varying degrees.

The poems, almost all written before 1920 and published in three separate volumes over the period 1923 through 1925, put Cummings firmly in the center of modern poetry. Even though not all the work he included was worthy of publication there was a solid body of first-rate work here—enough to establish a reputation. As we might expect some critics and reviewers were troubled by or even dismissive of his typographical legerdemain or his Hephaestian distortions, but others grudgingly recorded genuine admiration. Robert L. Wolf, writing in the New York World, said, “it is a very disconcerting thing to be compelled to admit, reluctantly, that [Tulips and Chimneys] is very good, that it is extraordinarily good, that it contains, in its own individual and unprecedented style, as beautiful poems as have been written by any present-day poet in the English language. When I first read Mr. Cummings' poetry, some years ago in magazines, it inspired me with rage and scorn; from which it appears that disgust is a half-way station on the road to admiration.”³

Nor did the volumes sell very many copies. It would be another thirteen years before any book of his poems did anything but lose money for publishers and another sixteen years beyond that before his Poems 1923-1954 brought him unqualified recognition and publishing success.

Notes

1. RSK, Interview with Slater Brown, September 1971.

2. Letter to S. A. Jacobs, Spring 1924, in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia.

3. New York World, November 8, 1923, 9.