[In the following essay, Thompson discusses Cummings’s attempt to compress images and words as tightly and succinctly as possible to affect the strongest intensity of feeling upon the reader.]

Intensity was a cornerstone in cummings' vision and a primary element in his aesthetic theory throughout his career. In his Dial review of T. S. Eliot's Poems (June 1920), cummings stressed that “every [Eliot] poem impresses us with an overwhelming sense of technique.”¹ In a 1925 review, cummings used the circus as a metaphor for his idea of what Art should be. At the circus, the spectator/reader is continually amazed by the “unbelievably skilful and inexorably beautiful and unimaginably dangerous things” which are “continually happening” in the circus poem. There should always be such an intense experience happening in the tent or on the poetic stage that the spectator/reader “feels that there is a little too much going on at any given moment.”

“Intensity” for cummings includes many critical elements, one of which is “compression.” Cummings selected every word in each writing with care, attempting to place exactly the right word in exactly the right place on the page. Cummings' object was to capture the essence of each experience he recorded with the fewest possible words.² His period of greatest compression came in the 1915-25 period of his writing.

The Enormous Room was rewritten from notebooks and journals he kept while in the World War I French prison camp which is the setting of the novel. A comparison of materials from his notebooks with corresponding sections from the novel reveals the rigorous selection of detail which is so much a part of cummings' methodology. The notebook version is extremely compressed:

In one of my numerous notebooks I have this perfectly direct paragraph:

Card table: 4 stares play banque with 2 cigarettes (1dead) & A pipe the clashing faces yanked by a leanness of one candle bottle-struck (Birth of X) where sits the Clever Man who pyramids, sings (mornings) “Meet Me …”

(ER [The Enormous Room], 110)

The notebook version is a form of shorthand. Key images have been recorded so that the scene may be recalled in detail. The passage is an example of Ezra Pound's Imagist principle of “direct presentation of the thing, whether subjective or objective,” using the fewest possible number of words. To the general reader, however, the notebook entry may seem cryptic, for extreme compression treads the fine line between communication and incomprehensibility. Cummings' exclusion of transitions and apparently unnecessary connectives interferes with the reader's ability to “translate” the compressed statement into a logical, conscious understanding of the author's intended meaning. But the passage communicates more than scribbles in a secretary's notebook communicate to one unversed in the symbols of shorthand.³ The notebook version uses images to carry the impression of the scene just as a pencil sketch carries the essential outline of a scene which may appear later in a finished oil canvas.

In the published novel, cummings adds colour and shadow to his sketch, but still uses only the words absolutely necessary to his presentation. He interprets this particular notebook passage for us in the novel:

… which specimen of telegraphic technique, being interpreted, means: Judas, Garibaldi, and The Holland Skipper (whom the reader will meet de suite)—Garibaldi's cigarette having gone out, so greatly is he absorbed—play banque with four intent and highly focussed individuals who may or may not be The Schoolmaster, Monsieur Auguste, The Barber, and Même (myself); The Clever Man (as nearly always) acting as banker, The candle by whose somewhat uncorpulent illumination the various physiognomies are yanked into a ferocious unity is stuck into the mouth of a bottle. The whole, the rhythmic disposition of the figures, construct a sensuous integration suggestive of The Birth of Christ by one of the Old Masters. The Clever Man, having had his usual morning warble, is extremely quiet. He will win, he pyramids—(speculative technique in which one continually bets all he has previously won on the next bet, hoping to win ever-increasing quantities of ＄)—and he pyramids because he has the cash and can afford to make every play a big one. All he needs is the rake of a croupier to complete his disinterested and wholly nerveless poise. He is a born gambler, is the clever man. …

(ER, 110)

Even his interpretation, however, is an example of extraordinary compression. For example, he uses the single word “pyramids” to represent a whole gambling philosophy. After explaining parenthetically the process of “pyramiding,” he uses only the single word to convey the idea. Visually, cummings also used typewriter symbols such as “＄” to represent words and concepts.

Cummings considered his inmate-companions as persecuted by elements of wartime French society in much the same way as the early Christians were persecuted by the Romans. An analogy between this card game and the biblical manger scene is suggested by this brief comment: “suggestive of the Birth of Christ by one of the Old Masters.” The sketch captures the essence of the scene in economical language suggesting a situation, participants, a mood, and the poet's perceptions of and reactions to them.

The scene is so distilled that it borders on caricature. Each participant is referred to by a name which denotes his or her primary characteristic. Auguste was the barber of the prison community, and is referred to as “The Barber.” “Judas” was one of the inmates who was constantly spying on and betraying his comrades. The book includes an immense number of characters: cummings' vivid sketches capture the essential or most memorable characteristics of each person, and help the reader to keep track of the many characters as they move about The Enormous Room.

Cummings compared his use of caricature in fiction to the selection of details and elimination of all unnecessary words in poetry-writing. In his 1920 review of T. S. Eliot's Poems, cummings wrote that the style of the “extremely great” artist “secures its emphasis by always hesitating on the edge of caricature at the right moment.” Eliot's poetry was praised in terms which explain cummings' own use of near-caricature: “this intense and serious and indubitably great poetry …, like some great painting and sculpture, attains its effects by something not unlike caricature.”⁴ Cummings is here referring to a selection of details so economical that the scene is painted as Ezra Pound's Imagist credo asserts poetry should portray a scene: concretely, with only the most important details present, with every word contributing directly to the presentation and with all excess words cut away. One development in cummings' poetic technique was from an early compression so severe as to make the poem nearly unintelligible, to a later compromise between intensity of compression and reader-accessibility.

By comparing early and late versions of a single poem, we can see the development toward greater reader accessibility vividly demonstrated. “Listen” was first published in The Little Review in 1923. It was carefully revised by cummings forty years later for inclusion in his last complete manuscript, 73 poems. In its final 1963 version, the poem represents the mature craftsman's style, vision, and aesthetic theory. By comparing the two versions of “Listen” we can see some of the most significant developments in cummings' artistic expertise and in his attitudes toward his reader-audience.⁵

As printed in 1923 the poem reads as follows [line numbering is mine]:

Cummings is telling us that he can sense something—a positive life-affirming yes attitude or response—arriving in himself and insists that the reader join him in running through the streets appreciating the beauty accessible to an open mind and heart: “come O you if come who with listen run / me with I quick / Listen.” Translated into more normal syntax, this statement might read: if you (reader) will only come with me and listen, if you will run beside me quickly down the street, then you, too, will be able to perceive the excitement of simply being alive. But you must Listen. Only if you seek out this experience of delight in living will you be able to “hear” or otherwise sense the arrival of”something”:

                    (something arrives
noiselessly in things lives trees
at its own pace, certainly silently)
comes
yes

Cummings often tried to recreate perceptual experiences in his poems. As he matured he became more effective in presenting his experience faithfully, yet allowing the reader to follow his line of presentation. In this 1923 poem the syntax is so fragmented, the juxtaposition of words so unusual, the deletion of transitions is so complete, that only careful study and dissection supply us with a comprehensible reading of the poem.

He has carried the theory of compression—using only the most significant words—to an extreme. The result is nearly unreadable. Part of his message is that such vivid perceptions as the one pictured here are not available to the logical, classifying, mental faculties which are tied to linear reasoning processes. Instead, cummings wants us to break down our tendency to classify and categorize; he wants us to let the images and sounds flood into us in intuitive sequence. Cummings is trying to expand our awareness of the elements available to the open senses of an aware person on a sunny day. But the method he has used is akin to presenting a boring scene through boring, monotonous language—the reader may be alienated from the poem in the process of trying to read it. Careful analysis can help us appreciate the poem's accurate depiction of an emotional state.

Cummings places this at the beginning of the second line to call attention to the vibrant immediacy of the sound of this particular dog barking right now. Repetition of this as the opening word in line three further emphasizes the specific and unique quality of the experience being considered.

In lines 3-5 and 7-9 the poet attempts to demonstrate the complexity of sensual impressions which strike him in this moment of time during which he listens:

.....

The poet, totally alive and open to every facet of experience, describes in a shotgun blast of words the impressions he is receiving as he “listens.” Smiles, cries, gestures of people are juxtaposed in the speaker's mind with houses, church steeples, and growing things.

All aspects of life crowd in at the poet's senses in chaotic profusion: objects (river, mirrors, houses, steeples); animals (dogs); people; other growing things (leaves, spikes of new grass, green); actions and motions (move, push, writhe, smiles, gestures, mirrors, buttered, see); visual phenomena (glitters, gestures, sunlight, green, see, mirror); and sounds (cries, chuckles, bark). All of these images are mixed with the poet's spontaneous reactions (listen, O, Listen, see, why, come, O, listen, run) in an ecstatic moment of total involvement with experience. The juxtaposition of images with all transitions eliminated in these six lines recreates on paper the spontaneous, disorganized nature of the impressions which cummings receives when he opens himself completely and unthinkingly to every sensation he can perceive.

The syntax takes on a normal speaking pattern in the last nine lines of the poem as cummings explains how he derived a sense of unity out of all the preceding sensual chaos:

Unity comes from the attitude called yes, which remains a constant, unifying element throughout cummings' poetry. In the external world, the equivalent of yes is the season of spring; in cummings' internal world of feeling, yes is an attitude of sensitive attentiveness to all stimuli. The poet insists that we uninitiated readers listen while the poem's speaker describes what may be perceived if we adopt a positive life-affirming response to the potentially exciting world around and inside ourselves. The early poem is only partially narrative, more an act being staged visually for the reader. When read aloud, the extreme compression of language creates unintelligibility. Only when the early poem is read slowly, carefully, and treated as an exercise in meditation, do the juxtaposed images become meaningful. The connotations and denotations of each word must be digested slowly before the meaning becomes clear.

In the later poem, however, the reader is able to plunge through the verbal experience with cummings. The later version of “(listen)” reveals its increasingly deeper significance with each reading, but there is no longer the sensation of disorientation which must be encountered before we can see even the most literal meaning. The persona of the later poem is less hostile, less arrogant, less stubborn. He is asking for the reader's participation rather than demanding the reader's total commitment a priori:

(listen)
this a dog barks and
how crazily houses
eyes people smiles
faces streets
steeples and eagerly
tumbl
ing through wonder
ful sunlight
—look—
selves, stir:writhe
o-p-e-n-i-n-g
are (leaves;flowers) dreams
,come quickly come
run run
with me now
jump shout (laugh
dance cry
sing) for it's Spring
—irrevocably;
and in
earth sky trees
:every
where a miracle arrives
(yes)
you and i may not
hurry it with
a thousand poems
my darling
but nobody will stop it
With All The Policemen In The World

The syntax is relatively conventional, with the only inversions arranged for emphasis and sound pattern: (listen) emphasizes the “now”ness and “here” ness of the dog's bark; the abrupt insertion of crazily lends a wild, happily crazy quality to the houses / eyes people smiles / faces streets as well as to their eagerly / tumbling. The punctuation serves as vocal choreography.

The experience of Spring is much more complete in this poem than it is in the early “in Just- / Spring,” due primarily to the strong use of parentheses in cummings' later work. Here the parenthetical insertions serve a triple purpose. First, they work as stage directions to the reader/actor/participant in the poem's experience (listen), (laugh / dance cry / sing), (yes). Second, parentheses reveal the “aliveness” of natural things: listen … leaves;flowers … laugh / dance cry sing … yes—if we listen we can hear natural things singing “yes,” an affirmation of life. Third, the felt experience of nature's aliveness as something outside (or rather inside) the realm of the five senses is symbolized by placing the concrete sensually-experienced description of Spring outside the parenthesis while sowing the felt sense of deep affirmation of life's “yes”ness throughout the poem inside the parentheses.

The first parenthetical insertion is the opening line of the poem, stressing the importance of this normally “modifying” insertion. Parenthetical insertions are normally phrases; the importance of this thought is stressed by its clause construction (“flowers … sing”). Beginning as a separate thought, set off from the main series of stanzas as a refrain, the parenthetical part of the poem suddenly inserts itself into the midst of the description in the thirteenth line: o-p-e-n-i-n-g / are (leaves;flowers) dreams. The opening of dreams is the conceptual, descriptive level of action; in the midst of this is juxtaposed the “happening” of leaves and flowers opening, laughing, dancing, crying and singing yes. Two different kinds of experience are being juxtaposed: we participate fully in the immediate happening of the parenthetical flowers and leaves dancing; and we are simultaneously shown by the narrator at our elbow how the dog is barking, how our perceptions seem to be tumbl / ing, how selves are stirring and writhing and opening to the presence, reality, beauty, arrival of Being (Spring), and how the experience may not be hurried or stopped by anything outside ourselves. Thus, while the narrator is reading us his poem about the arrival of spring, Spring or openness or Being is arriving inside himself (in parentheses) and hopefully in us as well.

Parentheses often function in this way in 73 poems and throughout cummings' later work: they attempt to juxtapose a demonstration of the actual experience or feeling, a description of the external stimulus which provoked it and the physical manifestations of the experience which are available to the five senses. In the best of these poems, the two aspects of the experience fully complement and supplement one another, as in “(listen)”. The words in parentheses function equally well as part of the visual experience of the poem as it stands on paper as part of the parenthetical expression in isolation. By contrast, the 1923 version of “listen” uses parenthetical statement only to further define or limit the word yes:irrevocably … comes a thing called yes, where yes equals something which arrives noiselessly in things, in people's lives, and in trees, coming at its own pace, and certainly arriving silently. Both statements are from the same point of view, both are explaining a phenomenon which the poet alone is experiencing. The later version of “(listen)” is remarkably superior in its use of parenthetical technique.

Punctuation in the early version of “listen” is almost non-existent. The only period appears in line 12, which would seem to indicate that the poet wishes us to consider the first twelve lines and the final ten (including line-spaces) as two separate meaning-units. Capitalization and spacing are alternate forms of punctuation utilized in this poem, but the first line-space stanzaic break does not come until the eighteenth line, leaving only line-breaks and four capital letters to guide us. Of the four capitalized words in the poem, three of them are repetitions of “O”. “O” is cummings letter-symbol for a state of wonder and pleasant surprise. The letter is visually representative of an open-mouthed state of awe, as well as the shape of the sun (“buttered in sunlight”), or the shape of the moon. “Listen” is the only other capitalized word in the poem, leading immediately to the logical conclusion that the state of awe (“O”) and the state of intense awareness (“Listen”) are synonymous states of being; both states of awareness are included in the positive “yes” attitude whose arrival is announced in line 19.

Because cummings chooses each word with care, a repeated word adds import with each recurrence. The key words Listen, O, you and are each occur three times in the poem.

A major developmental change in cummings' style is his attitude toward the reader, as illustrated by these two versions of “Listen.” His early work implies an adversary relationship between poet and audience. In his first four books of poems cummings deliberately ignored (or violated) the traditional reader expectations about the way poems should be written, choosing instead to invent individualistic modes of poetic expression. In his 1952 “nonlecture two” he was still asserting that “so far as i am concerned, poetry and every other art is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality” (i6n, [i: six nonlectures] 24). The object of his earliest poems was to express the ideas and feelings of nobody-but-himself in a style specifically designed to express his insights. He seems to have cared little about reader response to his unusual techniques.

In The Magic-Maker, Charles Norman reports a conversation in which cummings discussed his early attitude toward his readers: “The relation of an artist to his audience is neither positive or negative. It's at right angles. I'm not writing ‘difficult’ so that simple people won't understand me. I'm not writing ‘difficult’ for difficult people to understand. Insofar as I have any conception of my audience, it inhibits me. An audience directs things its own way” (MM, 134).

The 1923 version of “Listen” demonstrates the young poet's commitment to sincere self-expression in his poetry. It is a poem which attempts to record in visual form the very essence of his experiences—with little regard for any reader's ability to enter easily into that experience through conventional reading techniques. The poem chastises its reader to “listen” to the perceptual processes of the poet who demonstrates the way it feels to be truly open to experience. The poet is telling us that he can sense something, or a positive, life-affirming yes attitude or response, in the everyday world of things buttered in sunlight. He insists that we listen as he describes his personal experience of something which arrives silently, in the things, the lives, the trees around him. The fact that “something” arrives / noiselessly tells us that, paradoxically, to simply listen (repeated four times throughout the first section of the poem) with our ears will not be a sufficient level of awareness to perceive the arrival of the something. We must “listen” in some deeper sense if we are to hear.

The reader receives the impression that this special listening process is something unique to the poet—that only cummings can really hear or feel the excitement and wonder—signified by O, listen in line 6. For you, dear reader, cannot hurry it with a thousand poems, nor can you, the reader, stop it with all the policemen in the world. The reader is assumed to be antagonistic to the state of wonder and excitement related by the poet in the early lines of the poem. This is one of the most important differences between the two versions.⁶

In the final version, as it appears in 73 poems, the reader is assumed to be a willing sharer in the perception of wonder: The poet excitedly asks the reader to (Listen), look, come quickly come / run run / with me now. It is no longer the poet alone against the world (and against the reader). Now it is the poet and reader together: you and i may not / hurry it with a thousand poems, and we share the secret that nobody will stop it / With All The Policemen In The World. Cummings' perception of the something in the early “listen” has changed to a feeling of Spring arriving irrevocably. A miracle arrives in the external objects: earth sky trees / every / where. In the early “listen” the something also arrives in men's lives only at its own pace. There is no way to hurry it if you, the reader, don't already possess this sense of wonder even if you want to have it happen to you: YOU CANNOT hurry it with a thousand poems (emphasis mine). But in the 1963 version we find that the miracle MIGHT (may) take place in us if we “run run / come with me now / jump shout (laugh / dance cry / sing) for it's Spring,” and “you and i may not / hurry it with / a thousand poems / my darling / but nobody will stop it / With All The Policemen In The World.” There is a possibility that participating in the poetic experience may bring you and i to participation in the miracle a little sooner than it might otherwise occur in us.

This positive attitude toward his reader first appeared explicitly in the introduction to his 1938 edition of Collected Poems: “The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople—it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves that the squarerootofminusone. you and i are human beings; Mostpeople are snobs.”⁷ Here the poet includes the reader, a solitary person who is sharing cummings' poetry as one of the human beings. Every one who is not true to himself, but lives by the ethics and platitudes voiced by others may be considered to be mostpeople. Then follows a page and a half of satirical prose blasting the deadly philosophy of mostpeople as contrasted with the alive, growing, yes outlook of e. e. cummings.

By 1952, when cummings included a revised version of his introduction in his fourth nonlecture, he was even less overtly hostile toward mostpeople. In the nonlecture he eliminated the first paragraph (quoted above) along with almost all of the other satirical, antagonistic passages. He used only sixteen lines of the introduction, and these were only the positive parts which described his own outlook. However, cummings did not change his negative opinion of people who were insincere or who failed to examine their world critically and assert their right (duty) to be unique, feeling individuals. But he did change the way the poet-speaker addressed the reader in many of his poems and in his introduction to books of poems.

In the 1963 version of “(listen),” the effect of the speaker's changed attitude toward his listeners is to encourage our participation in cummings' sense of wonder; whereas in the 1923 version we feel as though we are being castigated for not participating—before we are given a chance to join in the poet's outlook. We are assumed to be guilty in the early poem; not until the later poetry does he more often assume we are innocent until proven guilty.⁸

Cummings also changed a few of the images in the later version of “(listen).” “This crowd of people” in the early version becomes simply people in the 1963 poem, “and are these steeples” becomes simply steeples; “glitter / O why … buttered in sunlight,” is simplified into “are eagerly / tumbl / ing through wonder / ful sunlight,” the syntax and diction of a simple childlike singing voice. The four occurrences of listen are reduced to the single opening “(listen)” in the later poem. Verbal requests are added to involve all the reader's senses in the miracle: look, selves, stir:writhe / opening, dreams, come, run, jump, shout, laugh, dance, cry, sing. The scene we are witnessing also involves more sensations, more aspects of growth than the older poem gave us: crazily, eagerly tumbl / ing, wonder, wonderful, and full sunlight, selves,stir:writhe, opening, dreams and Spring are either absent from the earlier poem or are buried in the fragmented syntax (which is more pervasive in his earlier poems).

The early poem characterizes the something as silent, noiseless; the only sound images in the poem are those of the dog barking, the cries, and the river chuckling. The later version of the poem is alive with sound images. The dog still barks, but now poet and reader are loudly rejoicing the arrival of the miracle: both shout, laugh, cry, and sing.

Both poems celebrate an intense commitment to the appreciation of all external and internal life-experiences. Thus “intensity” is for cummings not only a way of writing, but also a way of perceiving. His poems recreate in compressed language the experience of living intensely, of living each moment to the fullest.

Several letters have been published in which cummings explains a particular poem for a puzzled reader. A survey of these letters indicates that he apparently began explaining poems to readers around 1949. However, in that first known explication cummings' tone is the somewhat haughty tone of a master craftsman to a bumbling apprentice. He is discussing one of the “poempictures” in his 1950 book XAIPE:

chas sing does(who,ins
tead,
smiles alw
ays a trifl
e
w
hile ironin
g!
nob odyknowswhos esh
?i
rt)n't

Cummings tells his unknown correspondent that “chas sing” is the name of a “Chinese laundryman on Minetta Lane (maybe Street).” This poem tells you that, in spite of his name, he doesn't sing (instead, he smiles always a trifle while ironing nobody knows whose shirt). So far his explication is very straightforward and helpful, written in a discursive tone of voice. Here the tone changes, however: “I can't believe you've never done any ironing; but, if you have, how on earth can you possibly fail to enjoy the very distinct pictures of that remarkable process given you by the poet's manipulating of those words which occur in the poem's parenthesis?!” His concluding line sounds as though the master was having a difficult time trying to communicate with another one of those “mostpeople”: “ah well; as Gilbert remarked to Sullivan, when anybody's somebody everybody will be nobody.” Still, he did explain the poem to a reader who was not included among those he thought of as his friends, so he was indeed moving toward more of a dialogue with his audience than was the case in 1923.

By 1959 the tone of these explanatory letters was much more friendly and their frequency of occurrence had increased significantly. In a letter written 03 February [1959?] he discussed poem 19 from 95 poems:

un(bee)mo
vi
n(in)g
are(th
e)you(o
nly)
asl(rose)eep

Cummings tells his correspondent that “all” the poem “wants to do is to create a picture of a bee, unmoving, in the last blossom of a rosebush. Taken alone, the parentheses read ‘bee in the only rose’. Without parentheses, the poem asks ‘unmoving are you asleep.’ Put these elements together & they make ‘bee in the only rose (unmoving) are you asleep?’” Again he has given an explanation of a poem in a discursive tone of voice. However, his explanation is more complex in this case, perhaps demonstrating that his use of parentheses has become more complex in his later poetry, and perhaps also demonstrating that he is now willing to explain his poems in more depth.

The last paragraph of cummings' letter demonstrates the change in attitude toward his audience which had taken place by 1959. Cummings exhibits an attitude toward his reader which is friendly and open: “if you'll let me know which of the other poems seem least comprehensible, I'll gladly furnish explanations; which are certainly harmless, as long as a person doesn't mistake the explanation for the poem.”

This statement assumes his reader to be a friendly participant in the poetic process and parallels the attitude revealed in his 1962 version of “(listen).” The number of explanatory letters increases sharply after 1950 and they grow increasingly more friendly and helpful through these later years. These data would tend to support my observation that cummings' attitude toward his audience changed significantly in his later years.

Many of the later poems are more accessible to “mostpeople,” but the basic aim of writing poems never changes throughout his long career: to make “a dozen persons react to his personality genuinely or vividly” and to substitute in his readers a fully aware, vital experience for their normally un-intense impressions of reality.

Notes

1. e. e. cummings, “T. S. Eliot,” The Dial (June 1920), rpt. in George J. Firmage, ed., A Miscellany Revised (New York: October House, 1965), pp. 25-29. All articles quoted hereafter which may be found in A Miscellany Revised will be noted in the text as indicated, viz. (Misc.,—) with page reference in the parentheses.

2. Norman Friedman has demonstrated cummings' craftmanship in Chapter Five of his second critical book on cummings, eec: The Art of His Poetry. In that chapter Friedman concludes from his analysis of cummings' revision process that: “cummings is … a poetic maker. This claim is based on an assumption that a man, to write great poems, needs, in addition to a great moral vision and a flair for language, certain constructive and critical powers pertaining to the organization of a poem—to the adjustment of its various parts and devices to the whole for the sake of achieving a unified effect” (126). Friedman shows that “the whole poem was rewritten dozens and dozens of times in its entirety so as to incorporate at each step in the process the new with the old, the altered with the unchanged; it moved forward as a growing and developing unity from stage to stage, adding, changing, rearranging, dropping, and adding bit by bit the elements of the finished design, and without breaking anything” (158).

3. Robert E. Maurer has also found this to be true. In his article “Latter-Day Notes on E. E. Cummings' Language,” Bucknell Review, 5 (May 1955), 1-23, rpt. in Norman Friedman, ed., Twentieth Century Views Series e. e. cummings (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), p. 81, he said: “At its most highly developed state, in his later books, Cummings' language becomes almost a foreign one, usually possible to figure out for a reader who knows English … ; but he will get its full meaning only if he has read a great deal of cummings and if he ‘knows the language’.”

4. “T. S. Eliot,” Misc., 26.

5. e. e. cummings, “Three Poems,” The Little Review, 9, No. 3 (Spring 1923), 22-24. This poem has not been discussed in cummings criticism to date.

6. Cummings at the beginning of his career was generally more antagonistic to critics and readers than he was later in his career. One possible reason for the change in attitude may be simply that his audience grew larger later in his career; therefore he felt less and less that he was speaking into a vacuum as the years passed; later in his career he felt that there were quite a few readers who took his poetry seriously.

7. e. e. cummings, “Introduction” to the 1938 edition of Collected Poems, rpt. in Poems 1923-1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1954), p. 331.

8. Even the satire in 73 poems is directed at them. We no longer seen an angry poet attacking all beside himself with Swiftian vehemence; now the reader is assumed to be with him, sharing the poet's confidence:

   the greedy the people
   (as if as can yes)
   they sell and they buy
   and they die for because
   though the bell in the steeple
   says Why

   (73 poems, # 29)