Reviews of Selected Poetry Collections - E E Cummings Part 1 On Tulips & Chimneys, which contains Thy fingers make early flowers of, in Just--, O sweet spontaneous, and Buffalo Bill’s Slater Brown (1924) Modern art gets much less explanation than it deserves. The artist is too busy pioneering, the intransigent critic too busy fighting his own battles. Nor does any explanation come from the critics of the older school. They have a fear of tasting anything which they cannot recognize at a glance, they refuse to understand anything which is disturbingly new. But since they are house-broken only in their own traditions and would inevitably make a mess of themselves if they wandered afield, it is perhaps fortunate for the world that they make no attempt to understand the underlying aesthetic upon which these crisp and brilliant poems of E. E. Cummings are built. For Cummings is not only a poet but a painter. His knowledge of word value is as profound as his knowledge of color, and it is largely for this reason, because he has carried over the eye and method of art into the field of poetry, that the fresh, living, glamorous forms he has created seem so intangible. To many of those who do not understand this fact, this translation of one art into the technic of another, the poems of E. E. Cummings seem nothing more than verbal and typographical mannerism. But it is not unapparent in his work that Cummings approach to poetry has been quite definitely through painting. The spatial organization of color has become the durational organization of words, the technical problem that of tempo. Words, like planes in abstract painting, function not as units in a logical structure, but as units functioning in a vital and organic structure of time. Logic and all its attributes of grammar, spelling and punctuation, become subservient to the imperial demands of form. The words must come at the moment juste, the spark perfectly timed must ignite them at their fullest incipient power. while in the battered bodies the odd unlovely souls struggle slowly and writhe like caught. brave: flies; In this quotation the verbal units fall, almost as if by fate, into a sharp relentless tempo that drives each into the highest incandescence of its meaning. There is no waste, the skilful orchestration of tempo forces each word to the final limit of its stress. But Cummings not only derives his technical organization from painting. The sudden and glaring accuracies of description with which his poetry abounds, are those of an amazingly adept draughtsman who has for the moment exchanged his own medium for that of words. In some cases this pictorial accuracy is that of a photograph taken with a lens of ice, brutally clear. But in many of his more recent poems, of which there are all too few examples in the present volume, this accuracy, deepened and sharpened by satire, cuts both ways. These poems, particularly the one published in the fourth number of Secession, have all the quality of Daumier plus that formal significance which Daumier never attained. It is a satire both in form and import far beyond the timid and retiring ironies of T. S. Eliot; a satire which reveals Cummings as completely innoculated against that galloping stagnation which seems to carry off so many of our younger American poets. Of the grace of Cummings poetry much has been written. But grace is an emanation, the residue or by-product of a means which has utterly realized its aesthetic or extra-aesthetic purpose. It is an ease which springs from the perfect economy of method. But since it cannot be its own purpose, since it can only be attained by way of a technic whose purpose is not grace itself, it necessarily extends beyond the reaches of analysis. Nevertheless it may be touched by a consideration of that purpose from which it emanates, and though I may be leading myself by the nose into a very doubtful territory of assumptions, I should say that the formal grace (one might as well say beauty and be done with it) of Cummings work is largely due to the fact that the lines of his poems are built for speed. Their beauty is that of all swift things seen at rest. In his best work this speed is evident; there exists in them an organized direction toward which each verbal unit functions at its highest velocity. Cummings seldom attempts to achieve momentum through the utilization of mass, the violent and often painful impact of his poems is the active manifestation of speed; their formal beauty has that quality common to racing cars, aeroplanes, and to those birds surviving because of their swift wings. But it is this speed, this sudden impact of his poems which turns so many people against them. Men do not like to be knocked down, particularly by some quality they admire. But if art is to have any of the contemporary virtues it must have speed, and though it is perhaps more pleasant to be softly overturned by the witching waves of Amy Lowell, or knocked slowly numb by the water droppings of Georgian poetasters, it is certainly more exhilarating to experience the sharp, the living, the swift, the brilliant tempos of E.E. Cummings. And though the selection of poems in this volume is neither a sensitive nor a comprehensive one, though it contains poems of questionable value, it nevertheless stands as the most important work of poetry yet published in America. from Slater Brown, [Review of Tulips and Chimneys ]. Broom 6 (1924): 26-28. Harriet Monroe (1924) Mr. Cummings first book opens with a fanfare--there is a flourish of trumpets and a crash of cymbals in the resounding music of Epithalamion, a certain splendor of sound carried just to that point of blare which should match an exaggerated and half-satiric magnificence of mood. Go to, ye classic bards, he seems to say, I will show you what I can do with iambic pentameter, and a rhyme-patterned stanza, with high-sounding processional adjectives, long simile-embroidered sentences, and 0-thou invocations of all the gods! And lo and behold, this modernist does very well with them--Picasso and the rest, turning from the chaos of cubism to the cold symmetry of Ingres, must not get ahead of him! He will be in the fashion, or a leap or two ahead of it--and the muse shall not outrun him! Listen to two separate stanzas from this glorified and richly patterned spring-song, this earth- and-sky-inspired Epithalamion: And still the mad magnificent herald Spring Assembles beauty from forgetfulness With the wild trump of April: witchery Of sound and odor drives the wingless thing, Man, forth into bright air; for now the red Leaps in the maples cheek, and suddenly By shining hordes, in sweet unserious dress, Ascends the golden crocus from the dead. . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 0 still miraculous May! 0 shining girl Of time untarnished! 0 small intimate Gently primeval hands, frivolous feet Divine! 0 singular and breathless pearl! 0 indefinable frail ultimate pose! 0 visible beatitude--sweet sweet Intolerable! Silence immaculate Of Gods evasive audible great rose! (Right here is due a parenthetical apology. Mr. Cummings has an eccentric system of typography which, in our opinion, has nothing to do with the poem, but intrudes itself irritatingly, like scratched or blurred spectacles, between it and the readers mind. In quoting him, therefore, we are trying the experiment of printing him almost like anybody else, with the usual quantity of periods, commas, capital letters, and other generally accepted conventions of the printers art.) In a more or less grandiloquent mood the poet swaggers and riots through his book, carrying off Beauty in his arms as tempestuously as ever Petruchio his shrew. The important thing, of course, is that he does capture her--she is recognizable even when the poet, like Petruchio, laughs at her, tumbles her up-to-date raiment, sometimes almost murders her as he sweeps her along. She drops swift phrases in passing: ... Between Your thoughts more white than wool My thought is sorrowful. Across the harvest whitely peer, Empty of surprise, Deaths faultless eyes. Softer be they than slippered sleep. Thy fingers make early flowers of All things. And all the while my heart shall be With the bulge and nuzzle of the sea. Thy forehead is a flight of flowers. The green-greeting pale-departing irrevocable sea. The body of The queen of queens is More transparent Than water--she is softer than birds. The serious steep darkness. Deaths clever enormous voice [in war]. The Cambridge ladies who live in furnished Souls. . . . They believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead. Some poems guffaw into grotesques leering with tragic or comic significance. The Portraits are mostly of this kind, and certain of the Impressions. Here the poet is often too nimble--he tires the reader with intricate intellectual acrobatics which scarcely repay one for puzzling out their motive over the slippery typographical stepping-stones. But even here the fault is one of exuberance--the poet always seems to be having a glorious time with himself and his world even when the reader loses his breath in the effort to share it. He is as agile and outrageous as a faun, and as full of delight over the beauties and monstrosities of this brilliant and grimy old planet. There is a grand gusto in him, and that is rare enough to be welcomed in any age of a world too full of puling pettifoggers and picayunes. One might quote many poems in proof of this poets varied joys. We shall have to be satisfied with two. The first is number one of the Chansons Innocentes: In just-- Spring, when the world is mud- luscious, the little lame balloon-man whistles far and wee. And Eddie-and Bill come running from marbles and piracies, and it’s spring, when the world is puddle-wonderful. The queer old balloon-man whistles far and wee. And Betty-and-Isbel come dancing from hop-scotch and jump-rope, and it’s spring, and the goat-footed balloon-man whistles far and wee. The second of our quotations is number two of the Orientale series: I spoke to thee with a smile, and thou didst not answer: thy mouth is as a chord of crimson music. Come hither-- O thou, is life not a smile? I spoke to thee with a song, and thou didst not listen: thine eyes are as a vase of divine silence. Come hither-- O thou, is life not a song? I spoke to thee with a soul, and thou didst not wonder: thy face is as a dream locked in white fragrance. Come hither-- O thou, is life not love? I speak to thee with a sword, and thou art silent: thy breast is as a tomb softer than flowers. Come hither-- O thou, is love not death? Altogether a mettlesome high-spirited poet salutes us in this volume. But beware his imitators! from Harriet Monroe, Flare and Blare. Poetry 23 (1924): 211-15. Edmund Wilson (1924) [In this review, Wilson contrasts Cummings with Wallace Stevens.] Mr. Wallace Stevens is the master of a style: that is the most remarkable thing about him. His gift for combining words is fantastic but sure: even when you do not know what he is saying, you know that he is saying it well. He derives plainly from several French sources of the last fifty years but he never--except for a fleeting phrase or two--really sounds like any of them. You could not mistake even a title by Wallace Stevens for a title by anyone else: Invective Against Swans, Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores, A High-Toned Old Christian Woman, The Emperor of Ice-Cream, Exposition of the Contents of a Cab, The Bird with the Coppery Keen Claws, Two Figures in Dense Violet Night, Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion, and Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs. These titles also represent Mr. Stevens curious ironic imagination at its very best. The poems themselves--ingenious, charming and sometimes beautiful as they are--do not always quite satisfy the expectation aroused by the titles. When you read a few poems of Mr. Stevens, you get the impression from the richness of his verbal imagination that he is a poet of rich personality, but when you come to read the whole volume through you are struck by a sort of aridity. Mr. Stevens, who is so observant and has so distinguished a fancy, seems to have emotion neither in abundance nor in intensity. He is ironic a little in Mr. Eliots manner; but he is not poignantly, not tragically ironic. Emotion seems to emerge only furtively in the cryptic images of his poetry, as if it had been driven, as he seems to hint, into the remotest crannies of sleep or disposed of by being dexterously turned into exquisite amusing words. Nothing could be more perfect in its tone and nothing by itself could be more satisfactory than such a thing as Last Looks at the Lilacs. But when we have gone all through Mr. Stevens, we find ourselves putting to him the same question which he, in the last poem of his book, puts To a Roaring Wind: What syllable are you seeking, Vocallissimus, In the distances of sleep? Speak it. Mr. E. E. Cummings, on the other hand, is not, like Mr. Stevens, a master in a peculiar vein; a master is precisely what he is not. Cummingss style is an eternal adolescent, as fresh and often as winning but as halfbaked as boyhood. A poet with a genuine gift for language, for a melting music a little like Shelleys which sighs and rhapsodizes in soft light vowels disembarrassed of their baggage of consonants, he strikes often on aetherial measures of a singular purity and charm--his best poems seem to dissolve on the mind like the flakes of a lyric dew; but he seems never to know when he is writing badly and when he is writing well. He has apparently no faculty for self-criticism. One imagines him giving off his poems as spontaneously as perspiration and with as little application of the intellect. One imagines him chuckling with the delight of a school-boy when he has invented an adverb like sayingly or hit upon the idea of writing capitals in the middles of words instead of at the beginnings. One imagines him just as proud to have written last we on the groaning flame of neat huge trudging kiss moistly climbing hideously with large minute hips, 0 .press as: On such a night the sea through her blind miles of crumbling silence or the sonnet about the little dancer absatively posolutely dead, like Coney Island in winter. And there is really, it seems to me, a certain amateurishness about the better of these specimens of his style as well as about the worse. Just as in the first example he takes one of the lines of least resistance with a difficult sensation by setting down indiscriminately all the ideas it suggests to him without ever really taking pains to focus it for the reader, so in the second he succumbs to an over-indulgence in the beautiful English long i which from I arise from dreams of thee to Mr. T. S. Eliots nightingale filling all the desert with inviolable voice has been reserved for effects of especial brightness or purity but which Mr. Cummings has cheapened a little by pounding on it too much. One or two accurately placed long is, if combined with other long vowels, are usually enough by themselves to illuminate a poem, but Mr. Cummings is addicted to long is, he has got into the habit of using them uncritically, and he insists upon turning them on all over until his poems are lit up like Christmas trees. Mr. Cummingss eccentric punctuation is, I think, typical of his immaturity as an artist. It is not merely a question of unconventional punctuation: unconventional punctuation very often gains its effect. But I must contend, after a sincere effort to appreciate it and after having had it explained to me by a friend of Mr. Cummings, that Mr. Cummingss does not gain its effect. It is Mr. Cummingss theory that punctuation marks, capitalization and arrangement on the page should be used not as mere conventional indications of structure which make it easier for the reader to pay attention to the meaning conveyed by the words themselves but as independent instruments of expression susceptible of infinite variation. Thus he refuses to make use of capitals for the purposes for which they were invented--to indicate the beginnings of sentences and the occurrence of proper names--but insists upon pressing them into service for purposes of emphasis; and he even demotes the first person singular of the pronoun by a small i, only printing it as a capital when he desires to give it special salience--not, apparently, realizing that for readers accustomed to seeing it the other way it calls ten times as much attention to I to write it as a small letter than to print it in the ordinary fashion. But the really serious case against Mr. Cummingss punctuation is that the results which it yields are ugly. His poems are hideous on the page. He insists upon shattering even the most conventional and harmless of his productions, which if they had their deserts would appear in neat little boxes like the innocuous correct prose poems of Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith, into an explosive system of fragments which, so far from making the cadences easier to follow only involves us in a jig-saw puzzle of putting them together again. In the long run, I think it may be said that words have to carry their own cadence and emphasis through the order in which they are written. The extent to which punctuation and typography can help out is really very limited. Behind this formidable barrier of punctuation for which Mr. Cummings seems unfortunately to have achieved most celebrity, his emotions are conventional and simple in the extreme. They even verge occasionally on the banal. You have the adoration of young love and the delight in the coming of spring and you have the reflection that all flesh must die and all roses turn to ashes. But this is perhaps precisely where Mr. Cummings has an advantage over Mr. Stevens. Whatever Cummings is he is not chilled; he is not impervious to life. He responds eagerly and unconstrainedly to all that the world has to offer. His poetry constitutes an expression--and for the most part a charming expression--of a kind very rare in America--it is the record of a temperament which loves and enjoys, which responds readily with mockery or tenderness, entirely without the inhibitions from which so much of American writing is merely the anguish to escape. He is one of the only American authors living who is not reacting against something. And for this example of the good life--and for the fact that, after all, he is a poet at a time when there is a great deal of writing of verse and very little real poetic feeling--Mr. Cummings deserves well of the public.
Posted on: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 15:52:57 +0000
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