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“Only to Grow”: Change in the Poetry of E. E. Cummings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Rudolph Von Abele
Rudolph Von Abele*
Affiliation:
American University, Washington 6, D. C.
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Extract

A prevalent assumption about Cummings' poetry has been that it lacks a history—that it shows no growth, as if a man had been treading water for thirty years. This is a serious thing to say about a body of work which not only has become legendary in its time, but can also boast a respectable number of poems widely praised as first-rate. Early in Cummings' career it was brought home to many of his readers that he would use, to the borders of extravagance if he so liked, a profusion of technical devices sometimes difficult, sometimes eccentric, sometimes of no apparent usefulness at all. It was also made clear that he would take attitudes which, whether defensible or not, were not to be confined within the limits of what the world regards as either rational or decorous. One risk taken by any artist when he chooses at the beginning of his creative life to be perceptibly “different” from his traditions, is that, whether he actually adheres to it or not, he will ever after be read by the light of his divergence. And Cummings has not escaped this fate. He has too often been read as if he had stopped growing in the mid-1920's, and had turned into that most depressing of all literary freaks, the artist who parodies himself. The main end of this essay will be to demonstrate the injustice and the falsity of such a view.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 70 , Issue 5 , December 1955 , pp. 913 - 933
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1955

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References

page 913 * This paper having been substantially completed some months prior to the appearance of Cummings' Poems 1923–1954 (New York, 1954), I was unable to make use of that volume. But since its order of arrangement perpetuates the chronological ambiguities of which the 1937 edition of Tulips & Chimneys offers the sole clarification, it is actually less valuable in the present case than the ten books it supersedes.

page 913 note 1 George Haines IV, “::2:1—The World and E. E. Cummings” (Sewanee Review, lrx, ii, April-June 1951, 206–227), does deal in some respects with the growth of Cummings' talent, but it is not his main business.

page 913 note 2 The sonnet, “this is the garden,” from XLI Poems (1925) first appeared in Eight Harvard Poets (1917), and poem number 51 of No Thanks (1935) dates back to 1923 (The Dial, lxxiv, 1 Jan. 1923, 26–27). And only 34 of the poems in & (1925) and Is 5 (1926) appear to have been composed after the summer of 1922, for the original MS. of Tulips & Chimneys contained 150 instead of the 67 poems that were finally permitted by Thomas Seltzer to appear. The rest were shoveled into Cummings' next two books. See John Peale Bishop, “The Poetry and Prose of E.E. Cummings,” Southern Rev., iv, i (Summer 1938), 173.

page 913 note 3 Correspondence with S. A. Jacobs, Cummings' long-time typographer, as to the chronology of his poetry drew forth a reply as exasperating as it was obscure.

page 913 note 4 It is noteworthy that Cummings, unlike many of his peers, sees only a disjunctive relation between love and criticism. See his quotation from Rilke in i: Six Nonlectures (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 7.

page 913 note 5 Analysis of this aspect of Cummings' poetry has not been too systematic. A very early, hence tentative, piece by Gorham Munson (“Syrinx,” in Secession, No. 5, July 1923, 2–11) and pp. 12–28 and 59–82 of Laura Riding and Robert Graves' A Survey of Modernist Poetry (London, 1927), are devoted to Cummings' typography; both Haines (q. v., n. 1) and Lloyd Frankenburg, “The Poetry Of E. E. Cummings,” in Art and Action, 10th Anniversary Issue of “Twice a Year” (New York, 1948), pp. 273–300, make analyses in extenso of the typography of individual poems. Nobody has systematically classified the techniques or discussed their evolution, however.

page 913 note 6 I am not now concerned with the ancestry of Cummings' techniques: it might be remarked in vacuo that his efforts to interweave different lines of meaning are anticipated in Mallarmé's Un Coup de Dés, and his mimetic typography by Apollinaire's Calligrammes, to cite but two sources which might—though he denies it (letter to author, 5 Jan. 1955)—have influenced his style.

page 913 note 7 “ … don't recall meeting Mr Eliot socially while at Harvard; but do remember portraying a 2nd Footman in something … whose hero Lord—? subsequently mothered ‘The Waste Land’ ” (E. E. Cummings to author, 12 June 1954).

page 913 note 8 xcv, 1 (March 1913), 14, 16, 25; ibid., 2 (April 1913), 47—all rptd. in The Harvard Advocate Anthology, ed. D. Hall (New York, 1950), pp. 135—137.

page 913 note 9 lv, v (Feb. 1913), 170; lviii, iii (May 1914), 79; lix, 2 (Nov. 1914), 69–70; lix, 3 (Dec. 1914), 85 (rptd. Vanity Fair, xix, i [Sept. 1922], 45, and in Tulips & Chimneys [New York, 1923], pp. 45–46); lix, 4 (Christmas 1914), 115; lx, ii (April 1915), 37–38; lx, iii (May 1915), 91–92; lxi, iv (Jan. 1916), 101; lxii, i (Mar. 1916), 8–9; lxii, ii (April 1916), 9, 55; and lxii, iv (June 1916), 123.

page 913 note 10 “thou in whose sword-great story,” rptd. Tulips & Chimneys (1937), p. 187; “A Chorus Girl,” rptd. ibid. (1923), p. 114; “this is the garden,” rptd. ibid. (1937), p. 192; “it may not always be so,” rptd. ibid. (1923), 115; “Crepuscule,” rptd. ibid. (1937), p. 32; “Finis” (not rptd.); “The Lover Speaks,” rptd. ibid. (1923), p. 72; and “Epitaph,” rptd. ibid. (1937), p. 51.

page 913 note 11 When Cummings chose to resurrect certain poems, his revision was mostly removal of capitalization and some commas. His habit is apparently not to revise significantly between periodical and book publication.

page 913 note 12 Cf. The Dial, lxxx, i (Jan. 1926), 84, for comment on this.

page 913 note 13 Exception: “I remark this beach has been used too”—& (1925), p. 18, which is a forceful instance of typographical rhetoric.

page 913 note 14 Those on pp. 69, 70, 72, 75,105,113, and 114 especially.

page 913 note 15 In the story “The Princess With the Golden Hair.”

page 913 note 16 Others are in Tidips & Chimneys (1937), p. 143, and in ViVa (Nos. viii, xii and xxxiiii).

page 913 note 17 Excrement as imagery in satiric poems may be illustrated by the “liverpillhearted-Nujolneeding-There's-A-Reason/americans” on their “sternly allotted sandpile” (Collected Poems, 123), and in various references to the human posterior (ibid., 308; 50 Poems, 6; 1×1, x; Xaipe, 38, etc.).

page 913 note 18 Also 1×1, xxxvi, xxxvii, xxxviii, XL; Xaipe, 1, 36, 61, 69.

page 913 note 19 The spirit here is akin to that of Bill's and Jake's spoofing about Lincoln and Grant in The Sun Also Rises. The poem—“remarked Robinson Jefferson”—is one of a very few which was drastically revised from its original version in The Little Review, ix, iii (Spring 1923), 23.

page 913 note 20 In his essay, “Notes on E. E. Cummings' Language,” Hound & Horn, iv, ii (Jan—April 1931), 163–192 (rptd. The Vouble Agent, New York, 1935, pp. 1—29), R. P. Blackmur argues that Cummings' central flaw is his forcing the essential words of his poems to “remain impenetrable,” to keep them from surrendering anything “actually to the senses” (pp. 168–172). While true in part, this is not as generally true as Blackmur would have it; nor does its admission affect my point: that the earlier poems impress one as trying to deal concretely with their themes while the later ones try to achieve a kind of abstractness. To what extent these goals are reached is debatable; I think they are substantially reached, as this paper would tend to show.

page 913 note 21 Preface to Collected Poems.