e. e. cummings
e.e.cummings has been accorded the rare honour of conventionally having his name written in lower case in respect of his poetic practice.
Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Mass. in 1894 and died in 1962 and is one of the most instantly recognizable of poets by virtue of his distinctive style. He once explained that the small ‘i’ in his poems was perhaps less of an aberration than it looks as ‘did it never strike you as significant that, of all God’schildren, only English and American apotheosize their egos by capitalizing a pronoun’.
But his use of the lower case, with unorthodox capitalization elsewhere, was only one of many typographical effects that he used, including punctuation, elision and fragmentation of words and the arrangement of lines across the page. While the last of these might refer us back to a poet like George Herbert who wrote poems in which the lines made a shape, we can more accurately identify the influences if Ezra Pound’s Imagist economy with words and perhaps the lovestruck dreaminess of Keats in cummings’ poetry but the most striking kinship, it seems to me, would be with the maverick, sometimes eccentric, composer, Erik Satie.
Cummings takes the attitude of an innocent observer in a world that is in in Just-Spring, ‘mud-luscious’ and ‘puddle-wonderful’, who has a teenager’s propensity for and keenness in love, but it is surely a faux-naïve persona that he adopts because he is equally capable of social and political satire in a world of lost innocence, as we can see in next to of course god america in which the empty clichés of political rhetoric are parodied. Not all readers are enamoured with this approach and some find it, I think, a bit fey and whimsical, in the same way that The Catcher in the Rye can divide readers into those who idolize it and those who think it is an extended adolescent whinge. It seemed to me that among the Liverpool poets, Adrian Henri took the part of Allen Ginsberg in a ‘lite’ version whereas Roger McGough for the most part recycled the cummings whimsy.
Two poems that defy reading out loud are the ‘grasshopper’ poem in which we see the grasshopper arrange itself for flight and spring into being while the text in between reads,
who as we look up now gathering to leaps arriving to rearrangingly become
and l(a, which we might read aloud, but also diminish in the process, as ‘a leaf falls; loneliness’.
But one of my favourite of cummings’ expressions of precious innocence in a mad or wicked world is the greedy the people in which,
they flock and they flee
through a thunder of seem
though the stars in their silence
say Be
The conclusion arrived at in Bethany Dumas’s book A Remembrance of Miracles is that,
His description of himself as ‘an author of pictures, less a draughtsman of words’ re-inforces our own conviction that as a poet he was the most traditional of innovators and the most innovative of traditionalists.
The avant-garde is beset with dull theorists whose programme and ideology come before their poems but cummings remains fresh, for me at least, as a genuinely idiosyncratic original.
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I won't read any poems but invite the meeting to look at two examples of cummings' work which defy being read out loud.
r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
who
a)s w(e loo)k
upnowgath
PPEGORHRASS
eringint(o-
aThe):l
eA
!p:
S
a
(r
rIvInG .gRrEaPsPhOs)
to
rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly
,grasshopper;
l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness