Books: E. E. Cummings: Poet of the Heart

Edward Estlin Cummings' father, a Congregational minister, shocked his staid parishioners in Boston's Old South Church one Sunday by crying from the pulpit: "The Kingdom of Heaven is no spiritual roof garden: it's inside you!"

Poet E. E. Cummings, who died last week in New Hampshire at 67, spent a lifetime saying much the same thing. His tools were secular, but he practiced a religion nonetheless. It was the romantic individualist's religion of the heart, in which love is not an emotion but a deity. Its creed was faith in the miracle of man's individuality, his capacity for delight in beauty, in spring, in flowers, in girls. Its galaxy of devils, which grew as Cummings observed the modern world ("a hoax of clocks and calendars"), included dry intellects, science, mass thought, security worship, Sigmund Freud—everything inside man or outside him that tends to limit his individualism, to reduce his sense of wonder. The opposition was total:

along the brittle treacherous bright streets

of memory comes my heart, singing like

an idiot, 'whispering like a drunken man

who (ata certain corner, suddenly) meets he tall policeman of my mind. Or, in more succinct Cummingsese: "Not for philosophy does this rose give a damn." For Cummings, the rose—and indeed the whole world—was a cause of wonder, and the words that he poured out in anger or tribute trace his lyrical journey through its mysteries. After his death, poets and critics were quick to speak of him as "the greatest innovator in modern poetry," as a man who perfected "the idiom of American common speech." Some placed him beside Thoreau and Whitman in "the pantheon of American letters." Cummings would have disliked the portentous phrase. He was not the sort of artist who can easily be put in any resounding literary hierarchy.

He was popular—next to Robert Frost, by far the most popular contemporary U.S. poet. He won prizes, including the 1957 Bollingen, America's highest award for poetry. He was delightfully unpredictable. There was Cummings the crazy syntactical iconoclast who rarely used capital letters and recklessly (often unintelligibly) strewed syllables, commas and other gimcracks around the page. On the next page, though, he would turn up as a solemn, sonnet-writing traditionalist—or as Cummings the dreadful punster ("honey swoRkey mollypants"), or the pseudo pornographer happily smirking from the decks of his ship, the S.S. Van Merde: "May i feel said he (i'll squeal said she . . .)."

At his best, he was capable of turning out this:

since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you; wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world my blood approves, and kisses are a better fate than wisdom . . . then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis Cummings' heart-for-heart's-sake view's were, and are, intellectually unfashionable —not to mention untenable—in today's world. Modern poets usually come armed with shields of sinewy realism or are modishly cloaked in intellectual complexity.