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

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Critics, therefore, could and did point out that Cummings was an outrageously simple-minded fellow and an anachronism—a misplaced Victorian romantic still running around a hundred years after the battle with science has been lost, shouting "They murder to dissect."

Yet in this, as in much else during his lifetime, it was hard to dispose of E. E. Cummings easily—or, for that matter, to impress him with the modern world's displeasure. If he was limited as a thinker, Cummings nevertheless spoke in an astonishing range of poetic tones of voice and mastered a wild variety of poetic rhythms—lines that crept, leaped, staggered, paced proudly, turned on a dime, flowed smoothly as a prayer. More than any other poet of his time, he dressed up the few ideas he had in all sorts of outrageous and engaging costumes, cheerfully presenting them again and again:

may my heart always be open to little birds who are the secrets of living whatever they sing is better than to

know

and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry and fearless and thirsty and supple and even if it's sunday may i be wrong for whenever men are right they are not

young

Cummings came by his combined role as archromantic and Peck's bad boy of modern poetry naturally enough. Boyhood in Cambridge and Harvard ('15) gave him a New England intellectual's self-assurance and the Thoreauesque tradition of rebellious individualism. Just as Cummings began writing verse, Ezra Pound and the Imagists had turned old poetic practice upside down. Cummings was quick to follow them in tossing out high-flown poetic rhetoric and shucking off the straitjacket of traditional verse forms. Above all, the Imagist doctrine of quick impact was made for Cummings. Explaining his own techniques, he said: "I can express it in 15 words, by quoting The Eternal Question and Immortal Answer of Burlesk. viz.: 'Would you hit a woman with a baby?—No, I'd hit her with a brick.' "

Beyond his more bizarre typographical whizbangs Cummings lobbed most bricks at the enemies of individuality—what he called "socalled" humanity, "socalled" civilization, and everything commercial in America. Sample lines: "From every B.V.D. let freedom ring," and "a salesman is an it that stinks." Of statues in parks to commemorate wars, Cummings wrote:

quote citizens unquote might otherwise

forget (to err is human; to forgive

divine) that if the quote state unquote says

"kill" killing is an act of Christian love.

Brick-throwing is a young man's work. Cummings wrote for nearly 40 years: eleven volumes of verse, two verse plays and two prose books, including The Enormous Room, ex-World War I Ambulance Driver Cummings' precise account of prison camp life. Through most of all this, he continued to sound like a young poet alternately angry or moonstruck. It was an enormous limitation, and it made it easy to enumerate what he lacked that such poets as Frost and Eliot and Pound abundantly had. But it also led to Cummings' unique satirical and lyrical achievement, which caused Critic Allen Tate last week to declare that Cummings "had no superiors in his generation":

This is the garden. Time shall surely reap,