The Lyric Verse of E.E.Cummings
LAUTER, PAUL
The Lyric Verse of E. E. Cummings 95 Poems. By E. E. Cummings. Harcourt, Brace. 95 pp. $4.00. IT IS over forty years now since E. E. Cummings's first major billing in Eight Harvard Poets;...
...However ingenious a bubble-pipe may be, it still produces glossy, radiant bubbles...
...He is not guided [ ranging acquaintance with what goes by reason...
...There is an is followed by two brief appendices ; excellent section on Pascal, as on which polish off the analytic phi-Sartre...
...It is Barrett's treatment of religion However, Barrett's own per-that is most unsatisfactory...
...There of modern history" in the West "is must be many civilized folk who will unquestionably the decline of re...
...or as if our souls, awakened from summer's green trance, would not adventure soon a deeper magic: that white sleep wherein all human curiosity tve'll spend (gladly, as lovers must) immortal and the courage to receive time's mightiest dream" True worship ultimately consists of being alive, by which I think Cummings means: to grow...
...but flowers, like men (and mice), are trampled, trod and broken beyond beauty—everywhere, that is, but The Neu...
...Surely ours is the Age of Un-skill in philosophy with a flexible, reason...
...Yet, despite the constancy of these perceptions over the years, they have remained essentially unknowable for his readers...
...Usually his determination to remain lyrically, individually himself distracts our minds from what he is often correct in viewing as a sordid a,nd gloomy world...
...Reviewed by Robert E. Fitch By William Barrett...
...It is not, I think, carping to wonder whether the moo,n and sun here do mean anything at all (June-mooncroon sentimentality aside), whether a reader can more than peek in on Cummings's not quite accountable reactions to permanently shrouded secrets...
...more and more he has come simply to pummel targets selected not for their affectation, but by his own political and social prejudices...
...of modern art portrays man as "a creature full of holes and gaps, face-Barrett begins with a description less, riddled with doubts and negaof the present age in its encounter [ tions, starkly finite," but the inwith nothingness...
...It may be de-Furies...
...But I wonder if it is not more heroic to face up to tragic revolutions, not as excuses for malice, but as opportunities for humane sympathy, for singing of Olaf, "whose warmest heart recoiled at war," for examining the realities of life and love and death that Cummings so adroitlv dances about...
...kikes and niggers are patronizingly tolerated— if they's alive...
...he pressing to learn that the testimony exists only in fragments...
...He then considers • telligence which shows so much the sources of existentialism in the discernment in pointing out the Western tradition, with especial atmain features of the picture suggests tention to the Hebraic, Hellenic and a hope for genuine wholeness...
...He declares that sharp insight into a Hemingway or philosophers today are busy mainly a Faulkner, a swift judgment in one with disputes in the inner circle, that sentence upon a Tillich or upon a they have little contact with the in-Malraux...
...The reader is compelled to really candid, they would recognize see with the author even when the that they have ceased to have any reader does not agree with the author...
...And we've clapped his turns—the footwork, mugging and double-talk—even while wondering how many variations he could ring in on the same act...
...Cummings has left no parenthesis or preposition unturned in his search for the delicate a,nd precise tools needed to suspend a fall leaf on his page...
...Strangely, the hates of this bohemian individualist now approximate those of what Dean Fitch might call the "hipsters" of the Right...
...Thus Cummings's memorial for the Hungarian Revolution trickles into undirected unpleasantness : "uncle sam shrugs his pretty pink shoulders you know how and he twitches a liberal titty and lisps 'im busy _ right now' " Still, it is hard to stay angry with Cummings...
...he is possessed by the ; on in our world...
...Faced with a cosmology both simplistic and arrogant, can a reader seriously consider Cummings's "ideas" more than convenient airy platforms on which he strikes graceful poetic poses...
...Indeed, some critics the end of the road has itself disap might add that, if philosophers were peared...
...And sympathy is essential if we are not to become impatient with extravagances like Cummings's soft view of nature...
...December 15, 1958 Guide to Existentialism Irrational Man...
...And yet, ironically, growth is precisely the quality Cummings has failed to demonstrate in his own poetical career...
...We cannot finally believe in Cummings because, however charming and witty his lyrics, we do not finally know what he is singing about...
...Once he pricked the ridiculous pretension of "radically defunct periodicals," Cambridge ladies and politicians...
...how is a "man's heart/ true to his/ earth...
...Full comprehension of Cummings's universe is precluded by its very privateness...
...His most ambitious chapter, the third, is a careful discus-Quite apart from whether or not sion of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, we accept the main arguments of Heidegger and Sartre as the four Barrett's thesis, it is impossible not existentialists who most fully reveal to be set alight and aflame by the to us our plight...
...To maintain what critics like to term his "integrity," Cummings has had to reject the changing world— no unmitigated achievement—asserting in its place the ultimate validity of his own perceptions...
...There is, to me, a Man," which seems to leave us • provocative and disturbing interpreneither integrated nor rational...
...Barrett's estimate of the im-There is a linking of both the U. S. portance of his own profession at and the USSR to a common heritage this moment in history is an exceed-from the Enlightenment...
...Almost thirty years ago R. P. Blackmur pointed at the fog at the center of Cummings's language...
...In our time, as Barrett re-vivid style of writing, a sensitivity minds us, man has become a stranger to so much excellence in art and not only to God, nature and society, , letters and religion, and a widebut even to himself...
...He's shown us many ways to celebrate this deity—in the sexual fulfillment, and sensual enjoyment, of youth's halcyon days...
...And no one can question his successes in holding, indeed of mimicing, leaves and robins and mice and children in motion...
...And one pauses from time tellectual ?lite outside the Academy, to time over a single sentence: "It is and that, if they were oandid, they this treasure at the end of the road would recognize that they have less that has disappeared from the modern and less influence upon the minds horizon, for the simple reason that around them...
...For Cummings has played always no one but himself: e.e.c., poet extraordinary, pirouetting in the ecstasy of love and spring, pausing only to shy brickbats at society's convenient impieties...
...Rational whole writing...
...the language has varied, but the same roseate mist persists: "i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my trite) and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud) and the sky of the sky of a tree called life...
...tion of three varieties of atheism...
...which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart...
...IT IS over forty years now since E. E. Cummings's first major billing in Eight Harvard Poets...
...He has resisted the fetishes of prohibition in the Twenties, the proletarian idols of the Thirties, the demons of hate in the Forties...
...Oh, there have been changes, certainly...
...thus, sympathy must decline for the poet who insists upon his unique superiority to the rest of us...
...To Cummings, Love's still the only god, and Spring is his prophet...
...If he is formance in Irrational Man arouses able to assert that "the central fact new hope for the profession...
...Dean, Pacific School of Religion...
...The Lyric Verse of E. E. Cummings 95 Poems...
...Kumrads and trade-unionists get mangled together...
...The phallic has become the Reviewed by Paul Lauter Department of English literature, Dartmouth College conjugal, the satiric pike a censurious club...
...Why, too, are stillnesses "fatal...
...influence now even upon themselves...
...In conclusion there flashes of insight that illuminate the is a chapter on "Integral vs...
...now, midst the yellows and reds of fall, in a mystical assertion of Love's power over death: "—yes...
...He delights as few contemporary poets can—sufficiently, maybe, for another National Book Award...
...he's held the boards ever since with his trunkful of beavers, fright-wigs, paint and bubble-pipes...
...But are new developments in portrait tools—in punctuation, syntax, vocabulary, typography—what we can call poetic growth...
...Leader here, l o maintain his sanguine fancy Cummings must further rigidly bisect the world: poets become "true men" because they imitate flowers or birds (or rabbits...
...what, precisely, is there in a violet "that not/ all matterings of mind/ equal...
...He is no longer whole...
...278 pp...
...This i tation of Protestantism...
...Teeth are drawn and claws clipped in his universe of roses and robins: "but why should" the greatest of living magicians (whom you and i some times call april) must often have wondered "most people be quite so (when flowers) in credibly (always are beautiful) ugly" A pretty trifle, no doubt...
...5.00...
...the rest, most people, are ugly unmen blighting god's (and Cummings's) bright bubble...
...What might once have appeared as "new complete fragile intense flower" would now emerge as "intense new complete fragile here...
...author, "Decline and Fall of Sex" IT IS a sound instinct which leads i find delight in reading a book which William Barrett to discuss Irrational I exhibits the combination of technical Man...
...There is ingly modest one...
...Doubleday...
...now he oontinues to hold out against the organizational blandishments of contemporary Dagons...
...Christian sources...
...There is a shrewd discriminalosophers...
...Sympathy is also needed to blink the increasing nastiness of Cummings's satirical work...
Vol. 41 • December 1956 • No. 45
