E. E. Cummings in Scholarland

...Item: A book-length critical analysis—E...

...Now everyone agrees with joy that Cummings has written some of the most musical lyrics, most slashing satires, most tender poems of praise of this century...

...And whatever the limitations imposed by a perhaps excessive kindness toward his subject, Friedman's analysis is likely to be definitive—that is, unless or until Cummings chooses to have the last laugh by jumping to new ground...

...One wonders whether Xaipe (1950) is, in fact, poetically more significant than 50 Poems (1940) or more vital than Is 5 (1926...

...no one is likely to forget "if i have made, my lady," "i sing of Olaf glad and big" or "my father moved through dooms of love...

...Therefore, presumably, we ought to heed what poet and critic call "Heart" and "Soul...

...For all that, one may have the uncomfortable feeling that there is a good deal of academic mountain-making going on here...

...Nonetheless, I cannot help but feel a certain melancholy that all of Cummings' hideaways—whether within his verse or in the sundry remote periodicals to which he has contributed—are being opened for public scrutiny and hosannas...

...assuredly, however, E. E. Cummings has risen into an Eminence...

...Evidence...

...E. Cummings, The Art of His Poetry (Johns Hopkins, $4.00)—by a professor of English, Norman Friedman of the University of Connecticut...

...Perhaps the greatest joy one had in Cummings was discovery—and one wonders whether it will ever be the same now he has been securely fastened up in academia...

...inflated by often artificial comparisons with Emerson and Thoreau...

...Certainly Friedman's fifth chapter, "Creation," in which he analyzes both the published and some 75 (!) manuscript versions of "rosetree, rosetree" is a model of critical insight and technique...

...But Friedman never breaks far enough out of the trap of Cummings' own ambiguities to give us clear answers...

...it strikes 'realness into form' and creates 'blind full steep love.' " Or: Cummings' style "may be defined as a modified romantic style, which is romantic because of the quality and quantity of certain 'sweet,' 'soft,' 'warm,' and 'moist' words, such as delicious and exquisite, and modified because of the frequent intrusion of antipathetic or 'plain,' 'hard,' 'cool,' and 'dry' words, such as exact and stern...

...Nor does he really reply to R. P. Blackmur's famous charge against Cummings' foggy diction, and instead falls into it himself: "Rain is soft and turns the unworld into the dream world...

...The fact that Cummings is indeed still laughing, still jumping and, most of all, still writing, raises the most serious doubts about the value of the other volume in hand, George Firmage's bibliography...

...they are all abstractions and they all destroy man's capacity for life...

...The problem with a phrase like "stern miraculous" love is not its tensile strength, but what it means—but Friedman doesn't ask such embarrassing questions...

...But it is, I think, a sorrow to see Cummings boosted by tramplings on the reputation of Eliot, Yeats and Auden...

...It is unfortunately true, as Friedman says, that Cummings' "speaker sees this world as cleanly divided between good and evil, right and wrong," and that the poet "has no idea whatever of man's fundamental ambivalences due to environmental and psychological causes...

...Unswerving loyalty to Cummings' stature as a poet does not, as some of his admirers seem to think, require uncritical acceptance of even his vices of thought and style...

...Nor are such oversimplifications anything to boast about—they are, rather, the reasons why Cummings cannot seriously be compared with Emerson, who begins by acknowledging Fate and the sad fact that man's sinful nature suspends him between heaven and hell...

...It is thus disappointing to see a critic as perceptive as Friedman accepting and using Cummings' terms and distinctions as if they were clear and logically valid: "Therefore, since mind wants to make static the moving and finish the never-ending, its dominance creates for man an artificial world...

...For Cummings is not the prophet (humble or otherwise) of a new religion or a new man—or a new poetry, when you get down to it...

...I see no great technical advances in the latest Cummings' books, and find the everything-into-nouns-or-adjectives vocabulary—so marvelously exploited in poems like "anyone lived in a pretty how town"—becoming something of a tedious mannerism...

...Nor is it a good start for analysis...

...Pile these on last year's portrait by Charles Norman, Firmage's previous assemblage of miscellaneous prose and a projected collection of critical essays about Cummings being edited by S. V. Baum of Temple University, and the prospect becomes truly breathtaking...

...This would not be so much a defect if the volume were, in fact, quite as definitive as it is made out to be...

...Nor has he fully asked whether the change in Cummings' verse he has unquestionably demonstrated can consistently be called "growth...

...Item: A book-length bibliography—E...

...and just how intellectual activity (if that is what "mind" means) is the root of all evil and necessarily aims at a static universe...

...E. Cummings: A Bibliography (Wesleyan, $7.50)—by a gentleman editor, George Firmage of the National City Bank...

...idolized as kin to the "prophets [who have] walked among the lowly of the earth and consorted with criminals as a sign of their humility...

...But perhaps this is a matter of taste, and one ought not to quarrel excessively with a book which has provided so many insights both into Cummings' work as a whole and into numerous individual poems...

...Moneys and societies and wars are the result...

...It ought to be required reading for all literary commentators who try to combine the virtues of "new" critical and "old" scholarly textual analysis...

...Cummings' view of the world and society has its charm and its vitality—even if its closest political equivalent is probably Senator Barry Goldwater's "conservatism"—but to accept it uncritically as a legitimate philosophy for our time does no real service either to it or to philosophy...

...His work is unquestionably a more useful, accurate and complete account of Cummings' own productions than anything heretofore...

...Now I should like to know just what "Heart" and "Soul" mean and how they are distinct...

...While it is certainly true, as Firmage notes, that the previous Cummings bibliography which I compiled (now more or less out of print) "is marred by many inaccuracies and omissions," one wonders about an outlay of $7.50 for a completely redone volume of 129 pages outdated by whatever Cummings henceforth publishes (though supplements, like those of the previous bibliography, are evidently contemplated to keep up...

...Firmage's listing of changes in Poems 1923-1954, his noting of reprints with changes, his uncovering—with the valuable aid of Marion Morehouse—of many remote and obscure items, the chance his lists provide to trace Cummings' career—all are most valuable to scholars and Cummings enthusiasts...

...And Cumming's naive pre-lapsarianism that asserts—in Friedman's words—"the vision of the world that childhood gives us [as] the truest we shall ever know" is a far cry from Thoreau's PAUL LAUTER is Assistant Professor of English and American literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges...

...Unfortunately, a "soft" vocabulary—poetic or critical—is not to be redeemed by vague and abstract terms like stern and exact—however "hard" they may or may not be...

...sighting of a "Paradise (to be) Regained" within the potential of man's nature...