The Extremes of E. E. Cummings

...I am not competent to review anything pictorial, and I will make no remarks about the photographs beyond saying that they look handsome to me...

...A posthumous publication allows us to hear some of Cummings' last remarks...

...A writer survives in his best work, not in his worst, and at his best Cummings has written at least a dozen poems that seem to me matchless...

...It includes some fine analyses of Cummings' poems, the best of them by Laura Riding and Robert Graves, and some useful placings in the literary tradition...

...It begins "her careful distinct sex whose sharp lips comb," and it seems to me one of the most remarkable poetic celebrations of the sex act that I have ever read...

...At his best Cummings had a superb eye, seeing a waiter drifting between cafe tables "like an old leaf/ between toadstools," or offering as the only caption for a still life in Adventures in Value, "note the nail" (in reference to a nail sticking out half an inch from the wall behind...

...At any time Cummings might fall into jargon ("extemporise the innovation of muscularity") or pointless anagrams, like turning "grasshopper" into "PPEGORHRASS...

...When E. E. Cummings died, something equally unduplicatable went out of the world...

...When a writer who has been important to you dies," I wrote in these pages last year, in connection with the death of Hemingway, "the thing to do is to go back and read his best work...

...The other is the late sonnet that begins "pity this busy monster,manunkind," and ends: We doctors know a hopeless case if-listen:there's a hell of a good universe next door;lel's go A few of Cummings' mean poems are mean in a fashion that is life-giving and humane...

...The unsympathetic articles show that all the charges we make now have been made tirelessly for 40 years, and several enthusiastic pieces show that it is just as hard to be original in praising Cummings ("The wonder of the wide-eyed child," said Paul Rosenfeld...

...Where the effect of other exciting contemporary poetsStevens and Eliot particularly-had been to teach me a respect for craft, Cummings, although he had plenty of craft, had had an opposite effect, and one truly liberating...

...Another, equally disaffected with our mission in the Second World War, is the moron's patriotic speech that concludes: dem gud am lidl yelluh bas tuds weer goin duhSIVILEYEzum One neither Republican nor anti-literary, the savage obituary for President Harding, is short enough to quote entire...

...When Cummings died, I took my own advice and went back to the most complete edition of his verse, Poems 1923-1954 (Harcourt, Brace and World, 468 pp., $6.75...

...He sometimes displayed just as fine an ear, as in the self-justification by the "muffhunter" that concludes one poem: "daze nutn like it...

...In all that owlish scowling, his work seemed to say, never forget that making a poem is humping the old cow...

...Cummings was often childish, writing tired spoonerisms ("absitively posolutely," "Rish and Foses") or labored schoolboy humor ("and the hitler lies down with the cohn...

...It is that perpetually irreverent voice that we have lost...

...It reads: the first president to be loved by his bitterest enemies" is dead the only man woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors "is dead" beautiful Warren Gamaliel Harding "is" dead he's "dead" if he wouldn't have eaten them Yapanese Craps somebody might hardly never not have been unsorry, perhaps At the other extreme, two of Cummings' finest poems can only be called joyous...

...Cummings waves his gay delightful banner of individual joy," said Theodore Spencer...

...Sometimes Cummings wrote with the most extraordinary clumsiness, producing a line like "ere with the dirt death shall him vastly gird," or the inept "no liar looked him in the head" (to rhyme with "bread") that mars the beautiful tribute to his father, "my father moved through dooms of love...

...Another is the wonderful poem about apples, and perhaps about Eden, "it's over a(see just/over this)wall.' The third is the lovely and mysterious "this is a rubbish of human rind," ending: this is a dog of no known kind with one white eye and one black eye and the eyes of his eyes are as lost as you'll find The first book of critical essays on Cummings has just been published, edited by S. V Baum, with the worst title of the year: E??TI: e e c (Michigan State, 220 pp., $7.50...

...As R. P. Blackmur once charged, the poetry shuffles monotonous, vague counters: "death," "flower," "rain," "spring," and others...

...Reading almost 600 poems from 10 earlier volumes, one first sees the faults...

...Finally there are plain failures of craft: the ruinous pun ending the monologue by the mother all of whose sons were "kilt" ("they called them the kilties") or the equally ruinous last line of the lovely poem that begins: "so standing.our eyes filled with wind,and the/whining rigging over us...

...Other captions complain bitterly that the times are awful: "muckers don morningcoats,masters become their servants' servants,thieves are acclaimed & liars applauded,unchildren murder their nonparents,& politicians inherit the earth...

...Of course Cummings published too much, never able to tell which of his diamonds were paste...

...Cummings' text has the visual gimmicks of his poetry: spaces are not skipped after punctuation within the sentence...

...Three are among the great love poems of our time or any time: the sonnet "who's most afraid of death...

...I had never met him, but he was a friend of friends, and he and I had exchanged a few letters...

...It is Adventures in Value (Harcourt, Brace and World, unpaged, $10.75), a book of 50 photographs by Marion Morehouse, Cummings' widow, with text by Cummings...

...Cummings dreams of an earlier time "when loafing wasn't mankind's sole aim," or grumbles about the "UNamerican vice of softheadedness...

...thou...

...At their best, Cummings' captions are ingenious and beautiful like his best poetry...

...One is the early sonnet that reminds "the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls" that sometimes above Cambridge the "moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy...

...Who but our non-lecturer would describe a photograph of a zucchini squash standing against a wall as "a pleasing cross between porpoise & penguin,who is obviously listening with his nose...

...Starting in the '30s, when Cummings discovered that he was not an anarchist but a Republican who hated the New Deal, the bitterness against the times becomes pervasive, and almost hysterical in poems like the ballade "Jehovah buried,Satan dead," or "flotsam and jetsam," with its ingenious rhyming of "three cheers for labor" with "bugger thy nabor...

...One is the lyric "in Just-/spring," where everything is "mud-luscious" and "puddle-wonderful...

...the sonnet "if i have made.my lady,intricate...

...Cummings was terribly sentimental, although he learned to disguise his early girlish tone ("there fell upon the night, like angel's tears,/the syllables of that mysterious prayer,") with typographic and other facades...

...One is the endlessly anthologized, but still fresh and glistening, "Buffalo Bill's/defunct...

...The other fine poem that seems to me truly joyous is on that most unpromising of subjects, a whore's orgasm...

...He never again published anything quite so corny as the sonnet (few of his poems have titles) in which the poet takes the hands of his beloved's new love, "saying, Accept all happiness from me...

...His fake tough guy style, running to "will youse dearie?," "let on to/the bulls he'd bumped a bloke," or "buncha hardboil guys," tends to fall away and reveal a bunch of violets...

...another is like a Cummings verse line: "a wave beginning-e-x-p-a-n-d-i-n-gUpReArlnG-to:" The title of Adventures in Value is a pun, on pictorial values, the relationship of light to shade, as well as human values...

...and "somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond," with its magnificent and justly famous last line, "nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands.' The best two of Cummings' funny poems generate their humor out of bitter melancholy, like the great clowns and the finest blues...

...One is his protest against the martial spirit of the First World War, "i sing of Olaf glad and big," with its heroic martyred conscientious objector...

...Finally, there are three poems that cannot be neatly categorized but are uniquely Cummings...

...In college, I had read his poetry over and over, until I knew a considerable amount of it by heart...

...A photograph of a stuffed plush elephant, "a darling personage," floats bravely on a sea of gush...

...Many of the captions, unfortunately, have only the sentimentality and bitterness of the late poetry...

...All this has to be said, but it is of no importance...

...one caption is, in its entirety...