Champion of the Individual

...he reordered the syntax of the English sentence in strange and unexpected ways...

...Like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Cummings screams from the pages of wouldbe disciples...

...It is a useful book, and this is the best thing one can say, really, about a work of criticism...

...Then Wegner goes on to describe the poet's subjects, images, and themes, defining such key terms as "freedom" and "individualism" and characterizing those aspects of the social order that Cummings found stifling and so suitable for satire...

...Wegner begins with a chapterdevoted to the ontological preoccupation of Cummings: his commitment to "aliveness," to "being" as independent of what a man does for a living, his belief in the value of "failure" as a means to the universal harmony that he characterized with the daring word "nothing...

...Robert E. Wegner's little book, The Poetry and Prose of E. E. Cummings: A Study in Appreciation, helps the reader to understand the poems of a remarkable man...

...These poems were the effects of love, really, for it was love of the natural world, mankind, and art that motivated Cummings in all his work...

...This fierce individualism understandably focused on the value of the sensory experience of reality rather than on mind-created values, the abstractions that reduced life to categories...

...Professor Wegner ends his book with a discussion of the celebrated Cummings technique, which he shows was intended to make the reader see clearly what he has often merely looked at...

...And the technical innovations of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams have had an enormous influence on the practice of poets in the past 20-30 years...

...But at best they forced him to slow down and concentrate on every word of a poem...

...He liked to use verbs as nouns, for example, and adverbs as adjectives...

...He probably put too great a weight on love when he asked it for salvation, but this is, no doubt, an endearing error...

...Like a great many writers since Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and the great disputations over Evolution, Cummings saw human love as the avenue to the civilization of the spirit in a time without faith...

...There are too many critics on the scene whose work is no more than self-display or a parade of fashionable perceptions...

...All saw the mind as responsible for science and technology and the crippling of the emotional life of men by reason of their subjection to machines, factories, and the middle-class morality that proved to be economically useful...

...Cummings' suspicion of the mind was very much like that of D. H. Lawrence and Sherwood Anderson...

...With the aid of Wegner, one finds Cummings less puzzling technically and much wiser philosophically than one had supposed he was...

...Sometimes he produced emblematic poems by shaping the print in a way that suggested his meaning...

...And Cummings' best poems unquestionably deserve scrutiny, poems like "i sing of Olaf glad and big," "anyone lived in a pretty how town," "what if a much of a which of a wind," and "now all the fingers of this tree (darling) have...

...The Enormous Room...

...For Cummings the senses provided an authentic, direct contact with reality, with the many branches and leaves of life...

...But Cummings, curiously enough, has had very little direct influence, even though he pioneered for decades on the most thinly held frontiers of language and consciousness...

...Cummings was famous in the 1920s for his anti-war stand, for his rejection of the slaughter that group loyalties brought about in World War I. His position was clear not only in such poems as the one in praise of Olaf, the conscientious objector, who "was/ more brave than me: more blond than you," but also in his bitter fictional work...

...He attacked whatever prevented a man from becoming himself and living his life freely and completely...

...Wegner has resisted the temptation to engage in "creative criticism" and has gone systematicallv about his job of interpretation, in which he says he was assisted by Cummings himself...

...Reviewed by STEPHEN STEPANCHEV Author, "American Poetry Since 1945, A Critical Survey" E. E. Cummings was one of the leading figures of the remarkable literary renascence of the years 1910-30, when such poets as Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Hart Crane first won the attention of a public that was clearly suspicious of the new...

...But in time the public accepted and admired the new poets, for the simple reason that their brilliance was undeniable...

...His manner is so individual, so idiosyncratic, that to imitate him is to leave oneself open to the charge of plagiarism...

...This love of the particular is evident in poems about the sound of a grasshopper, the fall of a leaf, and the twinkling of a star...

...The most striking feature of Cummings' poems is their championship of individualism, their emphasis on the importance of personal being in a world increasingly threatened by the non-life of machines, routines, and schedules...

...They have proved to be so brilliant, in fact, that they still represent, for many readers, modernism in American poetry...

...It is a sharp criticism of the power of the state and of organized groups from the point of view of a man who was brought up to love Unitarianism and transcendentalism...

...He wrote an astonishing number of love poems, some of them so conventional that they border on sentimentality, but they are often saved by a glitter of technical effects that mask the familiarity of the themes and attitudes...

...Sometimes, to be sure, these devices distracted the reader's attention...

...and he frequently broke up words into their component letters, which he then scattered across the page...

...And in the 1930s he took a trip to Russia and wrote a diary record that he called Eimi...

...This is a fascinating chapter and demonstrates that the poet's unusual typographical arrangements are functional...

...It is, after all, not easy to distinguish between hokum and truth when the literary mode is unfamiliar...