E. E.

Cummings, High Modernist: A Defense

or
“Little Estlin, Our Nonhero, Modernist Faiteur”

Dr. April D. Fallon, Kentucky State University

There has been a great deal of controversy in the last forty years over the status of E. E.

Cummings’s poetry and place in literary history. The controversy over the correct representation

of his name—whether or not it should be capitalized or punctuated—serves as a symbol for the

fundamental level of disagreement and misunderstanding that surrounds Cummings’s creative

work. Even with putting such controversies aside, and even though there is a growing body of

criticism that argues for a more sophisticated consideration of Cummings’s poetry, there is still a

pervasive attitude that Cummings is a notable minor modernist poet at best. The fifth edition of

The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 2, describes Cummings as an author “of a

particularly agreeable kind of modernist poetry” who was “less ambitious in his attempts to

reshape poetry than Stein, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, or Williams” (Baym, et al. 1478). The fifth

edition shows some reassessment of Cummings from the fourth edition, with the fifth edition

stating that “there is always humor in his poetry, and his outrage at cruelty and exploitation is

balanced with gusto and celebration of the body” (1478), whereas the fourth edition goes so far

as to apologize for this “less ambitious style” by offering that “if his poetry was simpler in

thought and technique than the major modernists of his day, it compensated by a gusto and

humor that they often lacked” (Baym, et al. 1449). Both editions note his experimentation with

the visual presentation of poetry, yet the selection of poems in each anthology confirm that the

editors still felt more comfortable with Cummings’s less visually adventurous poems.

As seems often the case with critical assessments of Cummings’s poetry, the very things

that make his poetry exceptional and distinct from the other modernist poets, as well as make his
poems exceptional representations of modernist ideas and themes, are the very things that mark

him as a minor poet. The Norton introduction to Cummings continues that his poetry is

“distinguished by clever formal innovation” through experimentation with “punctuation, line

breaks, hyphenation, . . . verse shapes,” and with poems “without beginnings or endings,

consisting of fragmentary lines” (1478). In terms of themes addressed in Cummings’s poetry, the

text identifies that his poetry often attacked the exploitative mass culture, celebrated loners and

nonconformists, and used irony as a primary approach. Perhaps the attribute most likely used to

relegate Cummings as a minor poet, according to the Norton Anthology, is his populist appeal.

The introduction claims “Cummings’s verse is characterized by common speech” (1478).

These descriptions of Cummings’s poetry not only echo most definitions of modernism

and modernist poetry, but they also sound very similar to descriptions of the poetry and theory of

the high modernists. The second edition of The Harper Handbook to Literature defines

modernism as a stance in which:

art became subject to change in every way, that the content, forms, and techniques
inherited from the nineteenth century existed to be challenged, broken apart, and
reformed. Life was viewed as incoherent, experience was fragmented, and reality
a matter of perception. . . . Both poets and prose writers fragmented their themes,
their images, and their narrative. Many extended their experimentation to the
structure of language itself. (Frye 301)

Sanford Schwartz, in The Matrix of Modernism, adds to this definition the distinguishing

features of “abrupt juxtaposition, irony, paradox, and the like” (3). Ezra Pound’s and the other

Imagist poets’ use of the most precise word from common speech, and William Carlos

Williams’s articulation that poetry should present “no ideas but in things” are very similar to the

stance ascribed to Cummings. Likewise, Eliot’s concept of a “new compound” which creates

“new and sudden combinations” (The Sacred Wood 55), or Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Toward a

Supreme Fiction” that identifies art as the only true medium through which to interpret “reality,”
is not so different in kind to themes and ideas in Cummings’s poetry. The formal, thematic, and

multi-genre experimentation of Gertrude Stein in such works as Tender Buttons is not, in many

respects, any more radical than that of Cummings’s.

The major distinctions between Cummings and the poets labeled high modernists are

Cummings’s disinterest in producing critical theory, his syntactical experimentation, and his

attention to the visual content of the poems as an integral component of the poem’s theme.

Perhaps the closest Cummings comes to poetics is in his i: six nonlectures, a collection of

lectures delivered at Harvard from 1952-1953. The first nonlecture clearly articulates

Cummings’s stance in regard to critical theory:

Ever since many of you didn’t exist I’ve been learning and relearning, as a writer
and as a painter, the significance of those immemorial maxims “one man’s meat is
another man’s poison” and “you can lead the mare to water but yo can’t make her
drink.” Now—as a nonlecturer—I am luckily confronted by that equally ancient,
but far less austere, dictum “it’s an ill wind which blows nobody good.” For
while a genuine lecturer must obey the rules of mental decency, and clothe his
personal idiosyncrasies in collectively acceptable generalities, an authentic
ignoramus remains quite indecently free to speak as he feels. This prospect
cheers me, because I value freedom; and have never expected freedom to be
anything less than indecent. The very fact that a burlesk addict of long standing
(who has many times worshipped at the shrine of progressive corporeal
revelation) finds himself on the verge of attempting an aesthetic striptease, strikes
me as quite a remarkable manifestation of poetic justice; and reinforces my
conviction that since I can’t tell you what I know (or rather what I don’t know)
there’s nothing to prevent me from trying to tell you who I am—which I’d deeply
enjoy doing. (3)

It is clear from this statement, as well as from much of his poetry, that Cummings saw theoretical

writing as antithetical to creativity, and as an assault on the freedom true creativity requires.

Cummings viewed creativity as something that simply could not be adequately explained, but

was best represented and understood (or as Cummings preferred, felt) by experiencing the

creative work on its own terms, similar in some significant ways to Stevens’s “Supreme Fiction.”

Additionally, Cummings’s concept of creativity is that it is dynamic and fluid and cannot be held
within the confines of safety or decency, not something static enough to know or master in such a

way that it could be communicated through so banal a form as an essay. Cummings viewed art

theory and poetics as symbolic of the absence of creativity, or as he might have put it, nonart.

It is Cummings’s experimentation with language and with form that distinguishes him

from all poets preceding him, as well as from his contemporaries. Though some critics have

labeled this experimentation as merely clever word play, many poets of the latter part of the

Twentieth-Century—Robert Creeley is one notable example—name Cummings as a major

influence upon their development. Countless other poets have been influenced by Cummings in

more diffuse ways, including such diverse poets as Frank O’Hara and Charles Bukowski.

Cummings’s linguistic and visual experimentation did not simply create word tricks, word

puzzles, or even concrete or language poems, but enabled him to create surreal and synaesthetic

images, to achieve multiple meanings from words, phrases, and poetic lines, and to express

content through methods usually limited to visual art that all come to bear on the meaning of the

poem, and must all be addressed in order to gain the fullest sense of the poem. Different poems

highlight different aspects of these experiments, and some Cummings poems read similarly to

other linear lyric poems; however, in some of Cummings’s most successful and daring poems, he

achieves a kind of syntactical web or mosaic of meaning, as opposed to a narrative or

grammatical line, that is conveyed through both the content and the arrangement of the words,

and that can even sustain paradox, much like haiku does in its original Japanese characters that

more closely ally image and meaning. The closest that most of the other high modernist poets

can come to such expressions is the pastiche or collage, both of which are still usually presented

in an essentially linear syntax, and achieve their multiplicity of meanings mostly through theme.

The sonnet, “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls,” which is often
anthologized and appears in the Norton anthology, is in many ways a fairly straightforward

poem, yet couched within the sonnet form are Cummings’s less conventional images and

syntactical tinkering:

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls

are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church’s protestant blessings
daughters, unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things—
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
. . . . the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy (Poems 70)

Images such as “furnished souls” and “comfortable minds” are fresh and still accessible, whereas

the images “unbeautiful,” “unscented shapeless spirited,” and “permanent faces” are a bit more

suggestive and abstract in their meaning. Together the images create the picture of the very

active but creatively dead Cambridge ladies and their daughters, which is expressed more plainly

in lines like “they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,/ are invariably interested in so

many things—.” Syntactically, the language is mostly straightforward, with the exception of the

phrase, “delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?/ perhaps,” which mimics the chatty speech

Cummings envisions for them.

The imagery and the syntax both become more unusual in the final lines of the poem in

the image of the moon. Instead of bringing closure, the last three lines catapult the poem out of

the Cambridge ladies’ sitting room and into the sky. The image of the moon is surreal and

enigmatic, comic and paradoxical. The cornerless box of “sky lavender” the moon inhabits

presents the paradox of the moon’s restriction within boundless space. The image of the moon
rattling “like a fragment of angry candy” adds many layers of meaning in one phrase: it suggests

the moon is angry, that the moon can rattle, that the moon looks like a piece of candy, and only a

fragment of candy at that, and that a fragment of candy can be angry. These implied assertions

create an image with many facets, and a very different world from the mundane world of the

Cambridge ladies. Even though the poem is a sonnet—a form the Cambridge ladies most

assuredly would have regarded with respect—the magical, vibrant, almost comic-dangerous

world of the moon in the last lines of this sonnet is beyond the realm of the Cambridge ladies and

their education, social standing, and morality.

The poem “l(a,” is another often anthologized poem (though less so than ‘the Cambridge

ladies”), and is often used to cite that Cummings was a mere trickster with words. The poem’s

arrangement on the page illustrates the movement of the phrase “a leaf falls” while offering a

parallel statement on the action with the word “loneliness.” It is much more than a visual trick,

however, and makes much greater use of the placement of language and letters than simply to

depict the movement of the leaf:

l(a

le
af
fa

ll

s)
one
l

iness (673)

Richard S. Kennedy offers a perceptive explication of this poem in E. E. Cummings Revisited.

One of his observations is that the poem makes use of the typed lower-case “L,” which looks
almost identical to the numeral 1 and further conveys the singularity of the leaf with the definite

article “a” (131). To further Kennedy’s point, it is also clear in looking at the poem that

Cummings isolates the “Ls” throughout the poem, which gives visual representation to the

solitary nature of the “loneliness” conveyed in the poem. And, as Kennedy asserts, the

placement of the “one” and “iness” on separate lines further asserts the singularity of the self,

and the lower case “I” comments on the smallness this feeling creates. The poem expresses not

simply a momentary feeling, but an existential state. The poem is also essentially a haiku in the

associative relationship between the description of a natural scene and the speaker’s comment,

and is, in many ways, even closer to a traditional haiku than most western haiku in that it also

represents its meaning in its visual presentation as well as in the content of its language.

A much less frequently anthologized poem that makes similar use of space and

punctuation to create a web or mosaic of meaning, in this case the seemingly paradoxical senses

of confinement and emptiness, is the poem “dim”:

dim
i
nu
tiv

e this park is e
mpty(everyb
ody’s elsewher
e except me 6 e

nglish sparrow
s) a
utumn & t
he rai

n
th
e

raintherain (696)
The poem makes the word diminutive embody its meaning by breaking it into the small chunks

of “dim” “i” “un” “tive,” and by keeping the letters lower-case. Also within the word is

Cummings’s now famous (or infamous) lower-case “I” which achieves a double meaning, at

once functioning as a component of the word diminutive, and also creating the phrase “dim i,”

which further shades the tone of the poem and suggests the mood of the speaker. The placement

of the word diminutive so strikes the reader that the unlikely phrase that follows it, “this park is

empty,” almost slips by unnoticed; however, the juxtaposition of the sense of smallness of the

park with its emptiness introduces the complexity of feeling the poem depicts.

The emptiness of the park is conveyed in several ways. By leaving the initial “E” of the

word emptiness to hang in the white space of the page enacts the absence the word denotes.

There is also a visual and tonal echoing of the emptiness by the solitary lower-case “Es” flanking

“this park is” in the first line of the second stanza. Next, by putting any reference to living

things in parentheses sets any consideration of presence as separate. The contents of the

parentheses further shape and color the sense of emptiness. By slicing the word “everybody’s”

into “everyb” and “ody’s” symbolically disembodies the “everybody,” and hacking off the final

“e” of “elsewhere” and dropping it to the next line further demonstrates that the people

referenced are not there. To compound the sense that the speaker is isolated, the poem separates

the references to the others from the speaker with line breaks. The small scattering of six

sparrows who are the speaker’s only companions, is represented by the relative smallness of the

numeral 6 in comparison to the already small word “six,” and by the scattering of the name

“english sparrows” across three lines and a stanza break.

The juxtaposition of the commentary about the park’s small size and its emptiness with

the observation of “autumn and the rain the rain the rain,” functions much like a haiku in the
relationship between the natural image and the speaker’s perspective on it. Again, the placement

of words and word parts suggests the increasing season and rain storm, with the first use of the

phrase “the rain” dropping across three lines and a stanza break, and building to one line jammed

with “raintherain” without spaces between the words.

The attention Cummings gave to the visual component of his poetry seems natural since

he was also a painter. While he never achieved prominence as a visual artist, his knowledge of

visual composition comes through in his poetry. His poems depict their themes through not only

the content of their words, but also through its presentation on the page. However, this manner

of presentation is not, like some of his detractors have claimed, mere trickery. The visual aspect

of the poems are not presented as puzzles to be solved or as tricks that provide a “gotcha” once

realized. The poems present complex, and at times, paradoxical themes that reflect the complex

and variable nature of existence, like all other great poetry does. Nor is Cummings’s poetry

concrete or language poetry, for both concrete poetry and language poetry designate the meaning

of the language as subordinate to either the visual or the aural component of the language, and

Cummings’s poetry clearly unites all aspects of its presentation with the poem’s meaning. His

poetry illustrates a thorough aesthetic consideration of the visual associations and spacial

component of text in direct relation to the content of its language. The tools he employed to

achieve this synthesis include: the proximity and placement of words and word parts on the page

in relation to each other and in relation to the movement of the poem as a whole, the use of

typographic symbols, capitalization, and punctuation (or lack thereof), the use of white space.

With his knowledge of visual art as well as literature, Cummings’s best work achieves an

artistic synthesis that should assure him a place as not only one of the high modernist poets, but

also as one of America’s best poets. Criticisms of Cummings that imply his place in American
literature is not so lofty include that he did not exercise sufficient judgement in what he allowed

to be published, and that he at times made offensive statements in his writing and personal life.

Kennedy aptly defends Cummings from the first criticism by noting that Cummings’s lifelong

dedication to experimentation meant that not all of his poems would be as successful as those by

more conventional poets, and that by having access to unsuccessful experiments “meant that a

winnowing was possible for anthologists and poetry lovers who could make their own choices”

(79). Cummings’s playfulness in using the saying “one man’s meat is another man’s poison” in

his first nonlecture affirms this philosophy, and Cummings’s fierce love of freedom no doubt

would have included the reader’s freedom to choose from the largest body of Cummings’s work.

In reference to the second charge, it is common knowledge that many of the other modernist

icons held less than politically correct attitudes that were sometimes present in their writing—

Eliot, Pound, and Hemingway, for example—which has not, for the most part, harmed their

positions in the canon. Perhaps the real reason that controversy still exists in regard to

Cummings’s place in literature is because of his sense of humor; his willingness to poke fun at

himself, referring to himself as “little estlin” and “our nonhero” (Kennedy 28) in letters to

friends, his playfulness so evident in his poetry, himself preferring to call a poem a “fait” and a

poet a “faiteur” (10), and his unabashed disregard for editors, critics, professors, and all others

who would claim that they thought they understood his poetry rather than proclaim that like the

they felt that they understood, as Cummings proclaims in the poem, “since feeling is first:”

since feeling is first

who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
 my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

We are here for each other: then

laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis (290)

Works Cited

Baym, Nina, et al, eds. “E. E. Cummings.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 2,
5th ed. New York: Norton, 1998. 1478.

Baym, Nina, et al, eds. “E. E. Cummings.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 2,
4th ed. New York: Norton, 1994. 1448-49.
Cummings, Edward Estin. Complete Poems: 1913-1962. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1968.
---. “dim.” 696.
---. “l(a.” 673.
---. “since feeling is first.” 290.
---. “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls.” 70.

---. i: six nonlectures. New York: Atheneum, 1967.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. New York: Methuen,
1972.

Frye, Northrup, et al. “Modernism.” The Harper Handbook to Literature. 2nd ed. 1997. 300-301.

Kennedy, Richard S.. E. E. Cummings Revisited. Joseph M. Flora, Ed. Twayne’s United States
Authors Series. New York: Macmillan, 1994.

Schwartz, Sanford. The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century
Thought. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.