The Perfumed Paraphrase of Death

Review of Tulips and Chimneys (Thomas Seltzer, Inc., 1923) by W.C. Blum

Transcribed from The Dial, Volume 76, January, 1924, pp. 49-52.

Where it is a question of a first rate new poet one hardly cares to count any more on poetry lovers.  They swallow apparently anything and everything and seem not to know the difference between fresh asparagus and canned.  To prefer canned, my father says, is only perverse, but not to know the difference . . . . And let no one think I have made up this poetry lover out of straw.  There actually exist people who, having read [Ezra] Pound’s Chinese translations, will assure you that they are much the same as Witter Bynner’s or Miss [Amy] Lowell’s or almost anybody’s.

These Chinese translations make a test or measure for literary taste, a nice instrument of precision in a field where all is usually vague.  But to tackle the poetry of E.E. Cummings is to leave such things behind.  He is quite the most incommensurable among modern poets.  He has done so many things well, even many new things, the same thing seldom more than twice; he has rejuvenated so many verse forms, that it is hard to find any common divisor for his work.  For some time his name has been a sort of symbol of extreme modernism, and his writing has lately been said to “knock literature into a cocked hat."  I think however that while extreme he is only superficially "modern" and that far from knocking literature into a cocked hat, he is quite content to sharpen some very well known tendencies of that fairly inclusive body of practice.  With his typographical innovations, his extraordinary and ingenious appeal to the lust of the eye, he once led the fashion, or one of them.  But it is rather the satisfaction which he offers to the lust of the ear and to other old, often indecent, desires which poetry was supposed to gratify that I wish to emphasize; notably the desire for rapid unfailing lyrical invention.  And I think that for any one who is still capable of being stirred up by the lyric poetry, this book will appear with the same freshness and profusion as might an early book by John Keats or Verlaine.

No study is necessary to know this poetry as poetry.  One recognizes immediately the radiance of the words on the page, making the whole page luminous, a quality which Matthew Arnold’s words, for example, so seldom have.  And if a poem is read aloud one recognizes that here too everything is right and more than right [from Song IV].

These primary and striking virtues of Cummings’ poetry imply in the poet much more than merely a good eye and a good ear, though by no means all the literary virtues.  It is only natural for reviewers to endow the writer whom they admire with the abilities and intentions they admire, and I shall try not to make this mistake.  At least two reviewers have called attention to Cummings’ feeling for American speech, and one has written of his “accuracy in noting the cadences of talk and making music of it.”  The reviewer then quotes as an example the famous Buffalo Bill poem [Portrait VIII].   Now the cadence of talk is presumably the result of feeling in the one who talks, and it can be argued that the most accurate use of a cadence is the one which carries most feeling.  And of feeling, of typical recognizable feeling, I think Cummings’ phrases carry surprisingly little.  He does not bother with the typical.  Rather it is some peculiar and particular phrase or expression which he is apt to value.  Thus he wrote a sonnet [Reality III], a very good one, round abslatively posolutely.  The phrase of Buffalo Bill: .

is accurate in the sense that it is well put together, stands on its feet, but it does not give the impression of a living voice one half so strongly as, for [T.S.] Eliot’s [from The Fire Sermon in The Wasteland]

One would not venture to say that any person spoke or speared in these poems who was anything but frankly a grotesque, a marionette.  Cummings’ lack of interest in giving the impression of a living human being is comparable to his indifference to actual scenery in general, and I have been splitting hairs over this word accuracy because it suggests accuracy in representation, accuracy to “life.”  One finds few descriptions in this poetry which give one that intense joy of recognition (recognition as though of the very essence of the thing described) which is one of the chief pleasures of reading much mature poetry.

The modern common-sense doctrine of literary description figures very clearly in a passage in [Anton] Chekhov’s The Sea Gull where a young author complains about his difficulties in describing a moonlit night, not omitting the shimmering radiance, scented air, and the faint sounds of a piano.  Trigorin, the famous author, he says, would have written merely that the neck of a broken bottle glittered in the light and that there was a black shadow under the mill dam, and there you would have had the night before you.  This is the doctrine of the fresh and essential detail which dispassionately evokes an entire passionate memory.  Cummings, however, does not bother with this remarkably powerful common sense method; he always edges away, interposing an emotional word, firing it like a rocket, where one would expect an appeal to the senses.  He obtains the metaphor which equals the phenomenon (or our memories of it) in emotional intensity, rather than the image which evokes the memory and leaves the responsibility so to speak with the phenomenon.

This paraphrasing of life is not anything new in English poetry.  One finds it everywhere in the most respectable quarters, in Keats, in Milton, decidedly in Shakespeare.  Cummings is not a poet who dislikes conceits and mouth-filling lines.  Lord Byron himself could not have got more noise out of tiresome words than Cummings with his [from Unreality III]

His tearingly romantic wit enjoys particularly the confusion of the terms of grammar and of simple arithmetic, the shuffling of words for emphasis or out of childlike perversity, brutal surprises like Catullus’ glubit and excrucior.  Nothing is more typical of him, however, and more peculiarly his own than his use of adjectives, his opposition of matter of fact words to words vaguely emotional, of exact, accurate, skilful, to wonderful, enormous, terrible [from Puella Mia]:

This trick (much more than a trick considering his incredibly keen feeling for such words) which he pushes farther than any predecessor has dared, gives him control over most poignant, fragile, untouched emotions.  It also gives his verse an appearance of perverse abandon.  Decidedly the poet does not want his verse any safer than standing on a tower in a gale.  Suave, dangerous speed, dizzy falling, or veering in a reverberating emptiness—always the appeal to the motor and visceral sensations, the sensations of effective effort, of change of position, of alarming passive motion (as in an elevator) and to the primitive emotions of power and helplessness which lie just behind.  Sometimes he makes this appeal direct by a word, a verb as in [from Post Impression I]