Complete Poems 1913-1935 and 1936-1962 E. E. Cummings (MacGibbon and

Kee 63s each)

Private eye

ASHLEY BROWN

Complete Poems 1913-1935 and 1936-1962 E. E. Cummings (MacGibbon and Kee 63s each) These handsome volumes are a British publisher's tribute to one of the most attractive

American poets. Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962) is not among those Americans, like Frost and Ransom, who immediately appeal to British taste, and during his lifetime be was scarcely published in London. There is indeed no one quite like him in England except (now and then) Robert Graves, who has admired him for many years. In America he has been contemporary classic since 1923, the date of Tulips and Chimneys. This first collection of his verse came at a glorious moment in American poetry : the same year as Frost's New Hamp- shire and Stevens's Harmonium, the year before Ransom's Chills and Fevers and Marianne Moore's Observations. Pound and Eliot had prepared the way, as it were, in London, and now modernist poetry found its true home in the United States. Graves and Laura Riding presently brought out A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), a brilliant analysis of the subject, in which Cummings figures as prominently as Eliot. To many young Americans of the 1920s he must have seemed the last word. He was more accessible than Eliot or Pound, not at all intellectually demanding, and his raucous charm set the tone for the period as much as Scott Fitzgerald's early novels.

Heretofore the larger collections of Cummings (for instance the Selected Poems 1923-1958 from Faber) have suggested that he began writ- ing his poems after the First World War, but this new collection (which supersedes all others) makes it clear that some of them go back to his student days at Harvard. Cummings at the beginning was essentially a late romantic, reluc- tant to abandon the enthusiasms of his youth, notably Keats and Swinburne. The young Elibt, six years older than Cummings and also at Harvard till 1914, had already modified his style by way of Jules Laforgue—'Prufrock' was ac- tually written in 1911. Cummings's modernist poems came only around 1920. The decisive influence for him seems to have been Apolli- naire, and most obviously the Calligrammes.

In a sense Cummings began his career in France in 1918, the year of Apollinaire's death. He was profoundly affected by the war, moire than the Polish-French poet had been; his account of his imprisonment in a French deten- tion camp, in the prose work The Enormous Room (1922), makes that clear. The similarities

between the two are considerable. Both had as almost absolute devotion to personal freedom and an equal aversion to organised society. It was their intense delight in the momentary that really lay at the back of their ideogrammic method. Both had the example of Picasso and cubism (Apollinaire as art critic, Cummings as painter) for a poetry of simultaneity. Their famous innovations in typography and punctua- tion brought them soon enough to the verge of what is now called poisie concrete. But Cummings never departed from traditional prosody for long, and in fact half of his best things are sonnets. This, for instance, is the opening of the sonnet on Ford Madox Ford-:

possibly thrice we glimpsed—

more like twice that (once crammed into someone's kitchenette) wheezing bulgily world of genial plac - -idity (plus, out of much its misbutt- oned trouserfly tumbling, faded five or so lightyears of pyjamastring) a (vastly and particularly) live that undeluded notselfpitying lover of all things excellently rare ...

Here the dislocations of language and syntax, very precisely establish a simultaneity of per- ception. The rhetoric is markedly visual, but the eye still serves the ear. To this extent Cummings is 'traditional' and can easily be assimilated by the reader who resists poisie concrete.

The limitation of this method—more than a method, a way of seeing the world—is that it is fragmentary. Cummings's poems are as 'finished' as anyone else's. But his emphasis on sensation is necessarily private much of the time. The late R. P. Blackmur almost forty years ago wrote about the 'heresy of unintelligence' in Cum- mings : a denial of ideas and beliefs which leads to 'unintelligibility' and sentimentality. Poetry, said Blackmur, 'is not in immediacy at all.' This is perhaps too strenuous a judgment. All the same, Cummings's norm is something like this:

of this sunset (which is so filled with fear people bells)i say your eyes can take day away more softly horribly suddenly ...

This is no more 'immediate' than Eliot's: At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting ...

But Eliot's lines, though charged with immediacy, suggest something more—they lead into a vision of existence in which we are all involved. Cummings's fierce defence of the private life—for that is what his poetry is about —has much to be said for it even now. It is to his credit that he never succumbed to the politi- cal ideologies that awaited so many lyric talents of his generation—the temptation must have been considerable in the Greenwich Village of the 1930s.

This is not to say that Cummings didn't write work of a 'public' nature. The well-known anthology poem that begins 'my father moved through dooms of love' is as fine a celebration of one man by another as we can read in English poetry of any period. And another sort of 'public' poem is represented by the coarse but very _funny satire on the military that begini sing of Olaf glad and big.' As a rule the satirical poems don't wear so well. They still have a period interest for readers who fondly recall the inanities and philistinism of the Calvin Coolidge era, but the occasion has long passed. Cum- mings's major works, his excursions into the 'public' world, are in prose: The Enormous Room; Eimi (1933), a remarkable travel book on Stalinist Russia; and the play Him (1927), which might be set beside Apollinaire's Les Mamelles de Tiresias (both are descended from classical farce). It all adds up to a considerable achievement by a writer who ranks among the best of his period.