Words Into Pictures

Words into Pictures
Words into Pictures

E. E. Cummings’ Art across Borders
Edited by
JiĜí Flajšar and Zénó Vernyik
CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

Words into Pictures: E. E. Cummings’ Art across Borders, Edited by JiĜí Flajšar and Zénó Vernyik
This book first published 2007 by
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2007 by JiĜí Flajšar and Zénó Vernyik and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN 1-84718-335-2; ISBN 13: 9781847183354
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii

Acknowledgements .................................................................................. viii
Introduction ................................................................................................. x
Chronology............................................................................................. xviii
Part I: New Contexts
Cummings and the Brotherhood of Visual Poetics...................................... 2

Richard Bradford
Reflecting EIMI: The Iconic Meta-Sonnet, Manhood, and Cultural

Crisis in E. E. Cummings’ No Thanks....................................................... 27
Gillian Huang-Tiller
The Posterity of Idiosyncrasies: E. E. Cummings’ Influence

on Post-War American Poetry................................................................... 58
Isabelle Alfandary
Part II: Political Cummings
From Bad Boy to Curmudgeon: Cummings’ Political Evolution.............. 68

Milton Cohen
Divine Excess: The Logic of General Economics

in The Enormous Room ............................................................................. 90
Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder
Part III: Cummings in Space
“As usual I did not find him in cafes”: I-space, “i” space,
and Spatial Cognition in E. E. Cummings’ Poetry .................................. 108
Taimi Olsen
Sacred-Evil New York: Urban Spatiality in Tulips & Chimneys ............ 126
Zénó Vernyik
vi Table of Contents
Part IV: Amongst Arts
Crossing Generic Boundaries: Sculpture, Painting and Engraving

as Compensations for E. E. Cummings’ Hermeneutic Short-Cuts .......... 156
Claudia Desblaches
“With chasteness of sea-girls”: Björk’s Adaptation

of E. E. Cummings’ Poetry...................................................................... 170
Emília Barna
Part V: Identity and Subjectivity
Beyond the Scope of the “I” in E. E. Cummings’ Leaf Poem ................. 188
Kurt Harris
Notes........................................................................................................ 201
Contributors............................................................................................. 210
Index........................................................................................................ 214
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1-1 Final Schema of No Thanks (Small Special Collections Library,

University of Virginia)
1-2 Final Schema of No Thanks (as it appears in the typescript edition
of the volume)
1-3 First Schema of No Thanks (Houghton Library)
1-4 The first lines of the Sonnets, applied on the Final Schema
1-5 Structural chart of EIMI
3-1 Typology related to the reference frame
3-2 Cartographic fictional space in Tulips & Chimneys
3-3 Partitions of space in “i was sitting in mcsorley’s”
3-4 Binaries into a triad
3-5 Sacred fictional space in Tulips & Chimneys
4-1 E. E. Cummings 1894-1962, Noise Number 13, 1925, Oil on
canvas, 59 9/16 x 42 ¾ in (151.29 x 108.59 cm) Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York. Photograph by Geoffrey Clements.
4-2 Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533, National
Gallery, London
4-3 Giovanni Battista Bracelli, “Duel pour la Toison d’Or” in Bizzarie
di Varie Figure, 1624, Livorno
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This volume started out as a lack, something that its editors voiced
when they first met in February, 2005. What began as a casual and
friendly discussion over some food and wine, ended up as a long-term,
close professional relationship and a common plan for a new volume of
essays on Cummings. Strangely enough, chance, fate, or the hand of
someone above, had a lot to do with this book.
Nevertheless, however much does this strange encounter of an early
date have to do with the material existence of this book, it would have
never become anything more than a common dream, if it was not for a lot
of people who made it turn into reality.
First and foremost, our contributors deserve credit. They are the ones
who filled with content the structure we provided. Their work and their
original ideas made this into something unique and original, colorful and
varied. At the same time, their excellent cooperativity, and unparalleled
patience made them unusually pleasant to work with, while the
friendliness and honest interest some of them showed, turned our
relationship from a mere professional venture into something that we dare
call friendship.
However, all those essays, and all the effort their authors spent on
writing them, would have been of no use, if Cambridge Scholars
Publishing had not decided to agree and publish it. To some, this act of
saying thanks to them may sound a mere formality, but it is not so. The
fact that they trusted us from the very beginning deserves genuine and
heartfelt thanks, just as their willingness to publish a volume that has a
potentially limited audience. In addition, they proved very understanding,
flexible and helpful throughout the long months that this project required,
for which we are really grateful.
In particular, we would like to thank Dr. Andy Nercessian, our editor,
for showing interest in our project, for taking all the risks that it involved,
and for being very understanding about the delays that we encountered.
Carol Koulikourdi also deserves all our respect and thankfulness, for
answering all the questions that arose, for assisting us with our problems,
and devoting so much energy to make sure that everything went smoothly.
Amanda Millar, the person responsible for the volume’s typesetting,
should also be remembered as someone who contributed a lot to the
Words into Pictures: E. E. Cummings’ Art Across Borders ix
project and made up for the delays by being even more efficient than
usual.
Some of the artworks and poems reprinted in this volume are the
properties of various galleries and publishing houses. Therefore, we would
also like to thank them for allowing us to reproduce them here. We are
grateful to Boni and Liveright and W. W. Norton, for letting us reprint
poems of E. E. Cummings. The Houghton Library of Harvard University
and the Small Special Collections Library of the University of Virginia
also deserve our thanks for letting us reprint copies of manuscripts in their
collections. In a similar vein, the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, for
their permission to print Cummings’ Noise Number 13, and the National
Gallery, for kindly agreeing to the reproduction of Hans Holbein the
Younger’s The Ambassadors also deserves credit. Carcanet Press holds the
rights to Charles Tomlinson’s “Lines,” New Directions to the poems of
William Carlos Williams, and Faber and Faber to Hugo Williams’ poem.
The arrangements regarding these rights are still in process at the time of
the volume’s publication, and the author of the essay quoting them holds
full responsibility for their satisfactory conclusion.
We would also like to thank Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel and the
Department of English and American Studies at Masaryk University,
Marcela Malá and Zuzana Šaffková and the English Department at the
Technical University of Liberec, and Jaroslav Macháþek and the
Department of English and American Studies at Palacký University, for
tolerating all the inconveniences and missed deadlines they had to suffer.
This book would not have ever materialized without their flexibility and
understanding.
And last, but not least, our love and thanks to our families and friends,
and loved ones who could not get the attention they deserved while we
devoted our time to making this book materialize, and who supported us
nonetheless.
INTRODUCTION
The reader holds a new volume of essays on E. E. Cummings in her

hand. One that tries to shift the focus of interest of Cummings studies to
fields that are somewhat less researched, or traditionally somewhat
neglected. Although we do not claim that the book deals with heretofore
uncharted territories, it nevertheless does contain essays that focus on less
well-wrought topics. Therefore, it can be said to attempt to make the
treatment of the oeuvre of E. E. Cummings, if not more, at least differently
balanced.
The title of our volume, Words Into Pictures, has a peculiar ring to it.
In one phrase, it brings together the verbal and the visual, two forms of art
traditionally considered to be distinct and separate; a tradition that was
most clearly voiced by (and to some extent also instituted by) Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing in his Laokoon. In fact, this title, by positing the
possibility of transfer or metamorphosis between words and pictures
seems to be in clear violation of Lessing’s clear-cut system of verbal vs
visual. The book apparently ignores the dictum of associating “temporality
with literature and spatiality with painting and sculpture” (Landwehr 2002,
12), a division that allows literature to be only temporal, and painting to be
only spatial, and that labels all experiments that try to blur the boundaries
and experiment with spatial poetry or temporal (or narrative) painting as
imperfect, perverse or second-rate. As W. J. T. Mitchell puts it, quoting
Lessing himself:
[I]t is “prescribed as a law to all poets” that “they should not regard the
limitations of painting as beauties in their own art.” For poets to “employ
the same artistic machinery” as the painter would be to “convert a superior
being into a doll.” It would make as much sense, argues Lessing, “as if a
man, with the power and privilege of speech, were to employ the signs
which the mutes in a Turkish seraglio had invented to supply the want of a
voice.” (Mitchell 1995, 155)
Hidden in this prescriptive separation of the two types of art by Lessing,

behind his “moral, aesthetic imperative” to differentiate between “verbal
and visual mediation” (154) is, in addition, the preference of the written
over the pictorial, the attribution of superiority to the verbal arts. By
arguing “that the artist, unlike the writer, could only portray a single
Words into Pictures: E. E. Cummings’ Art Across Borders xi
moment in time and then from only one point of view” (Landwehr 2002,
12), Lessing and the tradition that followed clearly shows the signs of
privileging literature over visual art. Seen from this point of view, the title
Words Into Pictures stands for an act of regression not only because it
stipulates it possible and even advocates the blurring of the boundaries of
the verbal and the visual, but also because it gives a direction to the
process, and one that leads from what is traditionally considered a
“higher” level of sophistication to a “lower” one.
The title is not only emblematic in its stance against a certain
theoretical dictum, but also, more significantly, because it expresses its
allegiance to an altogether different school. Indeed, after the first
paragraph, it is not hard to guess that this is no other than the picture
theory advocated by W. J. T. Mitchell, and his interpretation of iconology.
This may be a rather surprising statement if one takes into consideration
that no essay published below refers to any work by Mitchell, or mentions
his influence even cursorily. Nevertheless, the relationship is real. In the
paragraphs below, we endeavor to show how.
Richard Bradford, in his “Cummings and the Brotherhood of Visual
Poetics” directly tackles Lessing’s above mentioned basic imperatives,
and shows how Milton, Wordsworth, William Carlos Williams and E. E.
Cummings created poems that are essentially visual and spatial in their
character. And Bradford does not primarily discuss those poems of
Cummings that are visual in the way of drawing by arranging the lines
into an abstract or more tangible picture on the page, but the essentially
visual quality of his poems. He shows how even Cummings’ most
“poetic” poems are far from being purely temporal in accordance with
Lessing’s requirements, proving that having an “image/text is just as
unavoidable and necessary with [...] unmixed media as it is with mixed,
composite forms” (Mitchell 1995, 94). By juxtaposing Cummings to such
canonized and well-established poets as Milton and Wordsworth, and
pointing out that this visual quality is not only detectable, but also crucial
in their writing. At the same time, he can show that the visuality of
Cummings’ poetry is not something that makes his art atypical, or
imperfect, but quite on the contrary: his poetry is the logical continuation
of a long tradition. A tradition that has always been there, only it suited
the critics more to play its presence down than to acknowledge it and face
a much more destabilizing complexity. Such an act would have inevitably
meant to accept that “all arts are ‘composite’ arts (both text and image);
all media are mixed media, combining different codes, discursive
conventions, channels, sensory and cognitive modes” (94-5). In
mentioning Williams, Bradford is also able to preempt the occurrence of
xii Introduction
another classical charge against Cummings, namely that he is simply

putting old things in new frames, because he “has nothing new to say,” he
only mimics and follows the old classics, only “wrap[ping] it [the old
content] up in gaudy packages to make it appear new” (Friedman 1964,
13), unlike other Modernists. Whether the pronouncement about other
Modernists is true or not, Bradford effectively counteracts such a charge
by showing that the continuation of the visual tradition is not unique to
Cummings, but rather a wider phenomenon, if not universal.
Claudia Desblaches, in her essay entitled “Crossing Generic
Boundaries: Sculpture, Painting and Engraving as Compensations for E.
E. Cummings’ Hermeneutic Short-cuts,” deals with an even more tangibly
Mitchellian topic. The article points out that a certain amount of
Cummings’ poems are prefigured in well-known paintings and sculptures,
and are therefore to be understood as “the verbal representation[s] of
visual representation,” that is, as cases of “ekphrasis” (Mitchell 1995,
152). The prefiguration of the poems in certain visual images, however, is
meant in its strictest sense, that is, Cummings’ poems do not simply
describe works of art, much rather it happens the other way round: it is the
picture that structures the text. The title Words Into Pictures is reversed
here, as we have pictures turning into words, or rather into phrases and
verbal structures. That is, Desblaches provides the reader with a striking
refutation of the seemingly incontestable claim that even in the case of an
ekphrastic relationship, “the visual object does not impinge [...] upon its
verbal representation to determine its grammar, control its style, or
deform its syntax” (159), because she claims that in the case of these
poems, it clearly does. The paintings and sculptures have a direct
structural influence on Cummings’ texts, and are not only and not even
primarily described or portrayed. Going even further than that, the essay
actually suggests, following in the steps of Christian Prigent, that some of
Cummings’ poems are not only structured by visual works of art, but
structured as visual works of art: they have an essentially visual structure,
in as much as they often behave in an anamorphic fashion, where
“Cummings’ signifiers have been forced through a semi-cylindrical mirror
which distorts words as we get closer to the surface.” That is, Cummings’
poems, although verbal constructs, employ the fundamentally “optical
technique of anamorphosis” (Helgeson 2005, 127), thereby once again
calling attention to the phenomenon that “all arts are ‘composite’ arts”
(Mitchell 1995, 95), and even more so when we talk about the art of E. E.
Cummings.
In relation to Cummings’ works, it seems even harder than usual “to
keep discourse out of painting” or “to keep visuality out of literature”
Words into Pictures: E. E. Cummings’ Art Across Borders xiii
(99). As Milton Cohen proved in his seminal study on E. E. Cummings’

art, it was not of secondary importance that Cummings was both painting
and writing continuously throughout his life, with equal intensity in both
fields. On the contrary, “Cummings’s painting is closely related to his
poetry, and both his poetry and painting derive from his aesthetics”
(Cohen 1987, 16). While scholars in the past twenty years have
acknowledged this, and it indeed helped to change the direction of
inquiries into the nature of Cummings’ art, such analyses usually stopped
at acknowledging general affinities in common, and the rootedness of
both fields in a common artistic theory that Cummings had. However,
studies like Claudia Desblaches’ can help us understand that the integrity
of the two arts is much closer than one might have thought. Not only is
Cummings a PoetAndPainter, not only are the two fields in close relation
to each other, but there might actually be only one field. When dealing
with Cummings’ art, there might not be a need to separate these two
vocations from each other. Maybe it is high time to take Cummings’ claim
at its face value, and to accept that “my poems are essentially pictures”
(Cummings quoted in Norman 1972, 289) in a semiotic, or iconologic
sense as well, not only figuratively. His works are both poems and
pictures at the same time, and none of them at the same time, thus
Cummings’ naming as “poempictures” (288). And the paintings just as
much. Maybe even written in one word, PoetAndPainter still entails a
basic separation that is not really there or not necessarily there, and one
should think of changing it to a poet-painter or even poetpainter in one,
someone whose work can only be compared to “the composite art of
William Blake, a poet-painter whose illuminated books seem absolutely to
demand a reader capable of moving between verbal and visual literacy”
(Mitchell 1995, 89). Perhaps, in a sense, E. E. Cummings is the William
Blake of Modernism, a thought that might help us in understanding why
his art has been so often misunderstood, rejected or intentionally
oversimplified in the critical reception, and why he is still usually
relegated to being a minor Modernist: he is simply too complex and
controversial to gain an unambiguous standing in the canon.
Returning to the original thought of how the essays are related to the
theoretical framework of Mitchell’s pictorial turn, one should also
mention the two essays on Cummings’ spatiality. Although Taimi Olsen’s
and Zénó Vernyik’s essays do not deal with the relationship of the
pictorial and the textual in Cummings’ oeuvre, in a sense, their texts are
also related to this framework. While Lessing claims that painting is
spatial, whereas poetry is time-based, these two authors focus on mapping
the spatial qualities of Cummings’ verse. Olsen’s paper shows that
xiv Introduction
Cummings is just as much of a master of the representation of space as

that of finely wrought and complex wording, and analyzes the grammar of
space in Cummings’ poems. In an article of a slightly different focus, but
very similar intent, Vernyik shows the alternative New York City in
action that Cummings’ first volume of poems creates, with its sacred
brothels and portals of time and space.
Emília Barna’s text also continues in the Mitchellian vein, only goes
even further, and it does not compare at the interrelation of text and
picture, but carries out an analysis of music and text in Björk’s
adaptations of Cummings’ sonnets. The emphasis here is on adaptation,
as Barna does not stop at comparing the poem to the music, or the
musically set poem to the original text, but considers the end-product as a
work of art in its own right, and a composite work at that. The text
illustrates the necessity to realize that the necessary subject matter of
studies dealing with intermedial relations is “the whole ensemble of
relations between media, and relations can be many other things besides
similarity, resemblance, and analogy” (89). The question is not whether
Björk’s version is a faithful rendition, nor whether Cummings’ essentially
spatial and visual poetics can be rendered in the completely aural medium
of music. No, “[d]ifference is just as important as similarity, antagonism
as crucial as collaboration, dissonance and division of labor as interesting
as harmony and blending of function” (89-90). The poem does not have
priority simply because it was “the original”, because it existed earlier in
time. The music also does not have priority, simply because that is “the
receptive” medium in this relationship. Instead, there is a complex work
of art, with its own internal tensions and structure, something very similar
to the above mentioned image/text composites, only this time one is to
face a music/text composite. It deals with what happens to the poems,
once they find their way through the high culture/popular culture divide
(if such a thing exists), once they become musical in quality, leaving
behind a written status. She also shows the changes in meaning caused by
the fact that the essentially masculine position of the speaking voice of the
poems becomes reappropriated, reinterpreted and changed by the feminine
position of the lyrical voice of Björk’s albums.
Even if there are some texts in the volume that do not fit in this general
framework, the general usability of it as a point of reference seems so
strong that the reader might be tempted to ask the obvious question: “Why
does the volume not have ‘Mitchellian readings of E. E. Cummings’ as its
subtitle?” The short answer is that the essays in the volume are simply not
Mitchellian. As it was mentioned early on, no author uses Mitchell’s texts
as an analytical framework, or even cites any of his works. The
Words into Pictures: E. E. Cummings’ Art Across Borders xv
connection is made by the editors of this collection only, on the basis of

striking similarities and affinities. But these parallels might simply spring
from what Mitchell himself termed the pictorial turn: that “modern
thought re-oriented itself around visual paradigms that seem to threaten
and overwhelm any possibility of discursive mastery” (9). It might be
connected to the present-day “postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of a
complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse,
bodies and figurality” (16). Or, on a more pessimistic note, it may be
simply because of the ever-widening influence on our thought of the
“cliche of postmodernism”: that the age we are living in is “an epoch of
the absorption of language into images and ‘simulacra,’ a semiotic hall of
mirrors” (28). The expression Words Into Pictures would be in beautiful
harmony with this last statement, even in its wording.
Without playing down the possibility of such reasons, there is a much
more down-to-earth way of accounting for the Mitchellian affinities of the
essays. This other possibility was actually touched upon above, when a
comparison was drawn between Cummings and Blake. That is, this
quality very probably is not residing in the essays, or the theoretical
positioning of the authors of the essays, but in the analyzed works
themselves: they are the exact types of image/texts Mitchell keeps
referring to, and in addition, even the aesthetic theories of Cummings
share a striking similarity to those of Mitchell’s. With this statement, one
is back again at the issue of the title of this volume. The title with its
vocally antithetical stance to Lessing’s and vocally supportive stance to
Mitchell’s thinking was not devised by the volume’s editors: it is taken
over from another piece of writing. It is the title of a short piece by
Cummings himself that appeared in May 1949, in an issue of Art News,
and tackles the relationship of his painting and his poems, as well as that
of realist and abstract art (reprinted in Cummings 1965, 329).
But leaving Mitchell and the “hidden” subtitle the volume could have
behind, it seems logical to discuss the really existing, actual subtitle of the
volume: E. E. Cummings’ Art Across Borders. The word “art”, of course,
refers to the fact that unlike in a lot of cases all too familiar to those doing
research on Cummings, our explicit intention was not to limit the focus to
only one form of art or genre, and even less to focus mainly on poetry.
This is, of course, not to say that poetry as such is exempt from the
volume or that we tried to purge it as much as possible. However, we tried
to do all that we could to encourage non-poetry centered analyses, both if
they aimed to deal with the non-poetic oeuvre of Cummings and if they
focused on non-poetic sources or destinations of the poems themselves.
This focus is well-represented by Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder’s essay that
xvi Introduction
analyzes The Enormous Room and Gillian Huang-Tiller’s paper that

shows some essential structural parallelisms between EIMI, Cummings’
other book-length experimental prose-work, and his sonnets in the volume
No Thanks. Although there are no other texts in the volume that focus on
the non-poetic art of Cummings, those works nevertheless appear from
time to time, supporting arguments that otherwise center on the poetic: the
play Santa Claus, the painting Noise No. 13, the short story MR X, and
Cummings’ try at self-(non)explanation, i: Six Nonlectures are all touched
upon in the various essays, some in greater depth, others only cursorily.
In a similar vein, across borders is an expression with emphasis. The
present volume is a statement trying to prove that experimenting with the
limits, borders and thresholds of arts, genres, forms, space and traditions,
as well as interpersonal relations, is a core issue in the works of E. E.
Cummings. It is this testing and stretching of limitations that resulted in
Cummings’ formal and textual games, it is this quality that led to the
experiments in reorganizing theatrical space in the instructions of Him and
in his essays on the theater, and it is the exact same impulse that made
poem-like pictures and picture-like poems. But this theme also appears as
a topic, in its various mutations: the topic of me vs. the other, inside and
outside, liberal and conservative, and so on.
In this manner, Kurt Harris’ rereading of the classic leaf poem shows
how this oft-quoted work can be understood as one representing the pre-
verbal manifestations of the process at the end of which the infant gains
its subject position, its “I”-ness, and learns to distinguish himself from the
other. The subject learns of its boundaries and loses its sense of unity.
Milton Cohen’s article deals with the elusive or maybe non-existent
imaginative border between Cummings the shocking liberal, and
Cummings the cantankerous conservative. Likewise, with a similar focus
on the politics in the oeuvre of Cummings, Ehren Pflugfelder shows the
workings of an alternative, underground, but at the same time very real
economy in The Enormous Room, a mini-state working against the
imposed rules of the camp de triage.
The concerns of those texts that deal with passing through the
(imagined) borders of the verbal and the visual were already outlined
above, so there is no need to recapitulate their claims here. However, they
are a very strong line in the present volume, showing the extraordinary
importance and very significant influence of Milton Cohen’s
groundbreaking early work in this area of studying the art of E. E.
Cummings.
Reading the essays themselves, however, is a more enjoyable way of
getting acquainted with what this volume can offer. Thus, we urge the
Words into Pictures: E. E. Cummings’ Art Across Borders xvii
reader to read on, and hope that she will find it worthy of her time.
References
Cohen, Milton A. 1987. PoetandPainter: The aesthetics of E. E.
Cummings’s early work. Detroit, MI: Wayne State Univ. Press.
Friedman, Norman. 1964. E. E. Cummings: The growth of a writer.
Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ. Press.
Helgeson, James. 2005. Harmony, anamorphosis and the “conceptual
scheme.” Romanic Review 96 (2): 127-153.
Landwehr, Margarete. 2002. Introduction: Literature and the visual arts;
questions of influence and intertextuality. College Literature 29 (3): 1-
16.
Mitchell, W. J. T. 1995. Picture theory: Essays on verbal and visual
representation. Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Norman, Charles. 1972. E. E. Cummings: The magic-maker. Indianapolis
and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
CHRONOLOGY
The chronology below is based on previously published chronologies

of the life and art of E. E. Cummings, and on his available biographies. It
is especially strongly indebted to Richard S. Kennedy’s chronology
introducing his E. E. Cummings Revisited, to the “Events and Characters”
section of the Selected Letters of E. E. Cummings, edited by F. W. Dupee
and George Stade, and to the chronology published in Rushworth M.
Kidder’s E. E. Cummings: An Introduction to the Poetry. Due to the
nature of a chronology, it is impossible to show where expressions and
phrases are taken over intact, and where they are extended, corrected or
cut, nor which source they come from. Nevertheless, these volumes, along
with Charles Norman’s biography, E. E. Cummings: The Magic-Maker,
are acknowledged as the sources of the following chronology.
In terms of methodology, Kennedy’s, Stade’s and Kidder’s
chronologies were checked against each other, and the basis of the
timeline below is formed by dates that are given by all three sources.
When contradictory facts were found, Kennedy’s work was considered as
the authority to follow, as his text is considered the most authoritative
available, and one that was based on close manuscript research. If
Kennedy’s work provided no clue in this respect, Dupee’s and Stade’s
version was accepted as factual, due to fact that they also had direct
contact with letters and other materials from the manuscripts of
Cummings. The data provided by these sources were extended with some
relevant facts provided by either of the two biographies, or Kidder’s
comments about some of Cummings’ exhibitions not mentioned by the
other two chronologies.
The goals kept in mind while creating it, were the following: to
provide a timeline that is more detailed than any one version previously
available, while keeping it concise, compact and usable. In addition, we
tried to put the chronology in context by providing a parallel column that
lists those events, names and works of art in history and art that were
relevant, in one way or another, to the art or life of E. E. Cummings,
thereby helping the reader in gaining a quick glance not only to the whats
but also some of the whys of the oeuvre.
Although the chronology was compiled with the highest possible level
of caution, mistakes, lapses and imprecise dates can nevertheless appear.
Words into Pictures: E. E. Cummings’ Art Across Borders xix
Therefore, the reader is kindly asked to consider this more as a general

guideline for quick reference when dealing with the art of E. E.
Cummings rather than an authoritative source. In addition, even though, it
is professedly based closely on previously available chronologies, the
authors or publishers of those works are in no way to be held responsible
for the inaccuracies of the present timeline.
EVENTS IN THE LIFE AND WORK RELEVANT EVENTS IN HISTORY

OF E. E. CUMMINGS AND ART
1894 October 14, Edward Estlin Cummings

is born in the family residence at 104
Irving Street, Cambridge, MA. Son of
Edward Cummings (teacher of sociology
and political science at Harvard, then
ordained minister of the South
Congregational Church, Unitarian in Boston),
and of Rebecca Haswell Clarke.
1900 Sigmund Freud publishes

The Interpretation of
Dreams.
1905 Albert Einstein comes

forward with his special
theory of relativity.
1907- Prepares for College at Cambridge Latin 1907 Pablo Picasso paints Les
1911 School. Desmoiselles d’Avignon.
The beginning of
Cubism.
1909 Ezra Pound, Personae

and Exultations.
1911 Enters Harvard. Specializes in Greek and other

languages.
1912 His first published poems appear in Harvard

Monthly.
1913 Elected to the board of editors of Harvard 1913 Premiere of The Rite of
Monthly. Spring by Igor Stravinsky
in France.
1913 March 4, Woodrow

Wilson becomes the 28th
President of the United
States.
xx Chronology
1914 Gertrude Stein publishes

Tender Buttons
1914 June 28, Gavrilo Prinzip

murders Franz Ferdinand,
heir to the Austro-
Hungarian throne. The
beginning of WW I.
1915 Receives A.B. from Harvard, “magna cum 1915 Albert Einstein
laude in Literature, especially in Greek and announces the
English.” Delivers his commencement speech, theory of general
“The New Art.” relativity.
1916 Receives A.M. Begins painting in Cubist style.
1917 Moves to New York, works for a short time at

P. F. Collier & Son.
1917 April 7, volunteers for Norton-Harjes

Ambulance Corps.
1917 April 28, sails to France on board of the ship

La Touraine. Meets William Slater Brown
who will remain one of his closest friends. After
five weeks in Paris, on June 13 they are assigned
to ambulance duty in the Noyon sector of the
Western front.
1917 September 23, arrested with Slater Brown on

suspicion of espionage. Sent to Depôt de Triage,
La Ferté-Macé.
1917 Eight Harvard Poets is published,

containing eight poems by Cummings.
1917 November 7, the October

Revolution in Russia.
The Bolsheviks seize
power.
1917 December 19, released from the Depôt de

Triage, thanks to his father’s strenuous
efforts.
1918 Returns to New York, continues painting and 1918 November 11, 1918.
writing. Drafted into the army, fulfills six Armistice.
months’ duty in the 73rd Infantry Division,
Camp Devens, MA.
Words into Pictures: E. E. Cummings’ Art Across Borders xxi
1919 Exhibits paintings at The Penguin Gallery

and at the annual exhibition of the Society of
Independent Artists.
1919 Love affair with Elaine Orr Thayer, wife of 1919 The Treaty of Versailles
Cummings’ friend Scofield Thayer. Their is signed, officially
daughter Nancy is born on December 20. ending WW I.
1920 Begins publishing his poems in periodicals,

with the first appearance of his poems in
The Dial, edited by Scofield Thayer. Urged
by his father to put down his war experience,
begins writing The Enormous Room in
September.
1921 Exhibits at Wanamaker’s in New York. 1921 March 4, Warren G.

Travels to Portugal and Spain with John Dos Harding becomes the
Passos, then moves to Paris. 29th President of
the United States.
1922 While living in Paris, visits Rapallo, Rome and 1922 April 3, Joseph Stalin
Venice during the summer. The Enormous Room becomes the General
gets published in a mutilated version by Boni and Secretary of the Central
Liveright. Exhibits with Modern Artists of Committee of the
America. Communist Party of the
Soviet Union.
1922 October 29, Benito

Mussolini becomes
prime minister of Italy.
1923 His first volume of poems, Tulips and Chimneys, 1923 August 2, Calvin
gets published. Moves back from France in Coolidge becomes the
fall, moves in at 4 Patchin Place, which remains 30th President of the
his permanent home—along with Joy Farm in United States.
Silver Lake, NH, the summer place his family
owned.
1924 March 19, marries Elaine Thayer in Cambridge, 1924 January 21, Vladimir
MA. Ilyich Lenin dies.
1924 Publishes an essay in Vanity Fair, the first of

many. Short trip to Paris.
1924 December 4, divorces Elaine in Paris.
1925 Publishes & (February 14) and XLI Poems

(April 11). Meets Anne Barton. Receives
The Dial’s Award “for distinguished service to
American letters.”
xxii Chronology
1926 His father, Edward Cummings, dies in a car

accident. The volume is 5 gets published.
1927 May 1, marries Anne Barton.
1927 Him, a play, published. His last publications

in The Dial. Publishes nothing more until the
summer of 1930.
1928 April 18, Him is produced at the Provincetown

Playhouse, directed by James Light.
1929 March 4, Herbert Hoover

becomes the 31st
President of the United
States.
1929 October 29, Black

Tuesday leads to the
Great Economic
Depression.
1930 Publishes [No Title], a series of Dadaesque

chapters, and Anthropos.
1931 Publishes ViVa, a volume of poems, and

CIOPW, a book of pictures in Charcoal,
Ink, Oil, Pastel and Watercolors. The first
independent show of his paintings is held
in New York. Trip to Soviet Russia.
1932 Separates from Anne Barton in October.

Meets Marion Morehouse, well-known
photo model, actress and photographer.
She continues to live with him as his
wife until his death, although they never
officially get married. Exhibits his
watercolors at Painters and Sculptors
Gallery, New York.
1933 Visit to Tunisia, and trip to Europe. 1933 January 30, Adolf Hitler
Receives Guggenheim Fellowship. EIMI, sworn in as Chancellor of
the literary account of his experiences in Germany.
Soviet Russia, is published.
1933 March 4, Franklin D.
Roosevelt becomes the
32nd President of the
United States
1934 August 31, divorces Anne Barton.

Words into Pictures: E. E. Cummings’ Art Across Borders xxiii
1935 Travels to Mexico and California. No

Thanks, a volume of poems is published,
along with Tom, Cummings’ scenario for
a ballet.
1936 1/20 [One over twenty], a selection of his

poems published. His first volume of
poetry to be published in England.
1937 Trip to France.
1938 Collected Poems gets published. The volume

contains 22 new poems along with a selection
of already published ones.
1939 September 1, invasion of

Poland by Germany.
WW II breaks out.
1940 50 Poems published.
1941 Arthritis starts to trouble his back and legs.
1944 1x1 is published. Show of oil paintings and

watercolors at the American British Art
Gallery in New York.
1945 Exhibition at Rochester Memorial Art Gallery. 1945 April 12, Harry S.
Truman becomes the
33rd President of the
United States.
1945 May 5, Ezra Pound gives

himself up near Genoa.
1945 September 2, WW II
ends.
1945 Ezra Pound charged with

treason.
1946 Santa Claus, a play, published. Harvard Wake 1946 Ezra Pound is placed in
devotes a special issue to Cummings. St. Elizabeth’s Hospital
in Washington, DC, after
the plea of the defense
(unfit for trial) is
accepted.
1947 January. His mother dies. 1947 The Second Red Square
begins (it lasts roughly
ten years).
xxiv Chronology
1948 Reunion with his daughter, Nancy. Exhibits a

selection of watercolors and oils at the
American British Art Gallery. Starts having
heart fibrillations.
1950 Xaipe published. Poetry magazine awards

Harriet Monroe Prize. Academy of American
Poets Fellowhip. Exhibits at Rochester
Memorial Gallery.
1951 Second Guggenheim Fellowship. Travels to

Paris, Venice, Florence and Athens. Death of
Aunt Jane.
1952- Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard,

1953 delivers his lectures that get published
as i: Six Nonlectures.
1953 January 20, Dwight D.
Eisenhower becomes the
34th President of the
United States.
1954 Collected Poems 1923-1954.
1955 Begins a seven-year career of poetry readings

at colleges and universities with the Craymore
Associates agency. National Book Award
Citation for Collected Poems 1923-1954.
Exhibition at 1020 Art Center, Chicago.
1956 Trip to Spain and Italy. 1956 October 23—November

10. Hungarian
Revolution against Soviet
influence and the
Communist government.
1957 June 23, Boston Arts Festival poetry reading

in Public Gardens.
1958 Publication of 95 Poems and E. E. Cummings: 1958 Ezra Pound leaves St.
A Miscellany. Bollingen Prize for Poetry. Elizabeth’s after 12 years
of hospitalization.
1959 Ford Foundation grant (for 2 years). Travels

to Ireland.
1960 Travels to Sicily, Italy, Greece, and France.

Words into Pictures: E. E. Cummings’ Art Across Borders xxv
1962 Collapses of cerebral hemmorhage at Joy

Farm. Dies on September 3, at 1:15 am.
Adventures in Value (photographs by
Marion Morehouse, text by Cummings)
is published.
1963 73 Poems published.
1965 A Miscellany Revised (extended edition of

A Miscellany) published. Fairy Tales,
illustrated by John Eaton, is published
Part I: New Contexts
CUMMINGS AND THE BROTHERHOOD
OF VISUAL POETICS
RICHARD BRADFORD, UNIVERSITY OF ULSTER
Visual poetry is and has always been tolerated as the idiosyncratic poor
relation of mainstream verse, a sub-genre worthy of critical scrutiny but
not really in the same league as proper writing.
There are two closely related reasons for this. Firstly the two best
known manifestations of visual poetry—the Renaissance Pattern Poem
and Postmodern Concrete Poetry—are regarded justifiably as aberrations,
self-defining formal experiments which limit the poet’s opportunities for
expression. They are as much ‘about’ themselves—specifically their use
of linguistic signs as graphic integers—as they are vehicles for addressing
ideas and feelings. Secondly, and more significantly, the consensus that
visual poetry amounts to little more than an intriguing sub-category of
experiment involves the willful disregard of a more subtle, complex form
of visual poetics that has existed for over three centuries and which
unsettles the standard assumptions and protocols of reading. This is not
undertaken only by marginal, esoteric writers; its practitioners involve
such mainstream luminaries as Milton, Wordsworth and Charles
Tomlinson. It exists, but most commentators upon poetry have blinded
themselves to its significance because it raises questions about what poets
do when they write and more profoundly what the use of language per se
involves. This quiet freemasonry of visual poetics has for poets registered
more in their verse than in their ex-cathedra comments on writing. As such
it has become like a mutually acknowledged code enabling its users to
enter a dialogue of shared experience and offering, for those on the outside
who crack it, a special insight into the practice of writing. E. E. Cummings
is an important figure in this regard because in many of his poems he is
both provocative and transparent; provocative in that he deals explicitly
with devices that previously had been deployed or acknowledged covertly
Cummings and the Brotherhood of Visual Poetics 3
by fellow versifiers; his transparency is his gift to the reader; an open door
to a brand of poetics whose existence they might otherwise have treated
with purblind suspicion.
The story which reaches its climax with Cummings began with
Milton’s Paradise Lost. A century after the poem’s publication Samuel
Johnson observed that it was “verse only to the eye,” which reflected the
contemporary widespread opinion that without rhyme the accentual
English line did not register for the listener, and since the defining feature
of poetry was the line, blank verse was not proper poetry. However,
Johnson’s comment was only one aspect of a debate that had engaged the
attention of critics since 1668. Thomas Sheridan must rank as the first
important “close-reader” of English verse. Many of his comments
prefigure those of Hollander, Ricks and Davie—often focussing upon the
same passages and reaching strikingly similar conclusions. His most
penetrating observations concern the relationship between the visual
format of poetry and its linear, spoken counterpart. On the following lines
from Paradise Lost,
Thus with the year

Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day (II 40-2)
he comments that the line ending “stops you unexpectedly and strikes the
imagination with the immensity of his loss. He can no more see—what?—
Day!—Day and all its glories rush into the mind…” (II, 246-7). Sheridan
is precise regarding the manner of his interpretation
When I speak of the harmony of verse, I mean an effect produced by an

action of the eye in comparing the different members of the verse, already
constituted according to the laws of melody, with each other, and
observing a due and beautiful proportion between then. (274-5)
He has no doubt that his readings are prompted by an effect that is an

intrinsic, intended feature of Milton’s verse and in this he, and by
implication Milton, go against Gotthold Lessing’s expansion upon
Horace’s ut pictura poesis. Lessing argued that painting (and sculpture) is
equipped to deal with objects existing in space by representing them and
their parts as visually juxtaposed. Poetry, and for that matter all language,
is committed to a representation of actions in time, a condition determined
by its linear successive identity as syntax and grammar. In short the parts
of a painting can interrelate, and create effects, spatially, while the units of
language are governed by the successive chain of speech.
Two centuries later John Hollander fixed upon the same passages from
4 Richard Bradford
Milton that had fascinated Sheridan and reached identical conclusions. He

found
closure and flow, the opposed features of Milton’s verse form, oppose
themselves in ways parallel to the opposition of the visual and acoustic
modes of poetic language. (Hollander 1975, 96)
Satan’s ruminative torment
wakes the bitter memory

Of what he was, what is, and what must be
Worse; of worse deeds worse suffering must ensue (IV 25-6)
Hollander (1975) remarks on how “the static pattern of line 25 … frames”

the prayer book formula of “now and ever shall be,” only to have the
reader’s sense of expectation jolted by the visually isolated “Worse”.
Sheridan: “What an amazing force does this position give the word worse!
And in what strong colours does it paint to use the desperate state of
reprobation into which Satan had fallen” (Sheridan 1775, 248). Hollander
had never read Sheridan but both are drawn to something in Milton’s
verse to which the orthodox criticism seemed, literally, to have blinded
itself.
Someone else had intuited a special quality in the texture of Milton’s
verse, as the opening passage of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” shows:
Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That one a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky (4-8)
Throughout the passage it becomes difficult, almost impossible, to

distinguish between the subjective impressionistic register and the
objective passivity of the same words. The “cliffs” literally “impress”
upon the “scene”, and at the same time “impress” upon the poet “thoughts
of more deep seclusion.” Does he as the sensitive perceiver “connect/The
landscape with the quiet of the sky,” or is this a slightly affected reference
to the function of the horizon? We can, will, never know but most
significantly Wordsworth has created this perpetual paradox by making
use of devices patented by Milton; specifically the tension between the
static words on the page and their function within the flow of syntax.
Both poets come close to treating words as objects whose physical
substance draws upon, even infringes, their function as arbitrary signs,
and Wordsworth is more adventurous in this area than Milton. Consider

these lines from Home at Grasmere
Dreamlike the blending of the whole

Harmonious landscape; all along the shore
The boundary lost, the line invisible
That parts the image from reality. (574-77)
Wordsworth seems, implicitly, to be confronting the reader with a

task. Blind yourself to the graphic, physical layout of these lines—recite
them without paying attention to their visual identity—and you will deny
yourself a key element of their resonance. The “line” that “parts the image
from reality” will become “invisible”. That magic “boundary”, which in
Tintern Abbey counterpointed the literal against the figurative will be
“lost”. Am I over-interpreting the passage? Go to the Excursion and make
up your mind:
What terror doth it strike into the mind

To think of one, blind and alone, advancing
Straight toward some precipice’s airy brink!
But timely warned he would have stayed his steps,
Protected, say enlightened, by his ear;
And on the very edge of vacancy
Not more endangered than a man whose eye
Beholds the gulf beneath. (VII 491-98)
What is the subject of this passage? The simple, sensible answer would be
the frightening hypothesis of walking toward a cliff edge without the
advantage of sight. At the same time, however, when we read the lines,
sighted, we watch where the “break” occurs; at the line ending. Perhaps if
we listened carefully we might hear the five “steps” (aka metrical “feet”)
that take us to the edge of the next line. When we come to line 297 we do
indeed shift our eye from the precipice of the line ending to “[Beholds]
the gulf beneath.” (And it seems almost vulgar to point out that
Wordsworth when writing this must have had in mind his famously blind
precursor who would meticulously count his steps through each line.)
What Wordsworth does in this passage is create a poetic enactment of
what Lessing (1879) deemed impossible and Sheridan (1975) and
Hollander (1775) discerned in Milton: the dynamic, interactive
relationship between words as tactile visual artefacts and their function as
arbitrary units within the successive chain of speech.
Milton and Wordsworth were dealing with a kind of poetic
Frankenstein’s monster, something which they had created but which
6 Richard Bradford
militated against the orthodox conception of verse as a spoken utterance.

One might therefore suspect that with the coming of Modernism more
poets would have been drawn to this curious hybrid of the visual and the
spoken. Free verse had unhooked the poetic line from its alliance with
metre and rhythm and it could now be whatever the poet wanted it to be.
In fact early Modernism virtually outlawed visual form. There was, of
course, the famous essay by Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written
Character as a Medium for Poetry, promoted in 1919 by Pound as a
manifesto for a new poetic. The problem was of how to create in Western
language the equivalent of the Chinese ideogram—visible language.
Bizarrely all enthusiasts of Fenollosa—Pound, T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint,
Amy Lowell—argued that the act of representation, the poem, should be
as immediate and transitory as the act of perception that it, momentarily,
records. The free verse poem was universally venerated by the early
Modernists as a pure speech act (See Bradford 1993, 79-93).
Two poets would reconnect modernism with the silent poetics of
Milton and Wordsworth. One was William Carlos Williams and the other
was E. E. Cummings.
Williams and Cummings construct a variety of relationships between
spoken irregularity and formal structure, but they do so both by taking
poetic writing a stage beyond the audible patterns of regular verse, and,
perhaps more significantly, by displacing the procedures of their
Modernist contemporaries. Both poets maintain the fragmented
immediacy of Imagist writing, but at the same time they cause the reader
to be aware of the permanence of the medium. To place their achievement
within its proper context we must consider an intraesthetic maxim which
predates Lessing by almost two millennia and which has attained equal
status as a theoretical debating point. Plutarch attributed to Simonides of
Ceos the distinction between painting as “mute poetry” and poetry as a
“speaking picture.” The intrinsic contradiction of this polarity has
attracted as much attention as its somewhat limited value as a theoretical
framework, because it attributes to each medium the very qualities whose
absence, as Lessing (1879) argued, represents their essential difference—
if a picture could speak, it would no longer be a picture, and if poetic
language was soundless, then it could no longer be language. But for all
its irritating circularity, Simonides’ distinction does succeed in
foregrounding a number of sensory priorities which rest, often
unacknowledged, beneath apparently straightforward aesthetic arguments.
Defending the visual arts, Leonardo Da Vinci pointed out that “if you call
painting mute poetry, poetry can also be called blind painting.” What he
implies but does not clarify is that the physical, visual image created by
poetry exists only in the mind of the reader, who is able to decode the
referential system and transpose it with the memory of an iconic presence.
Thus the means by which the linear, temporal medium of language can
grant us access to spatial images must be ideational, a function of the
reprocessing faculty of the reader, which operates as the link point
between temporal speech and mental picture. So, in an important sense,
the early free-versifiers, in their insistence upon the ephemeral nature of
the spoken text, were reiterating upon the claim that poetry must be
“blind”: our ability to return to, to contemplate the visual materiality of
the medium would necessarily delay and distort the process of conversion
from signifier to image, symbol to icon. Williams and Cummings
maintain an uneasy but extremely productive interplay between the
ideational effects generated by the poem and the static presence of poem
itself, as both an arbitrary linguistic representation and a concrete picture
of its meaning. The following is section VII of Cummings’ “Impressions”:
i was considering how

within night’s loose
sack a star’s
nibbing in-
fin
-i-
tes
i
-mal-
ly devours
darkness the
hungry star
which
will e
-ven
tu-
al
-ly jiggle
the bait of
dawn and be jerked
into
eternity. when over my head

shooting
8 Richard Bradford
star
Bur s
(t
into a stale shriek
like an alarm clock)
In Tulips and Chimneys Cummings has not yet reached the point at which
the silent, visual dimension of the poem’s signifying mechanism
effectively displaces its successive oral pattern, but the framework of
conflict is already in place.
We could read this poem aloud and interpret the printed fragmentation
of “infinitesimally”, “eventually” and “burst” as directions to slow and
uncertain vocalisation. Heard as such it would closely resemble
impressionistic fragments by Richard Aldington and T. E. Hulme. The
impersonal objects are subtly assimilated by the speech pattern into a
series of subjective, metaphoric relations between light, darkness, eating,
fishing, waking, alarm clocks… The directions to vary the timing of the
vocal performance merely reinforce the impression that we are listening to
the poet combining impression with thought. But unlike its Imagist
predecessors, this poem refuses to disappear. We cannot help noticing that
the lower case “I” which announces the lyrical presence of “e” “e”
“c”ummings in the first line re-emerges in the broken structure of
“infinitesimally”, but we cannot invoke the protocols of phonic
naturalisation because the “I”s chosen for isolation are phonemically
different from the “I” which begins the poem. We can see a pattern that
we cannot hear. The poet is both within the permanent, graphic language
which records his experience and absent from its ephemeral, spoken
counterpart. Cummings, like the phonocentrists of the early Imagist
anthologies, is aware that the process of articulating an experience
involves a form of surrender to linguistic patterns which bear no organic
or natural resemblance to it, but rather than displace this arbitrary
medium, he chooses to incorporate it as part of the communicative
experience. The words do not overreach the boundaries between life and
art to become things, but they become an element of the perceptual
experience rather than merely a disposable means of communicating it.
The ideational image granted after hearing a poem by Aldington, Hulme
or Amy Lowell defuses the tension between perception and linguistic
representation. But we can neither naturalise no fully transcend the
linguistic material of Cummings’ poem. We can of course hear how “a
shooting star Burst into a stale shriek like an alarm clock,” and we can
reflect upon how the image of the star transforms itself metaphorically
into a rather mundane and disappointing experience of surprise. We might

even consider the whole poem as a dream from which the poet is suddenly
jolted into consciousness. But when we also see the poem the word
“Burst” registers not only as a successive link-point between two
figurative structures but as a static picture of Cummings’ experience. The
two opening graphemic components of s, t, a, r, are literally detached:
Bur s
(t
to become reunited in s, t, a, l, e.
It could not be claimed that all of the verse in Tulips and Chimneys
creates such a complex interplay between the graphic materiality of
language and its referential function, but the effect which stays in the
mind after reading through the collection is of having seen and heard the
verse, of having experienced two cognitive dimensions of understanding
which do not displace one another, but which at the same time do not
maintain the parallelism of the auditory and the ocular that is found in
most poetry of the innovatory decade which preceded it. His most
perverse disorientations of expectation and effect occur in the sonnets,
where he forces together the tightest and most abstract formal pattern of
the English poetic canon with the demotic informalities of American
speech. In number VI of “Sonnets-Realities” we find an account of
visiting Dick Mid’s brothel negotiating its way through the rhyme
scheme, if not the metrical pattern, of the sonnet:
when you rang at Dick Mid’s Place

the madam was a bulb stuck in the door.
a fang of wincing gas showed how
hair, in two fists of shrill colour
clutched the dull volume of her tumbling face
scribbled with a big grin. her sow-
eyes clicking mischief from thick lids.
the chunklike nose on which always the four
tablets of perspiration erectly sitting.
—If they knew you at Dick Mid’s
the three trickling chins began to traipse
into the cheeks “eet smeestair steevensun
kum een, dare ease Bet, an Leelee, an dee beeg wun”
her handless wrists did gooey severe shapes.
When we hear this poem our attention is committed to following the stark
10 Richard Bradford
visualisation of the madam, culminating in a bizarre representation of her

‘accent’. The rhyme words are virtually displaced as accidents by the
hesitant yet powerfully evocative flow of the language. The “realities” of
spoken informality almost succeed in marginalizing the diagram of
abstract form, and it is only when we also see the familiar shadow of a
rhyme scheme signalling its presence at the end of the printed lines that
the peculiarity of the exercise becomes most striking. It is only then that
we begin to ponder the nagging inconsistency of the ninth line—“tablets
of perspiration erectly sitting”—which refuses to fit into the rhyming
pattern. It fits in well enough with the speech pattern, because when we
hear the poem the rhymes hardly register at all. It is almost as though
Cummings has deliberately inserted the line as a reminder that what we
see is not always what we hear. The plan of the poem’s structure which
remains in the mind after hearing it is just as likely to foreground the
internal off-rhyme pattern of “tumbling” “clicking”, “sitting”, “trickling”
as it is to register the equally dissonant correspondences of line endings at
“how / hair” and “sow- / eyes”, “door” and “colour”. It becomes almost
impossible to distinguish the “natural” music of speech from the abstract
formal pattern of the sonnet, except of course when our eye signals that
we should look for something that might not become apparent to the ear,
and it is at the line ending with “sitting” that the contrast between the two
dimensions of reading becomes apparent.
In the context of Cummings’ and Williams’s 1923 collections, Tulips
and Chimneys and Spring and All, we should recognise that this tendency
to conjure up the ghost of a regular pattern adds an extra significance to
the notion of verse as “free”. Just as free verse can never free itself from
the existence of the poetic line, so we find that the reader is invited to
consider his own limited condition of freedom from the codes and
expectations of regular verse. From Williams’s “Spring and All”:
By the road to the contagious hospital

under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water

the scattering of trees
All along the road the reddish

purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them

leafless vines—
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish,

dazed spring approaches
The opening two lines could stand as discrete units:
By the road to the contagious hospital

under the surge of the blue
They register as completed images, until the eye of the reader transforms
the static, substantive sense of “blue” into an adjectival dependence upon
the “mottled clouds” of the next line. In one sense this effect could be
regarded as the hesitant, successive pattern mirroring the equally gradual
process of impression being transposed into language—a process more
vividly enacted by two instances “the” detached from “northeast” and
“waste of broad, muddy fields.” But the poem is also forcing the reader to
distinguish between the unstructured formulations of expression and the
devices of art. The shape of the poem does not merely reflect the
hesitancies of unreflecting speech; there is also evidence that in, literally,
writing the poem the poet has in mind a secondary pattern of an art form
created from the static material of the language.
The colloquial, localised reference to the “contagious hospital” signals
a degree of idiomatic informality which at one point enters a stage of
conflict with the poem’s status as a formal artefact. When the persona
contemplates the
small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines
the moment is a perfect synthesis of Poundian technique and unreflecting

slang. Destroy the visual format and we have
with dead brown leaves under them leafless vines
“Them leafless vines” echoes the earthy and ambiguous title of “Spring
and All.” One oral reading of the poem would convey this rough
colloquialism, but when also read with the eye this effect is both
preserved and complemented by a poised, precise visual juxtaposition
which recalls “In a station of the Metro”:
12 Richard Bradford
with dead brown leaves under them

leafless vines
A visualist reading allows us to savour the co-presence of two

compositional imperatives. A silent reading registers a reflective,
ideogrammatic structure with “leafless vines” achieving a degree of stark
metaphoric contrast, rather like Milton’s “darkness visible.” But at the
same time the successive oral pattern maintains our awareness of
language caught in a moment of disorganised informality, not quite able
to impose a logical structure upon the impression: “leaves under them
leafless vines.”
“Spring and All” is a brilliant synthesis of unstructured patterns of
speech and the almost clinical precision of poetic technique, and it
succeeds in this improbable merger by silencing and uniting the disparate
identities of these expressive elements. To simply “hear” Williams’s
persona moving through unfocused levels of perception and ratiocination
is to experience only part of a very complex process of experience,
becoming thought, becoming language. The “movement” of Williams’s
language is preserved in the same way that a painting can allow us to
experience a sense of vibrancy, agitation within the stillness of the visual
configurations.
Williams and Cummings have frequently been seen as sharing
recognisable visualist traits with Concrete poetry, but the association is
misleading. Concrete poetry varies greatly in its range of unorthodoxy,
from the purist visualism of Eugen Gomringer to the more quirky
underminings and acknowledgements of conventional form by figures
such as Paul de Vree, Edwin Morgan and Ian Hamilton Finlay; but there
is a persistent feature which virtually all of them have in common. With
definitively Concrete poems we can establish phonemic, semantic, iconic
or syntactic links between words, letters and phrases—chains of
meaning—but it is either the case that several of these will be
simultaneously evident or they will refuse to function as units of
signification which can be rationalised or naturalised, and sometimes
both. As a consequence even a peripheral sense of a single presence
within or responsible for the text is extinguished; the text itself appears to
have distanced itself from an originator. Milton, Wordsworth and
Williams invest their texts with a univocal spoken pattern and it is against
this positioning of a speaking presence that they are able to juxtapose the
silent, visual dimension of the text. Significantly the former has to
predominate in order for the latter to undermine it. Cummings’ poems
leave more substantial elements of the formal and signifying function
embedded within the silent, graphic format but at the same time, unlike
those of the Concretists, they sustain within themselves the recognisable

signature of Cummings as their originator and inhabitant. He achieves this
singularity through a phenomenon I shall call “the shadow of speech.”
Speech is a term which, when applied to poetic texts, carries a double
signification. It splits the text between our perception of the genesis and
circumstances of its composition and our perception of how it works and
what it means. The traditional belief that “poetry is a spoken art” is based
upon a parallel and unitary correspondence between the two: the printed
text is a record of impression and feeling becoming speech which
preserves this phenomenon for later vocal performance. Of course, this
correspondence is subject to qualification, in that we are not expected to
believe that the complex metaphors and prosodic formulae of
Shakespeare’s sonnets are spontaneous and improvised. Rhyme schemes,
metrical patterns and ingenious tropes are the acceptable aesthetic
counterparts to unstructured, intuitive vocalizations of feelings and
perceptions. It has been my objective in this study to institute visual
pattern as a productive addition to this repertoire of formal structures. Just
as we accept the iambic pentameter or the a, b, b, a rhyme scheme is
evidence that the poet has structured and fashioned the language of the
text rather than merely recorded “the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feeling,” so we should accept that visual structures involve similar
restructurings of the univocal utterance. The shadow of speech is
discernible when the balance between formalization and spontaneity is
shifted so far towards the explicit and self-conscious manipulation of
graphic materiality that speech becomes a memory, a shadow of its
realization in sound, while maintaining the presence and individuality of
the poet.
Cummings’ volume No Thanks is generally recognized to contain his
most challenging visual experiments and can therefore serve as a testing
ground for my thesis that the “shadow of speech” distances Cummings’
work from Concretism and places it in a category of its own, between
purely graphic poetry and its acoustic, linear counterpart. Consider the
poem “9”:
o pr
gress verily thou art m
mentous superc
lossal hyperpr
digious etc i kn
w & if you d
n’t why g
14 Richard Bradford
to yonder s
called newsreel s
called theatre & with your
wn eyes beh
ld The
(The president The
president of The president
of the The)president of
the(united The president of the

united states The president of the united
states of the President Of The)United States
Of America unde negant redire quemquam supp

sedly thr
w
i
n
g
a
b
aseball
There can be few poems in English which disrupt yet effectively control
the reader’s codes of interpretation so skilfully as Cummings’ “9”. Like
Herbert’s “Easter Wings” and Herrick’s “The Pillar” it sets an iconic,
visual image against a temporal sequence, but unlike the “symmetrie” of
the pattern poem the two codes are cunningly interwoven.
When read aloud, and without reference to its graphic identity, we
encounter a mocking satirical presence which slips easily between parodic
formality and the familiar idioms of everyday speech. The opening verse
paragraph, with its combination of biblical grammar and modern
hyperbole, is pure pastiche from which emerges the more direct and
personal voice of the imitator: “I know and if you don’t.” This is the
controlling presence of the poem who goes on to invite the reader to “with
your own eyes behold” a bizarre audio-collage. In this the “The President
of the United States” is gradually introduced through a kind of drum-roll
of word-gathering. The tone is still mocking and parodic, dragging the
reader word by word towards the completion of a title which must be
inscribed upon the consciousness of anyone who has had the President
introduced to them via the newsreel or the radio. The concluding sequence
is splendid parody of 1930s political advertising: the great leader is also a
man of the people, and the grandeur of classical precedent adapts
comfortably to the throwing of a baseball.

Vocalised as such this amusing exercise in cynicism is only a single
dimension of the poem that Cummings has, literally, written. When
reading the poem aloud to anyone else we know, but we have no way of
informing them, that a vital component of the temporal sequence, the
letter “o”, is actually falling down the left-hand margin of the poem to be
picked up by the President and become the thing that it physically
resembles, the baseball. Nor can we inform the listener of how “throwing
a baseball” curves across the page and thus resembles the throwing of a
baseball. The most astounding piece of synaesthetic craftsmanship occurs
in the “fanfare” to “The President of the United States.” The title can be
read down each side of the figure; the whole structure is built upon an
incremental expansion (3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 words per line); the brackets
exclude yet another instance of the title, “The (…) president of the (…)
United States.” Indeed the whole structure is alive with textual interfaces
and correspondences, but however much we might be tempted to cite this
as an early example of Concretism, we should remember that running
through these complex and literally unrecitable patterns of signification is
a univocal presence. When Blake in Songs of Innocence and Experience
refers to “the Bard,” whose “ears have heard the holy word,” the
signifying pattern is caught between a movement beyond the materiality
of the poem to some projected ideational conception of the Bard and an
internal formula of alliteration (“have, heard, holy”) and rhyme (“heard-
word”). The correspondence between what we “hear” within the poem
and the Bard’s experience of hearing the holy word seems productive, but
it is the incorporation of what would otherwise be regarded as arbitrary
sound patterns within the spoken poem that makes such a judgement
valid; acoustic form becomes meaningful because of its context and not
because of its intrinsic signifying function. It could be argued that when
Cummings urges us to “behold the President” there is a similar
correspondence between the ideational picture of the President and the
structure of graphic signifiers within which we “behold” fragmentations
and completions of “the President of the United States.” Just as Blake
“speaks to us” of the Bard from within an arbitrary pattern of sounds, so
Cummings is able to achieve a similar poet-to-reader effect through his
use of graphic structures. The primary difference is that with the former
we are conditioned to read through the materiality of the language to the
authorial presence, but with the latter the phonocentric protocols of
interpretation do not provide us with so easy a route.
Cummings in No Thanks was operating in uncharted territories of
signification. The early free-versifiers had extended and rewritten the
16 Richard Bradford
conventional acoustic patterns of meaning—the metrical and syntactic

constituents of the line had moved from the persistent and repetitive to the
irregular and the unpredictable—but in an important sense they had
maintained an allegiance to the familiar balance between the acoustic,
non-referential structures of poetic form and the broader signifying
function of language. Acoustic free verse had an entire tradition of
compositional and interpretive protocols which would operate as
productive points of comparison for the new poetic, but, apart from the
pattern poem, there was no established “grammar” of visual signification
upon which Cummings could base his innovations. The difficulties he
faced in overcoming this problem can be judged by the response of
Harvey Gross to what must be the best known visual experiment of the
volume, “no 13.”
r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
who
a)s w(e loo)k
upnowgath
PPEGORHRASS
eringint(o-
aThe):l
eA
!p:
S a
(r
rIvIng .gRrEaPsPhOs)
to
rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly
,grasshopper;
We must piece together the shattered words and disarranged punctuation

to discover what the poem says. (It reads, as near as I can make out, “The
grasshopper, who as we look up now, gathering into PPEGORHRASS,
leaps! Arriving to become, rearrangingly, a grasshopper!”) I am unable to
discover what rationale lies behind the poem’s punctuation. What the
poem is doing is leaping, flying apart in midair, and rearranging itself on
the page … Cummings uses an elaborate technique of synaesthesia, a
complex visual and aural derangement, to signify emotional meaning. We
must in order to read this poem, “see” sounds and “hear” shapes. (Gross
1964, 123-4)
As much can be learnt from the uneasy tone of this passage as from its
critical exegesis. Gross finds himself able to understand the poem yet he is
uncomfortable, even uncertain, about the means by which he is able to
reach his conclusion. His ability to disclose a sequential pattern of

meaning, a metatext, is clearly due to his awareness of the shadow of
speech—the poem can never be vocalised, but running through it is a
presence which controls and deploys its linguistics constituents. He is also
aware that in identifying this metatext he has moved beyond the
conventional interpretive perception of how form relates to meaning (“I
am unable to discover what rationale lies behind the poem’s
punctuation”). It could be argued that it is equally difficult to “discover
what rationale” governs a form of “punctuation” in which coincidences of
sound are incorporated as a structural axis between separate syntactic
movements, but our familiarity with the co-presence of acoustic
materiality and sequential grammar allows us to naturalise such conflicts
between pattern and meaning. Gross refers at one point to Cummings
being in a “typographic fit” and to the interweaving of aural and visual
language as a form of “derangement”. The reader, he implies, must
consequently adopt a role similar to the psychoanalyst or the physician
and “piece together the shattered words and disarranged punctuation to
discover what the poem says.” But do we not face exactly the same
problems of restructuring and reconciling fugitive elements of what
Wimsatt (1944) calls the “logic and alogic” of rhyme? Cummings throws
the reader off balance not because his poems are incomprehensible, but
because the experience of “seeing sounds” and “hearing shapes” obliges
us to continually re-examine the relation between poet, text and reader.
When we naturalise a sequence of metre, alliteration, assonance and
rhyme the paraphrase will inevitably strip elements of the text’s meaning
from its structure—we don’t write about rhyme in rhyme—but text and
metatext at least adhere to parallel conditions of temporality and
actualisation in speech. With Cummings’ poems not only are elements of
the text left embedded within its original form, they are unrecitable and
unrepeatable in temporal discourse. Gross finds himself “understanding”
Cummings while never being able to hear him, and consequently he
displaces his sense of disorientation on to an authorial condition of
“derangement”.
Clearly Cummings has succeeded in creating the tension between
pattern and meaning which matches the effect of the conventional double
pattern but more significantly he has at the same time drawn the
sophisticated reader back through years of “literary competence” to an
experience of frisson which most readers and critics of poetry still
remember but can never again fully recreate: I respond to and understand
the poem and the poet but I’m not entirely certain of why and how. The
question of whether Cummings should be given credit as one of the
18 Richard Bradford
genuinely innovative poets of Modernism or, as is more often the case, be

tolerated as merely a whimsical master of verbal trickery, takes us back to
the problem raised earlier. Language, whatever else it might do, will
create a barrier between what we are, what we feel, what we experience
and our ability to communicate this to others. Every ground-breaking act
of poetic innovation in literary history ahs been premised upon the
objective of finding new ways to move around or through this barrier.
Visual form is held to be a phenomenon which thickens and solidifies the
barrier, unlike its formal counterparts in auditory language which enable
us to negotiate it. Cummings’ success lies in his ambitious programme of
reversing the visual-acoustic prejudices which underlie this objective.
Free verse was the creative manifestation of the perennial ideal of moving
poetic language closer to the experience which prompted the poet to
“speak”, but no matter how “free” poetry can become of its impersonal
conventions it will still be language; and language, in order to preserve the
moment of spontaneity, the fusion of medium and referent, must be
written down, stilled, frozen in the silent configurations of the page,
Cummings’ poetry asks us to think again about language as a barrier: he
demonstrates that the inbuilt tension between word and thing, signifier
and signified should be replaced by a sense of living within language as
well as through it. His skill is manifest in his achievement of a delicate
balance between these two experiences: his texts incorporate linguistic
forms which can never be spoken, never be translated into the temporality
of auditory communication, yet, paradoxically, Cummings the speaker is
present within them. These are his poems in the sense that they contain a
trace, a shadow of his spoken presence, the moment when feeling and
impression become language; but at the same time they inhabit the realm
of visual artefacts, paintings, sculpture, whose material function remains
immune from the interpreter’s urge to perform them. His poems
deconstruct the tension between permanence and transcendence in
language by interweaving the immediacy and ephemerality of the
utterance with the permanent materiality of the artefact.
Cummings is that rare phenomenon, a poet without a specific aesthetic
or technical context. His work appears in anthologies of Concrete Poetry,
but it is just as likely to be found in collections whose criterion for
inclusion could be “American”, “modern”, “contemporary” or sometimes
“comic”. In studies of free verse he features as the nagging eccentric
whose presence cannot be ignored, but whose experiments continue to
disrupt our attempts to document the methods and characteristics of
Modernist writing. The reason for this is that the poems with which he is
most readily associated, his visual texts, are instances of what
MukaĜovský and Jakobson have called “foregrounding.” No one, whether

they are a formalist or not, objects to foregrounding; indeed the self-
conscious positioning of devices and techniques that do not serve the
practical purpose of communicating facts or ideas is the premise upon
which virtually all attempts to define literature is based. However “baring
the device” is a practice that has so far only been fully documented and
understood when the device is seen to belong to the linear, acoustic
dimension of language. Cummings foregrounds the graphic materiality of
language not merely as an iconoclastic gesture, but to show how silent
visual language can signify independently of its acoustic counterpart, and
crucially he does not allow the device to obscure the living, though often
silent, presence of the poet.
Derrida, following Rousseau, Warburton and Condillac, traces the
origins of writing to our agrarian roots:
The furrow is the line, as the ploughman traces it: the road—via rupta—
broken by the ploughshare … How does the ploughman proceed?
Economically. Arrived at the end of the furrow he does not return to the
point of departure. He turns ox and plough around. And proceeds in the
opposite direction. … Writing by the turning of the ox—boustrophedon
writing by furrows was a movement in linear and phonographic script. At
the end of the line travelled from left to right, one resumes from right to
left. Why was it abandoned at a given moment by the Greeks for example?
Why did the economy of the writer (scripteur) break with that of the
ploughman? Why is the space of one not the space of the other? (Derrida
1977, 287-8)
In his sombre deconstructive manner Derrida ponders and fillets these

questions without even suggesting answers. The same questions had
informed the mindsets of Milton and Wordsworth, Cummings and
Williams, but they had hit upon an aberrant feature of language that
Derrida ignores. The poetic line is both a turning and a point of cessation;
it “measures” rhythm yet at the same time enables the poet to command
the page with the same geometric freedom as the painter.
What unites Milton and Wordsworth, Cummings and Williams is the
self-evident desire for a special brand of unorthodoxy. Each can become
both the originator of the ephemeral, spoken text and the permanent
keeper of its visual, static counterpart; most importantly they can
orchestrate the dynamic between the two. Some might suspect that this is
formalism in extremis but in truth it allows the poet to inject an
extraordinary level of idiosyncratic presence into the text.
Consider Donald Davie’s commentary upon the following description
of God’s casting-down of Satan:
20 Richard Bradford
Him the almighty power

Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the omnipotent to arms. (I, 44-9)
Davie:
The effect is kinetic. The placing of “Him”, “down” and “To” in

particular, gives us the illusion as we read that our muscles are tightening
in panic as we experience in our bodies a movement just as headlong and
precipitate as the one described. We occupy in ourselves the gestalt of
falling. (Davie 1960)
What Davie implies, but does not state, is that the effect of falling can only
be fully appreciated if the reader can both hear and see the verse. Read
orally, we find that there is a natural pause between “combustion” and
“down” as the connection between the verb “Hurled” and its adverb is
made. An oral reader might attempt to prevent the line ending being swept
away by pausing before and after “down”, but the effect would be rather
clumsy, and, more significantly, it would superimpose a successive pattern
upon a spatial juxtaposition. Indeed the whole institutionalised concept of
“reading” as something which follows a linear, successive progression
destroys Davie’s suggestion that “Him”, “down” and “To” are discretely
significant: “down” loses some of its resonance to “bottomless perdition”
and “To” becomes merely an adjunct of “down”. There is no oral
equivalent for the vertical, downward movement of
power
Hurled
down
To
dwell
In
For Milton the line ending seemed to acquire an almost obsessive,

fetishistic significance. He, the blind poet, would (as Wordsworth intuited)
find himself suddenly at the brink of the line and there is a vast number of
instances in Paradise Lost where the drop connects a verb or adjective to a
noun that is often unexpected, sometimes terrible. And of course his poem
had a single, insidiously present theme: the fall. Cummings was a little
less preoccupied with the fall of man but one discerns in his verse a certain
empathy with Milton’s taste for the vertical. A well-known example of
falling occurs in one of his later volumes, 95 Poems:
l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
It is impossible to describe the order in which the reader is able to

distinguish the formal materiality from the metaphoric resonance of this
poem. We might observe that there is some connection between a falling
leaf and the human condition of loneliness (the end of summer evoking a
sense of sadness and isolation). We might also note the mimetic effect
produced when the opening letter “l” only becomes the word “loneliness”
after, or more accurately during, the experience of watching the leaf fall—
in one sense we feel the word “loneliness” as we watch the leaf fall, a
blending of the material and the referential dimensions of language which
is further intensified by the literal isolation of “one”. Our awareness of
how temporal language can describe or signify a relation between an event
and a feeling is fused simultaneously with a visual representation of that
process. We know that we are not actually watching a leaf fall or
experiencing the unpremeditated effects of the event, but without actually
transforming language into visual iconic images, Cummings succeeds in
fusing the conventions of interpretation that, for Lessing, separate poetry
from the visual arts. As we have seen he achieves a similar effect with the
falling “o”—or baseball—in “No. 9”. In this respect Cummings was more
radical than Williams and, certainly, Wordsworth. He favoured the
freedom of the page almost as a map of different routes of signification.
He didn’t abandon the linear but, he caused it to operate through various
180o points beneath the diagonal. Wordsworth and Williams seemed more
comfortable with the movement of the ploughman.
The following is section II of Williams’s “Perpetuum Mobile” and the
sense of being drawn from left to right by the hand of the poet to the line
ending is an almost exact replication of Wordsworth’s passage in The
Excursion
22 Richard Bradford
To all the girls

of all ages
who walk up and down on
the streets of this town

silent or gabbing
putting
their feet down

one before the other
one two
one two they

pause sometimes before
a store window and
reform the line

from here
to China everywhere
back and
forth and back and forth
and back and forth.
If we “read through” this poem to its ideational picture we lose a

significant amount of its multidimensional visual effect. Williams, in
describing the movements of the girls, is himself “putting … feet down /
one before the other,” and the extent to which he interweaves the self-
referential pattern with the ideational meaning produces a curiously
pleasant effect of disorientation. In the sequence where
they
pause sometimes before
a store window and
reform the line
the word “they” refers both to the girls and to the fact that the (variable)
feet of the poem literally cause us to “pause sometimes before” the word
“pause” appears. The reference to the “store windows” shifts the attention
of the reader out again beyond the materiality of the poem, but before we
can establish a hierarchy of responses we find ourselves contemplating the
“line” as it is “reformed” both by the hand of the poet and by the
movement of the girls. The reader is literally drawn
back and
forth and back and forth
and back and forth
between an engagement with the physical presence of the poem on the

page and the naturalised images of the girls on the street.
A later recruit to diagonalism was Charles Tomlinson. Consider:
“Lines”
You have seen a plough

the way it goes breeds
furrows line on line
until they fill a field?
What I admire in this

is less the page complete
and all the insatiable
activity towards it
than when, one furrow

more lies done with
and the tractor hesitates:
another line to be begun
and then it turns and drags

the blade in tow and that
turns too along the new
and growing groove
and each reversal thus

in mitigating mere aggression
prepares for the concreted
on-rush of the operation
and then the dark, the cool

the dew corroding the intent
abandoned mechanism
that contemplates accomplishment.
There are two texts, the written and the spoken, and the relation between
them can only be appreciated with we see the poem on the page. Read
aloud, the thematic centre is occupied by the image of ploughing, with
only the mysterious reference to the “page incomplete” to make us suspect
a possible analogy with linguistic creation. But on the page the lines of the
plough are also the lines of the poem:
24 Richard Bradford
the new
and growing groove
is literally inscribed within the written text, and we can watch as
each reversal thus

in mitigating mere aggression
prepares for the concerted
on-rush of the operation
A few years later Hugo Williams would join in
Ten, no, five seconds

after coming all
over the place
too soon,
I was lying there

wondering
where to put the
line-breaks in.
It is difficult to appreciate the form-content joke of this poem without both

seeing and hearing it and the punch-line depends on the erotic register
inscribed in the diagonal movement.
Milton, Wordsworth, W. C. Williams, Tomlinson and Hugo Williams
share a touching almost nostalgic allegiance to the poetic line’s dual role
as a measure of speech and a more tactile agency of creation, the thing on
the page that unfolds left-to-right as the imagination and the hand of the
poet cooperate. They flirt with and extend the potential within the latter
for a secondary abundant level of signification beyond the range of
speech. Cummings, as we have seen, evolved a comparable interplay
between the temporal register of language and its visual tactile dimension,
but he was more radical in his tendency to use the page like Lessing’s
model of the painter’s canvas. He achieved what most commentators
would deem impossible. He invoked the formal conventions that define
verse while simultaneously reinventing them as a stylistic signature that
was recognisably his own. His texts move across the page not in the
manner of the Concretists where several patterns of meaning are
simultaneously present—along with numerous points of opening and
closure; in these the sense of there being a single presence who asks us to
follow them through the text is extinguished. As an individual Cummings
is continuously present and urgent, but at the same time able to opt, when
he feels like it, for silence and invisibility. His was a remarkable, indeed
unique, achievement.
References
Bradford, Richard. 1993. The look of it: A theory of visual form in English
poetry. Cork: Cork Univ. Press.
Cummings, E. E. 1954. Poems, 1923-1954. New York: Harcourt, Brace
and World.
Davie, Donald. 1960. Syntax and music in Paradise Lost. In The living
Milton: Essays by various hands, ed. Frank Kermode, 70-84. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Derrida, Jacques. 1977. Of grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
Fenollosa, Ernest. 1936. The Chinese written character as a medium for
poetry. Trans. and ed. Ezra Pound. London: Stanley Nott.
Gross, Harvey. 1964. Sound and form in modern poetry: A study of
prosody from Thomas Hardy to Robert Lowell. Ann Arbor: Univ. of
Michigan Press.
Hollander, John. 1975. Vision and resonance: Two senses of poetic form.
New York and London: Oxford Univ. Press.
Hulme, T. E. 1938. A lecture on modern poetry. Reprinted in T. E. Hulme
by Michael Roberts. London: Faber and Faber.
Johnson, Samuel. 1905. The lives of the English poets. 3 vols. Ed. George
Birkbeck Hill. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lessing, G. E. 1879. Selected prose works of G. E. Lessing. Ed. Edward
Bell. Trans. E. C. Beasley and Helen Zimmern. London: George Bell
and Sons.
Lowell, Amy. 1918. The rhythms of free verse. The Dial 64:51-6.
Milton, John. 1968. The poems of John Milton. Ed. John Carey and
Alastair Fowler. Harlow: Longmans.
Ricks, Christopher. 1971. Wordsworth: “A pure organic pleasure from the
lines.” Essays in Criticism 21:1-32.
Sheridan, Thomas. 1775. Lectures on the art of reading, in two parts,
containing Part I: The art of reading prose. Part II: The art of reading
verse. London.
Tomlinson, Charles. 1985. Collected poems 1951-1981. Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press.
Williams, William Carlos. 1963. The collected later poems. New York:
New Directions.
—. 1986. 1909-39. Vol. 1 of The collected poems of William Carlos
26 Richard Bradford
Williams. Ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan. New York:

New Directions.
Wimsatt, W. K. 1944. One relation of rhyme to reason: Alexander Pope.
Modern Language Quarterly 5: 323-8.
Wordsworth, William. 1940. Poetical works. 5 vols. Ed. E. de Selincourt.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
REFLECTING EIMI:
THE ICONIC META-SONNET, MANHOOD,
AND CULTURAL CRISIS
IN E. E. CUMMINGS’ NO THANKS
GILLIAN HUANG-TILLER,
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA’S COLLEGE AT WISE
The larger meaning of the icon is historically attached to the Byzantine

and Greek Orthodox portraits of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and holy figures.
The word “icon,” or eikon in Greek, not only implies an image of
resemblance and religious reverence, but also represents the cultural
reality that erects the icon, such as the cultural reality that distinguishes
the Byzantine from Russian Orthodox icons (See Babiü 1998, 3).
Although not a religious symbol, the visual dimensions of the sonnet—
with its long pedigree from Dante to the present, set rules for fourteen
lines and proper meter and rhyme scheme, prescribed structural divisions,
and column-like shape—also acquire iconic status after the sonnet revival
of the nineteenth century. By this statement, I mean that the sonnet, as an
icon, not merely an identifiable form with a surface resemblance,
gradually develops into a representation of “high” art and culture. In
particular, a set of expectations promoting the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet
as the noblest and perfect form (by sonnet critics such as Leigh Hunt,
William Sharp, Charles Tomlinson, and Charles Crandall) came to
represent Victorian bourgeois consciousness and New England genteel
culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.1 With the highly
refined language associated with the form and content (love, praise, and
meditation) of the Petrarchan sonnet, the genre acquired prestige and
began to symbolize its status as above the mundane or banal aspects of
daily life.
Subsequently, its visual structure ultimately encodes a mythology of
28 Gillian Huang-Tiller
aesthetic and cultural purity which became so entrenched that the “make it
new” modernist movement led by Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein,
and other avant-garde poets celebrated poetic iconoclasm and vers libre by
denouncing the sonnet and its established conventions altogether.2
However, not all modernist poets utterly rejected the sonnet. E. E.
Cummings, for one, worked the sonnet form from within by unmaking and
remaking its lineation and prosody, calling attention to the visual referent
of the set form. Nevertheless, in spite of critical interest in the iconicity of
poetic form and visual prosody, noted as such in works by Anthony
Easthope and Richard Cureton, little attention has been given to
Cummings’ life-long engagement with the iconic status of the sonnet.
From his first publication of poetry Tulips and Chimneys (1923) to No
Thanks (1935), Cummings not only published experimental typographical
verse but also gave a prominent place to his experimental sonnets, which
form the crucial part of his structural design in each publication and
visually turn the sonnet into the iconic meta-form. He observes this formal
task by calling attention to the process through which the sonnet achieved
iconic status and by exposing this status as artifice. The self-referentiality
and deliberate violation of conventions in Cummings’ sonnets explode the
myth of the sonnet’s purity and estrangement from daily life, commenting
on the genre and culture both aesthetically and critically.
In Chimneys (1922 manuscript), for instance, Cummings fractures the
sonnet plane into three dimensions: sonnet-realities, sonnet-unrealities,
and sonnet-actualities. In Is 5 (1926), Cummings folds the five sonnets
forming the first section and five sonnets forming the fifth section back
onto themselves like bookends. In ViVa (1931), Cummings embeds a
sonnet in each seventh poem and ends the collection with a sequence of
seven sonnets, from poem 64 through 70 (See Huang-Tiller, 2005). It is in
No thanks, however, that Cummings makes his fullest statement of the
sonnet form by designing a schema in the shape of a V and placing a
sonnet in every third verse like rungs in a ladder with nine steps down to
the nadir and nine steps up ascending to the “Star.” This numerological
progression with the use of the sonnet clearly has aesthetic significance in
its own presentation, not to mention its iconic status, for several reasons.
For one, use of odd numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 forms a pattern of iconic
ascendancy to Cummings’ employment of the sonnet throughout his
career; for another, Cummings’ fourteenliners bear resemblance to the
sonnet, yet depart from it in their open typographic form, as if
commenting on the genre’s iconic status. I refer to these Cummingsesque
sonnets as iconic meta-sonnets. These sonnets underscore not only the
genre’s status as an iconic sign (both in the resemblance of the form and
The Iconic Meta-Sonnet, Manhood and Cultural Crisis in No Thanks 29
the characteristics the form embodies; see Easthope 1983, 97-109), but
also to the cultural reality that the meta-form of the sonnet purports to
reflect.
Nowhere is the sonnet meta-form more prominently manifested than in
Cummings’ collection of poetry No Thanks, his sixth collection of poems.
No Thanks was self-published in 1935 after fourteen rejections from
publishers, partly because of economic concerns—weak sales of
Cummings’ previous books of poetry, the depleted market after the Crash
of 1929, little interest in his recently published Russian travel book EIMI
(“I Am”) in 1933—and partly because of the radical experimentalism in
this highly typographical volume, including well-known poems such as
“the grasshopper” (see Kennedy 1980, 351) widely anthologized today.
The original deluxe edition, financed by Cummings’ mother, Rebecca
Cummings, was bound sideways. Although a retort against publishers who
refused his manuscript, the title also shows a bifurcation between “No”
and “Thanks,” between rejection and acceptance as Michael Webster
insightfully points out.3 The composition of the book also juxtaposes
variations of birth and death, openness and shuttness, growth and
stagnation, transformation and transcendence. What the publishers missed
in 1935 is that Cummings probably completed one of his most deliberate
and purposeful books of poetry to date with nineteen methodically
patterned experimental sonnets.
With nine sonnets on the descending side and nine on the ascending
side, Cummings’ “V” arrangement of the No Thanks sonnets discloses a
discursive pattern to his iconic sonnet schema. The sonnets on the
ascending pole, in contrast to those on the descending pole, immediately
call attention to Cummings’ larger narrative framing, going beyond the
counter-narrative framing of the individual sonnet that Richard Cureton
(1986) has identified (266). Cummings’ schema reflects an archetypal
descent-ascent pattern of the progress of the human soul following the re-
formation and transformation of the self. This narrative pattern, evident
through the sonnet schema, surprisingly resembles EIMI.
A year before the 1934 composition of No Thanks, a similar
descending-ascending pattern appears in Cummings’ Russian travel
narrative EIMI (“I AM”), published in 1933. In this travel narrative,
Cummings shows his disillusionment with his visit to Stalin’s Russia by
structuring the narrative of his journey based on Dante’s Divine Comedy.4
Divided into thirty-six entries, EIMI reveals the nine-layer descent pattern
of the Inferno into the “unworld” of Russia and the ascent to earthly
paradise in Purgatorio where Cummings reemerges in Istanbul. The
Dantesque pattern of Cummings’ descent into the depth of darkness and
the subsequent ascent is even more pronounced in the 1-3-9 numerical

pattern of the sonnets in No Thanks. This paper argues that No Thanks is
not only a visual performance of the iconic sonnets alone, but also a
reflection of EIMI, evoking the rebirth of man or “I AM.” In this study, I
first examine how Cummings calls attention to the iconicity of the sonnet
by visually presenting a numerical pattern of the sonnet form to bare its
architectonics concealed by the fixity of the traditional form. By exposing
the form, Cummings’ sonnet schema, transcending genre and cultural
expectations, becomes a meta-schema for cultural and self reshaping. I
then discuss how the meta-schema of the descent-ascent pattern of the
sonnets in No Thanks reflects EIMI, reaffirming Cummings’ will to “I
AM” and self-transcendence.
From this schema (Fig. 1-1 or Fig. 1-2), we can see that on both the
descending and ascending side, nine poemgroups of three (except the first
and the final sets) are framed by the nine embedded sonnet steps in the
pattern of 2-1-3-1-3-1-3-1-3-1-3-1-3-1-3-1-3-1 vs. 1-3-1-3-1-3-1-3-1-3-1-
3-1-3-1-3-1-2. The ninth sonnet (poem 35) and the tenth sonnet (poem 37
or the center of the nineteen sonnets) flank the short-lined free verse, “into
a truly/curving form,” as the two poles converge at the nadir (poem 36) of
the sequence. Cummings’ sonnet-schema, following the descent to the
lowest point and ascending to stars in a “V” shape, clearly evokes the sign
of victory not only through the sonnets’ steps, but also through
Cummings’ overarching visual design.
Recent scholarship from Cureton to Michael Webster has contributed
to our understanding of Cummings’ most experimental performance of
poetry and poemgroups in No Thanks. Webster’s (2002) article on
“poemgroups in No Thanks” (10-40) gives a detailed examination of how
the poemgroups, enclosed and contrasted by the sonnets, “reveal complex
thematic and structural identities and interactions” (2). Cureton (1986),
however, is still the only critic to examine the visual form of No Thanks,
including valuable analysis of the visual iconicity, visual voice, and visual
ambiguity of the lineation of the individual sonnets in No Thanks as a
whole. Cureton notes how Cummings’ “patternedness” in the composition
of 14 lines gives the poem its visual “narrative frame” and how each
sonnet is visually “in counterpoint with the expected 8-6 or 4-4-4-2
distribution of lines” (259). For example, in poem 19 (the 5th of the
embedded sonnets, “who before dying demands not rebirth”), Cureton
shows how “Cummings splits line 12 (against the ‘arbitrary’ 1-4-2-5-1-1
stanzaic structure) to support visually the main divisions in the syntactic
‘left dislocation’ which gives the piece its narrative frame” (259):
rare with most early soul

him shall untouch
Fig. 1-1: Final Schema of No Thanks (MSS 6246-a, Special Collections,

University of Virginia Library)
Fig. 1-2: Final Schema of No Thanks (as it appears in the typescript

edition of the volume)
A line that could be paraphrased as “he who has the most premature soul
has not been touched” by art or “meaningless precision” (and may fall
victim to “complete fate” in the next line) is typographically performed by
the “distanced” him. Cureton elaborates this visual narrative framing in his
discussion of Arbitrary Form, pointing out that Cummings’ stanzaic
pattern “often runs in counterpoint to the traditional narrative pattern”
(266). He also uses poem 7 (the second embedded sonnet) and poem 37
(the 10th or the first sonnet on the ascending schema) to show a
“palindromic” design with a 1-2-3-2-3-2-1 line pattern or with a 2-3-4-3-2
pattern (267-68).
Nonetheless, Cureton leaves the “whys” of Cummings’ schematized
sonnets in the pattern of nine descending and ascending sonnets largely
untouched, even though he is aware that “the relationship between the
narrative structures in these sonnets and their visual patterns are [sic]
enormously complex and meticulously varied and deserve [sic] more
attention from both Cummings scholars and those interested more
generally in the possibilities of visual form” (268). Cureton is right about
the complexity of Cummings’ iconic sonnets in that they could imply a
deeper layer of meaning. Based upon his important study of Cummings’
visual lineation in the sonnet, I find that the complexity of Cummings’
iconic pattern and the visual use of the sonnet could be further examined
in two ways.
For one, Cummings’ use of the visual form of the sonnet as a structural
device directs our attention to the iconicity of the genre itself, along with
the cultural prestige and stylized emotions and feelings its long pedigree
supports. We have to wonder what effect this visual performance of the
iconic “meta-sonnets” has, besides giving the “additional shape to the rise
and fall of narrative tension” within the individual sonnet that Cureton
finds (267). It seems that the mimetic structural play of the sonnet affords
Cummings an effective means of destablizing the fetishized form, thereby
freeing the genre from its convention. In so doing, Cummings’ “counter-
sonnets” in No Thanks are indeed meta-sonnets—a self-reflexive comment
on the iconic fixity of the traditional genre.
However, this purposeful visual design to free the sonnet from its
conventional constraints (in the pattern of 8-6 or 4-4-4-2) discloses a
larger meaning when we examine how the arrangement of the sonnets
significantly parallels the descending and ascending narrative pattern in
EIMI. Following Cummings’ disillusionment with Russian-Stalinist
totalitarianism, the end of EIMI anticipates the rebirth of the individual
and a re-conception of manhood. Similarly, the entire sonnet schema in No
Thanks begins with the descent, exposing the false unworld and unmen in
America, not vastly different from those who populate it in EIMI, and
moves toward the transcendent vision. But why does Cummings use the
visual iconicity of the sonnet and the schema of the sonnet to reflect EIMI
and the assertion of “I AM”? Marianne Moore ([1944] 1955) advises that
“it is useless to search [Cummings’ work] for explanations, reasons,
becauses” (140). I, however, find the opposite to be true concerning the
idea behind the composition of No Thanks, especially Cummings’ use of
the sonnet schema in juxtaposition to the structured pattern of EIMI. I
believe that a parallel study of EIMI will shed light on this schema as a
cultural statement.
The Iconic Meta-Sonnet and the V-Schema of No Thanks

As Cummings works out this transcending process through the
sequencing of sonnets in No Thanks, I begin by examining how and why
Cummings uses the sonnet schema to reflect EIMI and “I AM.” In his set
of poems, Cummings constructs the sonnet as mimetic form (mostly
irregular Shakespearean), along with its 14-line formal quality (with or
without the rhyme scheme), constantly reminding the reader that he or she
is witnessing a sonnet, yet not the familiar prescribed form. Given the
iconic status of the Petrarchan or Shakespearean form, Cummings sets his
visual performance of lineation and enjambment in contrast to the
expected end-stopping lines and formal constraints of the sonnet. This
contrast shows his strong awareness of the visual quality of the sonnet
based on line structure. Cummings’ own penned-in insertion in his
manuscript referring to his last poem (#71) as “a sonnet with one extra
line” is a case in point (see Fig. 1-1). Beyond his manipulation of form,
Cummings compels the reader to look closely at his open lines. Here, he
returns to the primary numbers 1, 2, 3, and the combination of these, 1+2,
1+3, 2+2, 2+3, 3+4 and so on, that make up the visual form of the 14-line
sonnet. In so doing, Cummings significantly lays open the architectonics
of the sonnet form in its numerical structure, evoking an iconic meta-form
that symbolically recalls its origin while reflecting on the set form of the
sonnet.
Here I cite Cureton’s graphic count of Cummings’ lines per stanza in
each sonnet below (1986, 267):
Sonnet number Lines per stanza

#3 2131412 (irregularly rhymed; Cummings’ jump
rhyme)
#7 1232321 (irregularly rhymed; chiasmic line pattern)
#11 133142 (Shakespearean rhyme scheme)
#15 842 (Shakespearean rhyme scheme; line 11 off rhyme)

#19 142511 (irregularly rhymed; Cummings’ jump rhyme)
#23 44141 (irregularly rhymed; Cummings’ jump rhyme)
#27 4442 (Petrarchan-Shakespearean; hexameter)
#31 1234121 (1234 increase; irregularly rhymed; “I” split
from “S”)
#35 4433 (Petrarchan stanza; irregularly rhymed; descent
into darkness)
#37 23432 (off rhyme & rhymed couplet; chiasmic line
pattern)
#41 3443 (irregularly rhymed; chiasmic line pattern)
#45 block (irregularly rhymed; 4 halved lines)
#49 4415 (unrhymed; “young earth space opening was”)
#53 3182 (off rhyme & unrhymed; “happens” in elongated
lines)
#57 4532 (irregularly rhymed; IYou; joy)
#61 13442 (Shakespearean; 1off rhyme; mystery of love)
#65 3452 (irregularly rhymed; unlove disappears; voices
sing)
#69 4442 (irregularly rhymed; mystery of light)
#71 1233321(irregularly rhymed; isful; illumination;
chiasmic pattern)5
On closer analysis, these sonnets, except poems 35 (4433), 61 (13442),

and 69 (4442) which resemble the 8-6, or 4-4-4-2 stanzaic structure, are
sonnets in disguise. The variations of the lines for each sonnet change
arbitrarily from stanza to stanza. Furthermore, in most of the iconic
quatrains or tercets, Cummings embeds split lines, rendering line structure
into something more than four or three lines. With the use of the split lines
or descending triadic lines, what William Carlos Williams might term as
“variable foot” in his discussion of “A New Measure,”6 darting across the
sonnet plane, Cummings’ sonnets are both sonnets and meta-sonnets
engaged in mimicry of the form. The composition of lines in various
patterns further casts light on broader interpretive possibilities, based on
his play with form and his use of form, syllable counts, and line numbers
as metaphors.
The variation of line numbers reinforces Cummings’ demonstrable
concern for numbers and sequencing or rhetorical patterns that the
orthodox sonnet represents and contains, at the cost of spontaneity and
freedom. Cummings’ own notes on lineation in the unpublished papers
housed in the Houghton Library show how he frees the idea behind his
numerical patterning. Cummings deems 1,2 as simple lines; 121, 123,
1212, 122 as compound lines: 11 as “repetition”; 12 as “change”; 123 as
“direction,” “body goes somewhere,” or movement in “time,” or
“Growth” (life to death); 1212 meaning “ad infin., circular, a return-ing-

ness, parallel repetition”; 122, meaning “incomplete, up in the air,
unfinished like a poem ending w, a comma”; 13-2 as “jump.” Cummings
further writes that “certain motions wh. pay no attention to (are absolutely
independent of) the 123; those are based on 2 things: change 12
(movement//iteration 11 (standing still”).7 Borrowing Annie Finch’s term
“metrical code,” (1993, 3) I consider Cummings’ notes on lines as his
“lineation code.” Using this code, Cummings seems to give new meaning
and life to the line pattern of each of his sonnets that the convention of the
sonnet form has stultified.
For example, the lineation of the first and last two stanzas (in the
2131412 stanzaic pattern of the first sonnet) functioning as a structural
parallel could be interpreted as “change” in Cummings’ sense:
that which we who’re alive in spite of mirrors

(have died beyond the clock)we,of ourselves
who more a part are(less who are aware) (ll. 1-3)
………………………………………….
O love,my love!soul clings and heart conceives
and mind leaps(and that which we die for lives

as wholly as that which we live for dies) (ll.12-14)
When we go into the sonnet, what we find is surprising; isomorphic

linkage between form and content signifies “change” in the first and last
three lines. The first two cryptic, non-syntactic stanzas point to the state of
aliveness after rebirth. The final two stanzas evoke love and rebirth again.
Similarly, the lines of the second sonnet “entitled how to run the world)”
(#7) double back on themselves, conveying the same message “always
don’t,” meaning “let the world be.” In the sonnets that might suggest
linearity 1232321 and 1233321 (poem 7, and poem 71), Cummings inverts
the numerical pattern, turning it into a chiasmic or pallindromic
performance, as Cureton (1986) has previously noted (267-8).
Cummings employs this semantic play of the lines in two other sonnets
that occupy crucial places on his schema. In the “conceive a man” sonnet
(l.1, #37) rising from the nadir on the ascending side, Cummings again
uses a chiasmic pattern, folding the lines 23432 back like an envelope. The
carefully crafted central sonnet ends with the repeated phrase “conceive a
man” (l.14). According to Cummings, the consecutive number 123
indicates growth and progress toward the end, the doubling-back of the
same verbal phrase “conceive a man” again inverts that linear progress,
returning time to now, to the immediacy of the moment. The chiasmic
pattern of the linear number of the lines, along with the inversion of them,
occurs one more time in the celebratory star poem #71, the last sonnet of
No Thanks on the pole of the ascending schema. On the global level of its
thematic design, these three chiasmic sonnets from “not ruling the world,”
to “(re)conceiving a man,” to “ascending to stars” visually present a larger
narrative pattern, beginning with the rebirth, the development of a “new”
man, and the culmination of a full individual.
By turning the sequential numbers on themselves, Cummings not only
collapses the bi-partite or rhetorical structure expected of the sonnet, but
also visually and emblematically inverts linear or human time that the
narrative pattern of the traditional sonnet in the pattern of 8-6 or 4-4-4-2
depends on. Perhaps to break time, Cummings removes all end-stopping
punctuation from his sonnets, creating enjambment of time and space. All
of the 19 sonnets are enjambed throughout, except for two small dashes,
one question mark, and three closed parenthetical lines. The effects of this
method are two-fold: On one hand, time rushes forward from line to line;
on the other, time seems to halt or slow down when non-sequential
lineation, manifested in the number of lines for each stanza either in
variation or in reverse, breaks time into space and creates time-space
fluidity. In so doing, Cummings’ No Thanks visually achieves a singular
timeless Now, 1233321, through the juxtaposition of time and space as
time halts to “conceive a man” in the first ascending sonnet (#37 or the
10th sonnet) on the upward ladder.
In this numerical design, the sonnet step represents the number 1, also
associated with the number 9, on each side of the axis. One can almost see
the movement in the pattern of 1-3-9 as well. Adding the root of the
schema to the two upper ends, we again have the triad, forming the
symbol that represents Cummings’ thematic design for change and new
birth. In this light, the nadir or the pivotal poem in the pattern of 4-4-4-4-
4-4, “into a truly / curving form/ enters my / soul” (#36. 11. 1-4) becomes
the pathway, the zone of the ultimate “disappearing me,” before rebirth.
This arrangement confirms the mystical process of recreation of man both
isomorphically and numerically: “and through only this night a / mightily
form moves / whose passenger and whose / pilot my spirit is” (#36, ll. 21-
24). As Christopher Butler (1970) notes, the first act of creation is the
separation of the primal matter into four elements (3-9). The composition
of all six stanzas in the pattern of 4 at the root in poem 36 proves
significant to the larger meaning of Cummings’ schema and
numerological design. The number 36 is the product of multiplying 4 by 9.
The square thus formed by four sets of nine completes a cycle of death and
rebirth, akin to the four annual seasons (Hopper [1938] 2001, 45). At its
center, one can look forward to and back upon the death of the false self
and the birth of the new self in the numerical act of creation.
On this schema, the “stair” structuring of the sonnets further adds
meaning to Cummings’ larger narrative framing. The 2-poem groups
composed of the moon and the star poems on top represent the sphere
above this world. The 3-poem poemgroups on the descending side feature
the mass or the demimonde or denizens of the unworld in juxtaposition to
the Cummingsesque sonnet, representing the archetypal quest of the self
into “disappearing me,” shedding off the “false me.” In the ascending axis
of the collection, Cummings dramatizes the reemergence of sexuality, art,
and ideal manhood. At the bottom step on the ascending side, the earth or
night sonnet in the pattern of 2-3-4-3-2 (poem 37) is evoked to “conceive
a man,” followed by the evolution of the artists from naturalistic dancers
to performing artists, to the union in love, in US, and in rhythms of life
(sounds, waves, bells), affirming the rebirth of a new man and ultimate
assertion of “I AM,” and “IS.”
Webster emphasizes the thematic relationships of each poemgroup and
observes how each interlaced sonnet in No Thanks marks a transition for
each poemgroup in the entire collection:
Within the strict architectural schema of No Thanks, the poem groups form
fluid, ad-hoc bodies of themes, verbal echoes, and techniques. In general,
the sonnets will enclose and comment upon or contrast with the interior
groups of three or six or even nine poems, while at the same time offering
transitions to new groups and themes. (Webster 2002, 13)
However, Cummings’ use of embedded sonnets goes beyond serving as

transitional markers for poemgroups. We can deduce a larger purpose of
the design by further comparing the two schemas he constructed. In the
first schema he devised for the first typed draft of the collection,
Cummings uses the shape of a pyramid ^, with “sonnet entitled how to run
the world)” placed at the apex. Although he rejected his pyramid design in
favor of a V shape for his final schema, the investment in the sonnet form
in the two schemas implies a deliberation. The first schema apparently
centers its structural meaning on the visual form of the sonnet itself, as the
apex sonnet calls for a return to naturalness, to feeling, to “Children
building this rainman out of snow” (“sonnet entitled how to run the
world)”, l.14):
Fig. 1-3: First Schema of No Thanks (bMS Am 1823.7 [22, #65], Houghton
Library)
But it is only through the rearrangement of the visual, chiasmic pattern 1-

2-3-2-3-2-1 to counter the 8-6 or 4-4-4-2 pattern of the traditional form of
the sonnet that the collection’s thematic structure becomes evident. Using
a 1-2-3-2-3-2-1 pattern for the apex sonnet (Schema 1), Cummings
apparently envisions a larger narrative pattern for his schema, culminating
in a circular vision of the sonnet, with the message of “letting the world
be.”
In the final schema, Cummings shows his double desire to return to the
natural, to the origin of human soul, to oneness through the visual
performance of his embedded sonnets. The inverted apex is
isomorphically represented by the much shortened half-line verse, “into a
truly / curving form / enters my /soul ” (poem 36). Thus, the final line of
the collection, also the final line of his “self-transcendence” sonnet—“isful
beckoningly fabulous crumb”—is distinguished on the upper right end,
pointing heavenward (see Fig. 1-2). Logically, on the upper left end of the
descending side, Cummings replaces the “snow” poem with two “moon”
poems gradually falling to earth and to darkness. Indeed, Cummings’
employment of the sonnet form in No Thanks marks the culmination of his
engagement with the genre. This visual pattern in the shape of a V would
not be easily detectable had Cummings not provided the schema himself.
But once the schema is in place, the shape calls attention to a larger
narrative framing, reflecting the discursive pattern of the embedded sonnet
sequence.
From the chart below, we can see how Cummings schematizes self-
transcendence through the descending and ascending sonnets. The first
“circle” (using Dante’s term from The Divine Comedy) of two opening
moon poems (#1-#2) serves as the vestibule. When the moon gradually
Fig. 1-4: The first lines of the Sonnets, applied on the Final Schema
descends, the earthly journey begins. Cummings takes the reader into the
“hell” of materialist, capitalist culture. The first sonnet introduces the
contrary states of aliveness and death in the human world: “that which we
die for lives” and “that which we live for dies” (poem 3). The second
poemgroup (#4-#6) contains depictions of the meaningless angry boxers,
the drunkard, and the “business-notman.” The knocked-out anonymous
boxers work for Jeff Dickson (boxing promoter) in 1933, a poem
dramatizing these boxers’ work as anger, not art as they hit each other like
the anonymous angry souls in the Inferno. The drunk and the business
“notman” presented in the same poemgroup also appear with individuality
effaced by a capitalist society.8 The second sonnet (poem 7) advises the
reader that the best way to run the world is not to run it at all, pointing to
the futility of conquest and control.
Indeed, in the third poemgroup (#8-#10), Cummings exposes figures
(in split lines) who are “the(” (poem 8, l.1a) “WistfulLy dead” (l.1b)
surrounded by “news alimony blackmail whathavewe// and propaganda”
(ll. 10-11), followed by the missing “o” (the missing “circle-o”) in the
term of “progress,” alluding to F.D.R.’s “fireside chats” in 1933 (poem 9),
and the futility of “little man” (poem 10). The “little man” poem serves as
a segue to the third sonnet (poem 11), in which Cummings reflects on
three types of man: the Foetus (childish, materialist), the Ghost (ascetic,
sb. denies life), and Cummings’ Man who loves and gives. The evaluation
of man is in contrast to a descent into the natural world, where the fourth
poemgroup (#12-#14) presents the change of natural cycles—the

transformation of the wind, the grasshopper, and the still mouse.
Cummings then visits the failure of human speech in the fourth sonnet
(poem 15).
Cureton (1986) considers the fourth fragmented sonnet the sonnet of
the visual voice, as it mimicks the defective speech of the “inunderstanding”
couple (257). Stepping further down, the reader encounters the fifth
poemgroup (#16-#18) addressing misunderstanding, clichéd speech or
slogans in mundane relationships. The fifth sonnet calls for rebirth before
dying, abandoning “mind” for “brains” (poem 19). This sonnet is followed
by the sixth poemgroup (#20-#22) mocking overachievers (working ants),
propagandists, politicians and anti-semites, who obfuscate language by
interchanging letters for distortion. Stressing the reality of mechanized
men conditioned by the ideology of success, convenience, or hatred,
Cummings’ descending journey gives a portrait of passive-thinking,
unfeeling America in the sixth sonnet (poem 23). Continuing the descent,
we encounter more exposure of poseurs, populist publishers or writers,
including Ernest Hemingway’s masculine stance in the seventh
poemgroup (#24-#26). Assessing Hemingway, along with others in the
masses, Cummings gives the highest praise in the seventh step-sonnet (an
Alexandrian sonnet written in perfect hexameter) to his friend, “little” Joe
Gould, for being able to free himself from the restraints of society and
culture (poem 27). By contrast, Hemingway is perceived as a poseur; Joe
Gould is authentic, true to himself.9
Although the sonnet celebrating Joe Gould as Cummings’
quintessential individual is placed near the end of the descending sonnets,
it suggests a closeness to ascendancy on Cummings’ schema. The eighth
poemgroup (#28-#30) satirically representing “fatheads,” “mostpeople,”
and “kumrades” is further set in contrast to Joe Gould. Apparently
imitating the circles in Dante’s Inferno, Cummings’ critique of the
conformists and the system becomes harsher as these people are placed
closer to the bottom of darkness. These are the people who have lost their
shoulders and their straight backs as Cummings dramatizes men in
contrast to a man in the eighth (next to the last) sonnet (poem 31) on the
left-leaning pole. The broken figure of man is iconically marked by the
reduction of “I AM” or “IS” in the orthographic separation of “I” from his
“S,” his spine: “I the lost shoulders S the empty spine” (l. 14). The ninth
poemgroup (#32-#34) in the descending order takes the reader to the
world of snow and ice, like the ninth layer in the Inferno. It is followed by
the ninth sonnet (Poem 35), beginning with “how dark and single,where
he ends,the earth” (l.1) in a pseudo-Petrarchan 4-4-3-3, yet unrhymed
sonnet. With this sonnet, Cummings’ descent reaches the bottom left of
the schema. Here, we can see how Cummings’ larger narrative framing is
in place as we encounter Cummings’ man awaiting transformation in this
“darkness of the earth” sonnet:
35
how dark and single,where he ends,the earth
(whose texture feels of pride and loneliness
alive like some dream giving more than all
life’s busy little dyings may possess)
how sincere large distinct and natural

he comes to his disappearance;as a mind
full without fear might faithfully lie down
to so much sleep they only understand
enormously which fail—look;with what ease

that bright how plural tide measure her guest
(as critics will upon a poet feast)
meanwhile this ghost goes under,his drowned girth

are mountains;and beyond all hurt of praise
the unimaginable night not known
First, the descending man “comes to his disappearance” (poem 35, l.6)
without earthly identity. He sees himself covered by “the tide” (a
Dantesque image again) and turned into “this ghost” (so thin, so deep as
previously described in poem 31) in the unknowing, unimaginable
darkness of waiting. In waiting, the self’s final descent anticipates change.
The paring away of the self or the unself for rebirth in this sonnet
seems to evoke Hindu mysticism, set forth in the Upanishads, in ways in
which the individual has to go through the extinguishing of the false self
before rebirth. Cummings’ schematized descent of the individual into utter
darkness or the unknowing blackness with the “disappearing me”
resembles eastern mystical transformation. Considering Cummings’
composition of the final poems on the ascending pole, the ascent is largely
moved or energized by a typographic performance of iconic verses of
dances and bells:
60
(b
eLl
s?
bE
-ginningly(come-swarm:faces
ar;rive go.faces a(live)
sob bel
ls
(poour wo
(things)
men
selves-them
inghurl)bangbells(yawnchurches
suck people)reel(dark-
ly(whirling
in
(b
ellSB
el
Ls)
-to sun(crash).Streets
glit
ter
a,strut:do;colours;are:m,ove
o im
-pos-
sibl
y
(ShoutflowereD
flowerish boom
b el Lsb El l
s!cry)
(be
llsbe
lls)
b
(be
llsbell)
ells
(sbells)
The dance of bells also calls to mind an image of the Hindu’s Lord of the
Dance, Shiva, and his dancing feet with tinkling bells. Shiva dances to
break the shackles of human and formal bondage and unself, leading to a
union of one’s eternal soul with the cosmic rhythm. Cummings’ patterned
sonnets, mimicking a similar cosmic joining of the newborn, or true self to
the divine, to love, to the other, to you, to ultimate aliveness constitute
what I believe his own Upanishads.10
At the dark nadir, Cummings places a short-line poem, “into a truly /
curving form/ enters my / soul” (#36) on the schema; he thus
isomorphically confirms, as discussed earlier, the mystical process of
descent and ascent, as well as transformation of man in the number of
36.11 Following Cummings’ design, we unsurprisingly note how at the
bottom step of the ascending side, the tenth sonnet or the “dark earth”
sonnet (poem 37), is evoked to “conceive a man”:
37 (junction sonnet to form V)

conceive a man,should he have anything
would give a little more than it away
(his autumn’s winter being summer’s spring

who moved by standing in november’s may)
from whose(if loud most howish time derange
the silent whys of such a deathlessness)

remembrance might no patient mind unstrange
learn(nor could all earth’s rotting scholars guess
that life shall not for living find the rule)
and dark beginnings are his luminous ends

who far less lonely than a fire is cool
took bedfellows for moons mountains for friends
—open your thighs to fate and(if you can

withholding nothing)World,conceive a man
Contrary to the Christian “dark night of the soul” which transcends in

the spiritual union with God after purgation (see John of the Cross, 1959),
Cummings’ rebirth of the self into now—“dark beginnings are his
luminous ends” (l.10) and “—open your thighs to fate and(if you can /
withholding nothing)” (ll. 11-12)—further sheds light on his
transcendence into life. The larger purpose of his narrative framing forms
steps toward a different transcendence and victory that only the freed
sonnet can accomplish.
On the ascending side, the first sonnet step up after the rebirth of the
man in the metaphor of the seasonal cycle (numerically implied in the
previous nadir poem 36), the poemgroup (#38-#40) responds to the
anticipatory birth of a new man with the purifying “SNOW” in uppercase
(poem 38), followed by spring rain and mysteriously feeling alive to make
the world. Then a beautiful, unrhymed sonnet (11th sonnet, poem 41),
mimicking the Petrarchan form in a chiasmic 3-4-4-3 pattern, with
crossing and redoubling lines, celebrates nature in all its opening to life.
The second poemgroup (#42-#44) focuses on the natural dancers, Sally
Rand, a black tap dancer, and dancing boys and girls moved by primitive,
unrefined life rhythms, envisioned by Cummings as necessary steps to
rebuild culture and to reach the full rebirth.
The renewal follows spring and the transformed “i” in the next
ascending sonnet (12th sonnet, poem 45); the rejuvenating rain signals the
return of feeling. The last line split in the final line at “(night climbs the
air” (l.14), opening to the third poemgroup (#46-#48) with the iconic
aliveness of the flying artistry of a bird, the boxer-artist Al Brown, and the
individuated dancer, Paul Drapper, turning undulating emotion of a dance
into art and into life. The quintessential art of the boxer and the dancer (in
contrast to the demimonde fighters and drunks) is dramatically linked to
the next ascending sonnet (13th sonnet, poem 49), culminating in the
Emersonian “transparent eyeball” (see Webster 2002):
49
silent unday by silently not night
did the great world(in darkly taking rain)

drown,beyond sound
down(slowly
beneath
sight
fall
ing(fall
ing through touch
less stillness(seized
among what ghostly nerves of again)

silent not night by silently unday
life’s bright less dwindled to a leastful most
under imagination. When(out of sheer
nothing)came a huger than fear a
white with madness wind and broke oceans and tore

mountains from their sockets and strewed and the black air
with writhing alive skies—and in death’s place
new fragrantly young earth space opening was.
Were your eyes:lost,believeing;hushed with when
Self assertion is reassured in the next rising (fourth) poemgroup (#50-

#52) with the transformed “i” following light, candle or moon at the end of
the road or on a spring sidewalk. It is an ascent as if pulled by a “proud
dreamhorse” through the “raving city,” making all the dancing moves
toward IS, Love, Spring, and Happens (14th sonnet, poem 53). The iconic
meta-sonnet charged with joy, motion, and abundant energy breaks the
boundary of the lines and spills over the margin:
53
what a proud dreamhorse pulling(smoothloomingly)through
(stepp)this(ing)crazily seething of this
raving city screamingly street wonderful
flowers And o the Light thrown by Them opens
sharp holes in dark places paints eyes touches hands with new-
ness and these startled whats are a(piercing clothes thoughts kiss
-ing wishes bodies)squirm-of-frightened shy are whichs small
its hungry for Is for Love Spring thirsty for happens
only and beautiful
there is a ragged beside the who limps
man crying silence upward
—to have tasted Beautiful to have known
Only to have smelled Happens—skip dance kids hop point at
red blue yellow violet white orange green-
ness
o what a proud dreamhorse moving(whose feet

almost walk air). now who stops. Smiles.he
stamps
The fifth poem group (#54-#56) addresses the constitution of manhood:

can you call yourself a man in a world created for you? The real man
wages war against conformity even though it might make him a fool to the
masses: “this mind made war” (poem 56, l.1). The image of aliveness
intensifies as the ascent reaches the sixth step-sonnet. The theme of
Spring, accompanied by the hurdy-gurdy music on the sidewalk and the
dance, culminates in the lovers’ fusion, the iconic “IYou,” what Millie M.
Kidd might term “a genderless us” (15th sonnet, poem 57).12 The sixth
poemgroup (#58-#60) confirms love and living, and the life rhythms. The
mystery of love as the moving force of life is reflected in the next ascent
(16th sonnet, poem 61). The seventh poemgroup (#62-#64) presents natural
sounds, signifying the awakening to life: the rhythms of the floating
waves, distant voice of birds, and the emerging of “i” AM—the increasing
assertion of the individual. In the final ascent, Cummings pronounces the
“death’s death”—the end of the world of the undead—and the new life
opening to all selves (17th sonnet, poem 65). As expected, the eighth
poemgroup (#66-#68) begins with the failure of death (the unworld)
overcome by love; with the prospect of new life, new love takes place.
Near the top end of the ascending pole, the mystery of light, “the
unimaginable star,” emerges in the next to the last sonnet (18th sonnet,
poem 69), followed by the final poemgroup (#70-#71) culminating in the
iconic emergence of the bright star and in the transcendence of the self. In
this transcending moment, two star poems punctuate the final ascent into
complete brightness. Following the famous visual performance of the
rising star, the iconic “brIght” poem (poem 70) points toward Cummings’
final transcendent vision (see Cureton 1986, 269; Webster 1995, 136):
brIght
bRight s??? big

(soft)
soft near calm

(Bright)
calm st?? holy
(soft briGht deep)

yeS near sta? calm star big yEs
alone
(wHo
Yes
near deep whO big alone soft near
deep calm deep
????Ht ?????T)
Who(holy alone)holy(alone holy)alone
Cummings concludes his larger narrative framing in the last poem of No

Thanks, “morsel miraculous and meaningless”—a transcending meta-
sonnet (19th sonnet, poem 71) evoking the “star” to lift the poet into its
“freedom” and its “isful,” the ultimate transformation and fusion of the
self with oneness and aliveness:
71
morsel miraculous and meaningless
secret on luminous whose selves and lives

imperishably feast all timeless souls
(the not whose spiral hunger may appease

what merely riches of our pretty world
sweetly who flourishes,swiftly which fails
but out of serene perfectly Nothing hurled

into young Now entirely arrives
gesture past fragrance fragrant;a than pure
more signalling of singular most flame

and surely poets only understands)
honour this lonliness of even him
who fears and eyes lifts lifting hopes and hands

—nourish my failure with thy freedom:star
isful beckoningly fabulous crumb
It is important to note that Cummings’ schema culminates in the final

transcending poem, which Cummings notes prominently in his manuscript
as “this poem (the last) is a sonnet with an extra line” (Fig. 1-1).13 This
emphatic gloss is, however, not reproduced in the graphic of any of the
print editions. It is an unfortunate omission because it overlooks the
importance Cummings attaches to schematic sonnets for a larger design in
No Thanks. The last poem or the last sonnet placed outside of the
patternedness of 9 sonnets forms the perfect 10. In Dante’s cosmology,
along with the number of the divine Trinity 3, the number 10 symbolizes
the Empyrean, where God resides with the perfected souls. As “Ten and 1
are mystically the same” according to Pythagorean number theory
(Hopper [1938] 2001, 44), the last STAR poem returns to the One, unity,
and the beginning, “a complete cycle” (Hopper [1938] 2001, 10). It is not
difficult to interpret the purpose of the extra line for the sonnet in the
chiasmic pattern of 1-2-3-3-3-2-1, which reaffirms the transcendent status
of “I AM” and “IS” in a higher realm and in its most pronounced visual
form as “isful beckoningly fabulous crumb” (l. 15).14 Recalling
Cummings’ culminating sonnet in the apex of the first schema clearly
shows his deliberate infusion of a great amount of thematic and

philosophical force into the structural meaning of the sonnet form. In the
case of No Thanks, the visual form of the sonnet has become an essential
site for Cummings to recover “I AM,” to achieve self-transcendence and
rebirth of man.
Nevertheless, what does the larger narrative framing for re-conception
of the individual and manhood have to do with the sonnet and its
numerical pattern? Why does Cummings use the sonnet sequence in every
three poems to “conceive a man”? What effect does this visual
performance of the iconic sonnets have? Further analysis shows that
Cummings’ larger narrative framing forms both a cultural critique through
the genre and a critique of the genre itself by baring the form to its
essential feelings and emotions, freed from its formal constraints through
the variation of the number of lines. Clearly, Cummings has a purpose for
using the genre and he has consistently used the sonnet’s structure to
illuminate the concept of form as theme throughout his poetic career. As
the so-called “perfect” form, the iconic Petrarchan sonnet provides
Cummings with an apt vehicle for expressing ways in which formal
restrictions and artificial emotions stifle or hinder individual freedom and
the individual’s return to his true feelings and true self.
Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of the mimetic faculty as a
“camouflage” is useful for interpreting Cummings’ structural play with the
sonnet form here (1968; 1978). The schematized sonnets serve as
mimesis—or imitative performance—of the recognized system of the
traditional sonnet form, blending in, yet noticeably different, as if
camouflaged for defense, while calling attention to the actuality of
concealed love and feeling. For example, variations in the process of
imitation—breaks in the patterns of imitation—subvert expectations and
allow for expression beyond the conventional and the expected,
dramatizing Cummings’ idea of love in its “unknownness”: “love’s
function is to fabricate unknownness” (poem 61, l.1). The highly self-
referential sonnet sequencing discloses Cummings’ re-formation and
transformation of the sonnet icon and what it represents. In so doing,
Cummings renders the sonnet form in No Thanks into an architectonics
that calls attention to itself as a meta-schema, generating a counterpoint:
first, to the iconicity of the genre itself; second, to the ruling system that
oppresses the individual. Together, the iconic meta-sonnets and the visual
form in No Thanks arguably symbolize both the victory of the meta-sonnet
and the triumph of the individual over the set form. The opening of the
genre, which parallels the opening of form and culture, also appears to
give Cummings inspiration to critique a totalitarian society he experienced
in “iconically” controlled Russia.
Reflecting EIMI (“I AM”): manhood and cultural crisis

Cummings’ reworking of the schema in No Thanks, in many ways,
recalls his disillusioning journey through the Russian unworld and his
affirmation of himself as an artist and individual in EIMI. As shown in the
chart, EIMI records Cummings’ five-week truth-finding travel to Russia in
1931.15
With his unusually observing eye, Cummings related from his
notebooks his encounters with the major literary figures of Moscow, the
American expatriate community, professionals and travelers. Collectively,
his account reveals an indoctrinated society that effaced the individual
under the banner of Marxist collectivism and the ideal of a Soviet
Worker’s Republic. The complete manuscript is an expanded document,
ten times longer than the original notebooks. Most pronounced in his
expanded retelling of Russian experience is Cummings’ reaffirmation of
“I AM” as an artist and as an individual beyond the reach of any dogma,
propaganda, or indoctrination.
This travel narrative is divided into thirty-six entries, the number of
which could be significant. For one, Cummings structures his
disillusionment with his visit to Stalin’s Russia, based on the numerical
pattern of 9. Although the numbering of the days is not precise,
Cummings, in his introduction to the 1958 edition of EIMI, specifies how
his journey in 36 days “falls in 9 parts”: “Paris-Warsaw-N & N-Moscow,”
[3 days] “Moscow,” [18 days] “Moscow-Kiev train,” [2 days] “Kiev,” [1
day] “Kiev-Odessa train,” [1 day] “Odessa,” [6 days] “Odessa-Istanbul
steamer,” [2 days] “Istanbul,” [2 days] and “Istanbul-Paris train” [1 day]
(i). He further adds, “At N (Negoreloe) I enter “aworld of Was” (EIMI
8)—the subhuman communist superstate, where men are shadows &
women are nonmen, the preindividual marxist unworld: “This unworld is
Hell. In Hell, I visit Moscow, Kiev, Odessa. From Hell an unship takes me
to Istanbul (Constantinople) where I reenter the World ([EIMI] 377-86)—
returning to France by train” (i). As critics have noted, not only do
pseudo-names such as Virgil and Beatrice allude to the figures in Dante’s
Divine Comedy, but the use of number 9 is patterned after Dante’s schema
of a 9-layer descent into the Inferno and ascent to earthly paradise in
Purgatorio.16
I. 1 May 10: Departs via train from Paris;

Germany
2 May 11: Train crosses Polish-Russian
border
II. 3 May 12: arrives in Moscow: meets
“Virgil” and is taken to Hotel Metropole
4 May 13: first day in Moscow, gets
acquainted with “Virgil,” his secretary,
Russian food, theater
5 May 14: Propaganda play; St. Basil’s
6 May 15: “indoctrination” speech IX. 36 June 14 Paris and rebirth
7 May 16 3 hour speech of VIII. 35 June 13 Exits Turkey
indoctrination by “cadaverous” through Balkans
[dead?] man
8 May 17: Meets Turk and 34 June 12 St. Sophia’s again;
“Beatrice” (aka “Turkess” departs Turkey
“Harem”), Jack London’s (Lack
Doungeon’s) daughter
9 May 18 Legend of St. Basil; VII. 33 June 11 Visits family in
“gaga” (malfunctioning) street Istabul; Saint Sophia
sweeper
10 May 19 Seeks art museum VI. 32 June 10 finally departs;
nearly has goods stolen in Turkey
(has to threaten to kill boatmen)
11 May 20 hot bath at Turk’s 31 June 9 Ship delayed;
place
12 May 21 worries about lack of 30 June 8 Last mention of
mail; meeting with Soviet “Kumrad Kummingz”; failures of
theater director arranged socialism
13 May 22 visits socialist jail 29 June 7 Departure tomorrow
14 May 23 Soviet circus 28 June 6 (Nude) beach
(Turkess leaves during elephant
act)
15 May 24 Soviet literature 27 June 5 Almost thrown out of
bureau / soviet art theater hotel
16 May 25 Turkess depressed / 26 June 4 Meets “Noo Inglunder”
Turk and C visit “pseudojoint” (takes place of Virgil?), as they
wait for ship out
17 May 26 Writer’s club V. 25 June 3 reaches Odessa
“Tactitian” turns out to be GPU
18 May 27 party ; preparation to IV. 24 June 2: Kiev; purchases
leave “soft” passage to Odessa; passport
difficulties
19 May 28 Musical burlesque; III. 23 June 1 Train to Kiev
telegram of R’s suicide
20 May 29 “poet” different 22 May 31 Ticket to exit arrives
under socialism; “no poet is a visits St. Basil again (journey
capitalist” upward)
21 May 30: Lenin’s Tomb (lowest
point in the Inferno)
Fig. 1-5: Structural chart of EIMI
The resemblance of the journey through EIMI and the sonnet sequencing
in the pattern of 3, 9, and 10 in No Thanks to Dante’s inferno journey and
his reemergence into illumination reveal a close connection between the
two works. 17
EIMI begins with a train journey into the dark fields, into the
“Shutness” of Russia, enlivened only by a few details, one of which is
visually marked as “,,OO”” outside of the window (1), suggesting
nightfall and the descent into darkness. Considering the mOOn poems in
gradual descent into darkness as the first poemgroup of No Thanks, the
parallel is there. The eighth poemgroup of No Thanks, which satirically
represents “fatheads,” “mostpeople,” and “kumrades” as part of
Cummings’ critique of conformity, suggests a source drawn from his
account of Russia, including the mock-Russian spelling of Kumrades. The
references to progress and to eternity’s “five-year plan” (Poems #9, #54)
echo Stalin’s “five-year plan” that Cummings encountered, just as overt
reference to propaganda shows direct influence from Cummings’ travel in
EIMI. It was on the eighteenth full day of Cummings’ Russian visit that he
descended into Lenin’s Tomb (May 30). In No Thanks, in the ninth sonnet,
Cummings’ speaker descends into “how dark and single,where he ends,the
earth” (l.1). On the nineteenth day in Moscow, Cummings revisited St.
Basil, contemplating what the church symbolizes in spite of the
destruction of its spirituality by revolutionary Russia and begins his
“unworld” journey upward. Similarly, in the ascending side of No
Thanks’s schema, the sonnet begins the process of rebirth, “conceive a
man,should he have anything” (# 37 l.1).
In Russia, Cummings journeys through the unworld of the so-called
Workers’ Republic, meeting with numerous souls or ghosts in what he
calls hell. Therein we find a pageant of Russian public figures (from the
converted to the skeptical to the cynical, and to the disillusioned) and
American expatriates; their speeches belie the power of indoctrination on
individuals. Characters in EIMI can be roughly classed into four groups:
political or government figures, intellectuals, writers and American Leftist
sympathizers. Represented by the pseudonymous Mme Potiphar18 and her
husband, Jack and Jill or Fat and Cadaverous, and Otto Cant (the president
of the writers’ club), they relentlessly drive the Marxist vision with a
necessary sacrifice of the individual and necessary class struggle into
Cummings’ ears. Even though Russian writers like Flowerbuyer (poet-
novelist) and the playwright Something have mixed feelings over the state
control of art, they are still government mouthpieces and pledge to the
proletarian cause. In Moscow, Cummings also noted the numerous
propaganda machines blasting from the signs of the repeated slogans and
the radios. The Writers’ Club, the Publishers of the Revolutionary

Literature Bureau, and the theater all stress loyalty to the Workers’
Republic at all costs, including the surrendering of the artists to “socialist
collective” aims (Cummings [1933] 1958, 84).
Ultimately, a gallery of these many “identical” voices exchanged
between Cummings and them turns his Russian trip into a voyage of the
artist’s self-discovery, as Cummings meditates in EIMI: “I (:feel”=a
word)suddenly why socialist soviet Russia made pilgrimage to Is” after a
visit to the western art museum (185). Cummings declares: “& the if
nothing else very idiocy of the abovementioned capitalist Kem-min-kz
will somehow actually bring (I feel) him out of hell” (270). Concerning
Cummings’ heightened consciousness as an artist and an individual in
Russia, David Farley (2003) states that “EIMI goes beyond a ‘Russian
diary,’ to become Cummings’ fullest and most elaborate declaration of his
identity as an artist” (89).
Similarly, the descending poemgroups in No Thanks expose
inhabitants of a distinctly American materialistic unworld. As the poet
guides the reader from one layer to the next, he encounters a realm
populated by figures whose humanity has been conditioned by capitalist
and consumerist society: all are reduced, in one way or another, to “not-
men,” similar to the less-than-men Cummings encountered in Moscow. As
we progress downward, Cummings dramatizes the disruption and
commodification of language itself, which fails humanity in the unworld
of the descending axis: the missing “circle-o” in “progress.” The allusions
to American government propaganda in the third poem group (#8, #9)
provide an example of the breakdown of language. The radio broadcast of
the “fireside chats” and the newsreel of F. D. R’s opening baseball pitch
become, for Cummings, the American counterpart of the ubiquitous
government propaganda broadcast in Russia. The futility of the “little
man’s” endeavors (#10)—in contrast to the child’s innocence—provides
another instance of the corrosive effects of the culture Cummings depicts.
This negative evaluation of man is set in contrast to the natural world,
where the fourth poemgroup presents the change of natural cycles—the
transformation of the wind, the grasshopper, and the still (dead) mouse. In
the next circle, Cummings turns again to the breakdown of language—a
recurrent theme in EIMI; the fifth poemgroup addresses misunderstanding,
clichéd speech or slogans in mundane relationships. Here, the semblance
to EIMI is unmistakable, as party slogans and language dominate. The
only difference is the ideology that the false language defends (capitalism
versus communism). The sixth poemgroup opens with a depiction of
worker ants, whose endless labor becomes for Cummings a means of
satirizing propagandists, politicians and anti-semites—all of whom are

slaves of discourses they barely understand (the latter point driven home
by Cummings’ strategic use of malapropisms: “eye like the steak all reid /
but eye certainly hate the juse” (#22, ll. 11-12).
Stressing the reality of mechanized men conditioned by ideology of
success, convenience, or hatred, Cummings then turns to exposure of
poseurs, populist publishers or writers in the seventh poemgroup. The
“famous fatheads,” “mostpeople,” and “kumrades” are set in contrast to
Joe Gould, one of Cummings’ most admired individuals. These figures
satirically shown in the orthographic separation of “I” from his “S”
discussed earlier may well reflect those weak-willed American expatriates
in EIMI. Those members of the American expatriate community have
surrendered some part of themselves to the system, a surrender that only
further disillusions Cummings. The leftist artists, such as Virgil (a
Cambridge playwright) and intellectuals such as Mary, defend the
communist cause to convince themselves, while betraying inevitable
ambivalences and contradictions. Impressionable American travelers like
Papa Sammy lecture Cummings on the Soviet propaganda he brought with
him. American sojourners like Trustworthy, Yellow, god and his wife
Mammy Sunshine, and the New Englander are clairvoyant, yet trapped.
Although the cynical Turkish correspondent explodes the communist
ideology and his wife, Beatrice (Jack London’s daughter, Joan Malamuth),
an animal rights advocate, could not stand how people are treated under
the GPU’s instant censorship, they try to rationalize why Soviet Russia
came into being.19
Cummings’ ninth poemgroup can be seen as a metaphorical parallel to
his descent into the frozen scene of Lenin’s Tomb, as Lenin’s encased
fleshless body is seen in a waxlike state of “isn’tish”:
: all(of whom-which move-do-not-move numberlessly)Toward

the
Tomb
Crypt
Shrine
Grave.
The Gave.
Toward the(grave.
All toward the grave)of himself of herself(all toward the grave of
themselves)all toward the grave of Self.
Move(with dirt’s dirt dirty)unmoving move un(some form nowhere)
moving move unmoving(eachotherish)
….…….
—toward
Vladimir our life!Ulianov our sweetness!Lenin our hope!
all—
(hand-
fin-
claw
foot-
hoof
tovarich)
es : to number of numberlessness ; un
-smiling
all toward Un- moveunmove , all toward Our haltpause ; all toward all
budgeshuffle : all toward Toward standwait. Isn’tish. (Cummings 1933
[1958], 241-2)
Cummings adds,
Certainly it was not made of flesh. And I have seen so many waxworks
which were actual (some ludicrous more horrible most both) so many
images whose very unaliveness could liberate Is, invent Being (or what
equally disdains life and unlife)—I have seen so very many better gods or
stranger, many mightier deeper puppets ; … (243)
Beginning with “how dark and single,where he ends,the earth” (Poem 35),
Cummings’ final descent to the nadir in No Thanks anticipates change and
rebirth, recalling his ascent to St. Basil before leaving Moscow, where
Cummings is pulling the staggering “Kem-min-kz” out of “hell” (251),
“out of stupor” into the world (252). Only in the final day in Moscow,
where “Cummings” and the drunken “Kumminks” carry on a dialogue, do
we see how the integrity of the poet’s self has been compromised:
… reels with Kohen ,with Cohn staggers , INTOURIST mail department

… but less than staggers(less than reels) Cummings with Kem-min-kz.
“Come” reelstaggering Cummings begs “let’s collect our ticket!”—
“Wuhtiggid” Kem-min-kz wonders—“Our ticket for the world.”—
“Wurl?”(comrade Kem-min-kz doesn’t seem to understand ; it’s all his
sober friend can do to keep himself out of a tailspin as “wurl?” the
drunken staggerreeler repeats incredulously).—“Surely:we’re going
out.”—“Wear?”—“Out” patiently “of hell. Into the world.”—“Awreye”
abnormally straightening “buddeye doughn bulleevid” (Cummings [1933]
1958, 251)
In recovering his “conscious being,” Cummings comes into his own

epiphamy of IS: “Instinct : the fundamental , that what you call Is ; the
inciting power, the instigating force” (251).
Having rejected the Communist system, Cummings encountered

rejection by the capitalist system upon his return to America. It was
difficult to find a publisher for EIMI because Cummings’ disillusion with
Soviet Russia was at odds with the enthused Leftist and socialist counter-
culture of the 30s. The frustration with the capitalistic world and
disillusionment with American propaganda, along with its commercialism
in the Progressive and Socialist Era, compelled the poet to take on a
similar journey of self renewal and individual affirmation as an artist in No
Thanks—a soul-searching journey not through the travel narrative, but
through the schema of the visual form of the sonnet. It turned out that it
was even harder to find a publisher for No Thanks.
In EIMI, Cummings struggles to maintain a sense of self and his
identity as an artist against the pressures of the collectivist soviet system
and its propagandistic agents. In No Thanks, the numerical pattern of the
sonnet form, free from its formal constraints, provides counterstatements
to the dehumanizing effects of mechanized system and materialist culture.
These iconic meta-sonnets also serve as the poet’s alter identity in the
same way that “Cummings” represented the survival of Cummings’
individual self while Kumrad Kumminkz represented an identity truncated
by the collective. Cummings’ overall sequencing of the sonnet schema
creates a spiritual manual for the recovery of the self. Confronting a
cultural crisis that effaces man in the socialist dystopia and the corrupt
capitalist system of the1930s, Cummings used the visual iconicity of the
meta-sonnet as a discursive tool, through which to recall the
“disappearing” “I AM.”
References
Arms, Valarie Meliotes. 1979. A Catholic reading of Cummings’ “morsel
miraculous.” Journal of Modern Literature 7 (2):192-94.
Babiü, Gordana. 1998. Introduction to Icons. Munich: International
Publishing.
Benjamin, Walter. 1968. On some motifs in Baudelaire. In Illuminations,
ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
—. 1978. On mimetic faculty. In Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz. New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Butler, Christopher. 1970. Number symbolism. New York: Barnes &
Noble.
Crandall, Charles. 1890. Representative sonnets by American poets.
Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Cummings, E. E. [1933] 1958. EIMI. New York: William Sloane.
—. 1998. No Thanks. New York: Liveright.

—. n.d. Final schema for No Thanks. Clifton Waller Barrett Special
Collection. Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library,
University of Virginia, MSS 6246-a.
—. n.d. First schema for No Thanks. Houghton Library, Harvard
University, call number bMS Am1823.7 (22), folder 4, sheet 65.
—. n.d. Notes on poetry. Houghton Library, Harvard University, call
number bMS 1823.7 (39), folder 2 of 19, sheet 33.
Cureton, Richard E. 1986. Visual form in E. E. Cummings’ No Thanks.
Word & Image 2 (3):245-77.
Cushman, Stephen. 1985. William Carlos Williams and the meaning of
measure. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.
Easthope, Antony. 1983. Poetry as discourse. London: Methuen.
Farley, David. 2003. E. E. Cummings: Intourist in the unworld. Spring:
The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society 12:86-106.
Fergusson, Francis. 1984. When we were very young (Eimi). In Critical
essays on E. E. Cummings, ed. Guy Rotella. Boston: G.K. Hall.
Finch, Annie. 1993. The ghost of meter. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan
Press.
Hopper, Vincent Foster. [1938] 2001. Medieval number symbolism.
Mineola, NY: Dover.
Huang-Tiller, Gillian. 2000. The power of the meta-genre: Cultural,
sexual, and racial politics of the American modernist sonnet. PhD
diss., Univ. of Notre Dame.
—. 2001. Modernism, Cummings’ meta-sonnets, and Chimneys. Spring:
—. 2005. The modernist sonnet and the pre-postmodern consciousness:
The question of meta-genre in E. E. Cummings’ W[ViVa] (1931).
Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society 14.
Hunt, Leigh. 1867. An essay on the cultivation, history, and varieties of
the species of poem called the sonnet. In The book of the sonnet, ed.
Leigh Hunt and S. Adams Lee. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
John of the Cross. 1959. Dark night of the soul. 3rd. rev. ed. Trans., ed. and
intro. E. Allison Peers from the critical edition of P. Silverio de Santa
Teresa. Garden City, NY: Image Books.
Kenner, Hugh. 1971. The Pound era. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
Kennedy, Richard S. 1980. Dreams in the mirror: A biography of E. E.
Cummings. New York: Liveright.
—. 1994. E. E. Cummings revisited. New York: Twayne.
Kidd, M. Millie. 2002. E. E. Cummings and The Glass Menagerie. Spring:
Lofft, Capel. 1813. Laura. London.

Moore, Marianne. 1955. Predilections. New York: Viking.
Pattison, Mark. 1896. Preface to Milton’s sonnets. In The sonnets of John
Milton. 7-63. New York: A. Appleton.
Quiller-Couch, A. T. 1897. English sonnets. London: Chapman & Hall.
Russell, C. W. 1876. Critical history of the sonnet. Dublin Review 79:400-
30.
Sharp, William. 1912. The sonnet: Its characteristics and history. In
Studies and appreciations. 1-70. New York: Duffield.
Tomlinson, Charles. [1874] 1972. The sonnet: Its origin, structure, and
place in poetry. New York: Gordon P.
Webster, Michael. 1995. Reading visual poetry after Futurism. New York:
Peter Lang.
—. 2002. Poemgroups in No Thanks. Spring: The Journal of the E. E.
Cummings Society 11:10-40.
Williams, William Carlos. [1939] 1954. The tortuous straightness of Chas.
Henri Ford. In Selected essays of William Carlos Williams. 235-6. New
York: Random House.
—. 1957. The selected letters of William Carlos Williams. Ed. John C.
Thirlwall. New York: McDowell, Obolensky.
THE POSTERITY OF IDIOSYNCRASIES:
E. E. CUMMINGS’ INFLUENCE
ON POST-WAR AMERICAN POETRY
ISABELLE ALFANDARY,
UNIVERSITÉ LUMIÈRE—LYON II
I propose to examine in this paper the legacy of a poet whose name

and poems are widely known and yet are little referred to beyond the
narrow realm of American modernism. To raise the question of E. E.
Cummings’ influence on post-war American poetry may sound odd or
irrelevant if we consider the anthologies of post-war American poetry or
even the histories of American literature which hardly mention his name
after 1940, if they do at all. Eliot Weinberger, in American Poetry since
1950 (1993), argues: “By the 1940's most of Moore’s and cummings’
poetry were behind them” (395)—which is by the way highly debatable
since some of E. E. Cummings most famous poems were written after
1940, such as “anyone lived in a pretty how town” (50 poems, 1940), or
the leaf poem “l(a” (95 Poems, 1958). In Histoire de la littérature
américaine (1992), Pierre-Yves Pétillon refers to E. E. Cummings only in
comparison to Richard Wilbur’s The Beautiful Changes (1947) (179). The
poets who followed Cummings seldom mention his name while referring
to most of his modernist contemporaries and friends like Ezra Pound,
William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein
and Louis Zukofsky, whose works are no less avant-garde or “unreadable”
than Cummings’.
Even more striking than the lack of reference to his poetry is the
consistency of the references when they do occur: E. E. Cummings’ name
is often confined to footnotes or associated with minor innovations. His
poetic contribution, when acknowledged, is usually taken for granted,
considered to be self-evident and rarely debated. Such a paradox is, of
E. E. Cummings’ Influence on Post-War American Poetry 59
course, not only characteristic of E. E. Cummings but of all minor poets—

of all “major minors” as Richard Kennedy calls them—whose
experimental practices are as minor as they are decisive.
In fact, E. E. Cummings’ poetry not only mattered to a generation of
poets in the second half of the 20th Century, but his poetry marked the
American prosody more than is generally acknowledged.
There may be several reasons that account for this relative silence or
absence of references. First, E. E. Cummings, apart from individual
relationships with literary figures, remained isolated and kept himself
apart from the American literary scene of his time, at least to a certain
extent. “some ask praise of their fellows,” he writes out of frustration
rather than elitism in a love poem (IS 5, 1926), “but i being otherwise/
made compose curves/ and yellows, angles or silences/ to a less erring
end” (Cummings 1991, 292). As an avant-garde poet, he did not sell much
at the beginning of his poetic career and he had great difficulty being
published until the late 1940’s. No Thanks (1935), one of his most
innovative books, which eventually turned out to be a semi-flop, was
ironically dedicated to the 14 publishers who turned it down in the mid-
1930’s at the height of the Great Depression.
E. E. Cummings cultivated privacy and individualism, and to a certain
extent, this worked only too well. He refused to take part in any “ism”,
founded no school, initiated no movement. Although he had many friends
among the poets of his time, he turned away most of the poets of later
generations who tried to get in touch with him and discouraged admirers
as well as potential followers. In a brief and elliptical note in his
voluminous correspondence E. E. Cummings wrote Allen Ginsberg in
1956 that he was just too busy to talk with him. E. E. Cummings spent
most of his creative life secluded in Patchin Place, in the heart of
Greenwich Village in “The City”, but far from what was going on in the
world at large. Apart from epistolary exchanges with Eve Triem, a minor
poet, who wrote a book about him, John Cage and David Diamond, two
musicians who adapted his poems, he had very few contacts, and almost
no relationships with the young and promising poets, musicians and artists
of his time. E. E. Cummings had no sense of his legacy and thus died
almost without heirs in his private and his literary life. He legally
recognized his only daughter when she was a grown up. Paternity had
always been a problem for him.
Moreover, the nature of E. E. Cummings’ transgressive poetics must
be taken into account. One may wonder what can be inherited from such
idiosyncratic writing. What the poet does with his mother tongue, the way
he escapes from syntax and deals with punctuation made him immediately
60 Isabelle Alfandary
recognizable and inimitable.

Although he was awarded grants—some of them very prestigious—he
was never named Poet Laureate of the United States, nor unanimously
appreciated by the contemporary critics. This must have filled him with
bitterness. Yet the situation radically changed in 1952. As an aging poet,
he started a new life and career as a poetry reader and performer. He
proceeded from the page to the stage, as Paul Hoover described it. Partly
for economic reasons, E. E. Cummings decided to accept the Eliot Norton
Professorship at Harvard for 1952-1953. He delivered six so-called
“nonlectures”. They were immensely popular among the undergraduates
and visitors, as Richard Kennedy reports in Dreams in the Mirror (1980).
E. E. Cummings proved to be a wonderful public reader and actor of both
his own and others’ poetry. Through his performances he became the best
known poet in the country to a generation of students, especially on the
East Coast and in the Midwest. In the mid 1950’s, a young and
enthusiastic audience listened to and read Cummings. He was no longer
considered only an avant-garde poet. He came to be seen as a mainstream
author of poems that students learned by heart. E. E. Cummings read and
dramatized his simple verse and some of his most elaborate poems,
respecting with incredible accuracy every typographical nuance, rendering
with precision every visual silence with what was described and
remembered by many as “his singing intonation.”
I contend that E. E. Cummings’ contribution to post-war American
poetry cannot be reduced to concrete or even visual poetry. What is at
stake in his typographical eccentricities, in what Pierre-Yves Pétillon calls
his “visual innovativeness,”1 is more than the mere prefiguration of the
concrete poetry to come, that is suggested, for instance, by The New
Princeton Encyclopedia for Poetry and Poetics in its article on “Concrete
Poetry” (Preminger and Brogan 1993, 232-4).
l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
[…]
(Cummings 1991, 673)
On the contrary, I would argue that E. E. Cummings’ “iconic syntax”2

differs essentially from concrete experiments, such as Emmett Williams’

“sound and sense” (1954-55) or Eugen Gomringer’s “wind” poems
(1954), because E. E. Cummings’ syntax never reduces or even tends to
reduce the linguistic sign to a mere object—which is, according to Wendy
Steiner (1982), the very definition of concrete poetry. Even though a
concrete poetry manifesto entitled “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry” paid
tribute to E. E. Cummings in 1967 as a forerunner of concrete poetry,
along with Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Guillaume Apollinaire, the Futurists
and the Dadaists, “Cummings’ atomization of words, physiognomical
typography; expressionistic emphasis on space”3 were not concrete
practices. Emphasizing the physical quality of the written sign does not
lead to its autonomy in E. E. Cummings’ mind or in his poetry. In the
wake of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics, E. E. Cummings is only
interested in playing on the gap which is at the core of the linguistic sign
and in exploiting poetically its arbitrariness. In the manner of Stéphane
Mallarmé (1945), who remarked that “[le vers] rémunère le défaut des
langues, complément supérieur” (364), E. E. Cummings wants poetic
language not only to make sense, but to make as much sense as possible.
E. E. Cummings’ restless obsession with typography, with what he
calls “the precision which creates movement” in a “Foreword” to IS 5
(221), has certainly contributed to opening new spatial horizons in
American poetry and to awakening consciousness of the “Enormous
Room” of the page. Traces of E. E. Cummings’ typographical art can be
found in the principle of field composition that poets of the Black
Mountain School developed. The explosion of the poem on the page, with
blanks corresponding to pauses and silences, was not only inspired by
abstract painters, as is generally argued, but also by E. E. Cummings’
visual experiments; for he was one of the first and only modernist
American poets to have been intrigued and to have worked on the spatial
dimension of poetry. This is the case in some of Robert Duncan’s poems,
“Close” (1987), for example, where shape and visual rhythm are
comparable to some of E. E. Cummings’ early compositions. In fact, in E.
E. Cummings’ poetry, the white space on the page is as important as the
black print. Visual devices involve rhythmic patterns that make it possible
for the voice to resound in its original and surrounding silence.
E. E. Cummings’ graphic techniques and innovations have led to the
emergence of new and unknown rhythms. Some of John Cage’s
compositions such as “Mesostics Re and not Re Mark Tobey” (1973) or,
to a lesser extent, Hannah Weiner’s prose poems in Clairvoyant Journal
(1978), directly echo E. E. Cummings’ rhythmic typography.
[…]
s
tilLnes
s (Cummings 1991, 814)
The alternative use of lower cases and capitals, creating a visual and
tactile vibration on the surface of the page, concealing the very text of the
poem, which needs to be wholly deciphered as in the case of E. E.
Cummings’ composition, or concealing subliminal messages within the
text as in Cage’s mesostics, obviously appealed to this other master and
lover of silence. John Cage is one of the few poets of his generation who
not only acknowledged his debt to E. E. Cummings but also paid a
musical tribute to him by turning several of Cummings’ poems into
musical compositions. Being fond of “A music that needs no rehearsal”
(Cage 1982) that he saw in E. E. Cummings’ writing, John Cage obtained
permission from Cummings, who was otherwise very jealous of his
authorship, to turn Cummings’ so-called visual poems into musical works.
In its very essence, as the passage to performance, either musical or vocal,
demonstrates, E. E. Cummings’ visual poetry involves a latent oral
dimension. Words must be spoken aloud, phonemes must be uttered,
letters or syllables must in some cases literally be chewed for the poem to
take shape and for meaning to be recovered.
David Antin’s poetic performances are reminiscent of E. E.
Cummings’ lower case first person singular. In the manner of “the lower
case Cummings” (1946), to use William Carlos Williams’ phrase and the
title of a famous article about his contemporary and friend Estlin, whose
systematic and minuscule typographical mark constitutes his enormous
and personal signature in the American idiom; David Antin resorts to the
lower case “i” in his poetic transcriptions. E. E. Cummings’ most
idiosyncratic manifestation, which lies at the core of his typography and
grounds his underlying grammar, is the origin of a poetic voice and lyric
that differs radically from the major and capitalized romantic and post-
romantic voices, including Walt Whitman, and ironically opposes them.
E. E. Cummings’ influence on post-war American poetry is neither
echoed in confessional approaches, nor confined to a strictly visual field,
but may be traced in diverse postmodernist strategies or movements. Even
some of the Language Poets may not be indifferent to E. E. Cummings’
grammatical investigations. Gertrude Stein, who is considered the natural
modernist reference and ancestor, may not be the only one after all. E. E.
Cummings in his early writings and especially in his short stories such as
MR X (1927, 39-41), as well as in his more mature poems such as “anyone
lives in a pretty how town” (1991, 515), is eager to take language literally,
to pay attention to what David Forrest, a cummingsian critic, calls “the

motions of meaning,” and even to let language speak for itself and tell
highly dramatized tales. Jackson Mac Low may help to shed some light on
the issue. He defines his poetry as “language-centered”—a term the author
of “anyone lived in a pretty how town” would acknowledge as his own.
Further, the terms Jackson Mac Low uses to describe his poetic project
could be strictly applied to E. E. Cummings’ poetics: “nonreferential” and
even “perceiver-centered.”
Whatever the intentions of the authors, if the perceiver gives serious

attention to the works, they will—at some “level”—be finding meaning.
This is what arouses and sustains their interest and sometimes moves them
emotionally. (Weinberger 1993, 491)
In the case of E. E. Cummings, only the adverb “sometimes” would need

to be removed, for his poetics is essentially based on emotion; yet the rest
of the definition is perfectly appropriate.
To end this far from exhaustive survey, I would like to consider the
case of Susan Howe’s poetry and to dwell on its affinities with and
differences from that of E. E. Cummings. What E. E. Cummings and
Susan Howe have very obviously in common is their sense of typography
and their insistence on details. Of course, Susan Howe admits her
affinities with 19th century writers4 and poets, with Emily Dickinson5 in
particular. This is in no way contradictory to a possible Cummingsian
influence. Both poetries emphasize the omnipresence of the letter, which
may be related to their common puritan heritage. E. E. Cummings was the
son of a Unitarian priest and preacher in Cambridge: he mocked the town
where he grew up in a poem, “the Cambridge ladies live in furnished
souls” (1991, 115). Susan Howe (1993) acknowledges her Yankee
heritage in “New England is the place I am” (47). She explicitly focuses
on the letter as a key to her poetry:
Esthetics is for artists/ what Ornithology is for birds. Worn words and
tattered feathers. Only names remain. Letters. Can they be saved and how?
Forward in a backward direction, a world of torn words turn to grasp.
(Silliman 1986, 556)
Both poets share an interest in blanks and margins, a passion for

eccentricity. Susan Howe (1993) even discussed her fascination for this
intensely poetic space, which she defines as “the edge of the page, left
blank or to be filled with notes” (28) in her reflection on Melville’s
Marginalia. E. E. Cummings’ poetics of transgression may be echoed in
Susan Howe's poetics of trespassing—a word and notion that is recurrent
in her book The Birthmark. Almost the same typographical and syntactic
devices, the same semantic games can be found in Howe’s early poetry
and in E. E. Cummings. Both poets play on meaningful caesuras and witty
run-on-lines, on the proliferation of syllables and the progressive unveiling
of syntagms, as in Howe’s “White Foolscalp: Book of Cordelia” (1983) or
Cummings’ “o pr” (1991, 392) for instance. Both are fond of the
spectacular and microscopic happening of meaning in poetic space.
Yet a significant difference separates the two poets: while the line and
the linearity of language prevail in E. E. Cummings’ verse, Susan Howe
tends to break with line and linearity, especially in her later poetry
“THOROW” (1987). According to “The principle of the hinge,” which she
explored in an early book of poems, Frame Structures (1974), quoting
Marcel Duchamp: “Perhaps make a HINGE PICTURE. (folding yardstick,
book...)/ develop in space the PRINCIPLE OF THE HINGE in the
displacements 1st in the plane 2nd in space” (32), letters are overlapping,
words are upside down: the syntax and readability of the verse are
consequently and irremediably altered. In using the “hinge”, Susan Howe
not only develops the modernist line, but breaks with it.
In conclusion, E. E. Cummings, along with other modernists after Ezra
Pound, contributed not only to the renewal of the American poetic
paradigm but also to the passage from modernism to post-modernism in
post-war American poetry. To realize the impact and influence of E. E.
Cummings’ aesthetics on some of his remote or formalist followers, one
needs only to browse through an anthology. The poetics of grammar of the
author of “Buffalo Bill ’s” has helped to free verse, displace poetic
constraints and has made it possible to elaborate singular poetic forms of
expression, which defy simple categorization.
[…]
Jesus
he was a handsome man

and what I want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death (Cummings 1991, 90)
References
Cage, John. 1982. Introduction to Themes & variations. New York:
Station Hill Press.
Cummings, E. E. 1991. Complete poems. Ed. George J. Firmage. New
York: Liveright.
—. 1927. MR X. Bookman 66, September 1927, 39-41.
—. 1946. E. E. Cummings number. Harvard Wake 5.
Cureton, Richard D. 1981. E. E. Cummings: A case of iconic syntax.
Language and Style 14:185-215.
Forrest, David. n.d. The motions of meaning in the poetry of E. E.
Cummings. PhD diss, Harvard Univ.
Howe, Susan. 1974. Frame structures. New York: New Directions.
The Birth-mark. 1993. Hanover: Wesleyan Univ. Press.
Kennedy, Richard S. 1980. Dreams in the mirror. New York: Liveright.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. 1945. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Henri Mondor and G.
Jean-Aubry. Paris: Gallimard.
Pétillon, Pierre-Yves. 1992. Histoire de la littérature américaine. Paris:
Fayard.
Preminger, Alex, and T. V. Brogan, eds. 1993. The new Princeton
encyclopedia for poetry and poetics. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press.
Silliman, Ron, ed. 1986. In the American tree. Orono, ME: The National
Poetry Foundation.
Solt, M. E. 1968. Concrete poetry: A world view. Bloomington: Indiana
Univ. Press.
Steiner, Wendy. 1982. Colors of rhetoric: Problems in the relation
between modern literature and painting. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press.
Weinberger, Eliot, ed. 1993. American poetry since 1950. New York:
Marsilio Publishers.
Part II: Political Cummings
FROM BAD BOY TO CURMUDGEON:
CUMMINGS’ POLITICAL EVOLUTION
MILTON COHEN,
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS
In this paper, I shall not consider the E. E. Cummings whose lyrical

poems have achieved well-deserved immortality: the sweet singer of love
and spring, the agile, always original, deeply-moving lyricist, and the
innovative “draughtsman of words.” The Cummings discussed below is
the satirist of his society's values and the champion of his own.
Accordingly, “political” poems are defined broadly to include social
values and well as explicitly political themes.
L’enfante terrible: Cummings in the Twenties

Cummings’ political positions and poems in the 1920s were entirely
consistent with the personas he was shaping as a poet, painter, and
bohemian. In all these realms, he rebelled against convention and
embraced all that was new, original, and shocking. He vigorously opposed
his father’s pressure to turn his talents in writing and art to lucrative (or at
least self-supporting) ends, stubbornly defining himself then and ever after
as “poetandpainter” (Cohen 1987, 35-36). His early painting rejected
naturalistic representation for large abstractions in oils, which he titled
Sound or Noise. And of course, his violations of virtually all poetic
conventions—from lowly punctuation marks and capitals to the way his
poems moved across the page—established his life-long reputation as the
bad boy of poetry.1 So it comes as no surprise that Cummings’ political
views in the Twenties were equally rebellious, equally guaranteed to
flabbergast the Rotarians—and in particular, his father.
We should recall that what the young artist was rebelling against was
not merely the nebulous concepts of mainstream America, but his personal
From Bad Boy to Curmudgeon. Cummings’ Political Evolution 69
experience of them in his comfortable, bourgeois upbringing in placid,

prewar America and particularly in the strong-willed views of his father.
Cambridge, then, was the epitome of middle-class respectability and
accepted beliefs—
the Cambridge ladies live in furnished souls . . . .

they believe in Christ and Longfellow,both dead
—(Cummings 1991, 115)
and Cummings, as a preacher’s and professor’s kid (his father was both
minister for Boston’s South Congregational Church and Harvard’s first
professor of sociology), had a double dose of this asphyxiating
respectability. To achieve his own sense of self—“individuation” in
Jungian terms—meant not simply challenging this or that belief, but
repudiating the entire package and open-mindedly exploring the worlds
that Cambridge shunned: the low-life of Boston and Somerville. As
Cummings recalled in his Harvard non-lectures several decades later:
the more implacably a virtuous Cambridge drew me toward what might

have been her bosom, the more sure I felt that soi-disant respectability
comprised nearly everything which I couldn't respect, and the more
eagerly I explored sinful Somerville (Cummings 1974, 31).
His matriculation at Harvard only confirmed this repudiation of the

genteel life, although it did provide him with good friends who helped
introduce him to modernist art and Boston’s demi-monde.
In a memorable letter to his sister from Paris in 1922, Cumming
summarized his belief that “finding out for yourself” meant rejecting what
you have been taught. Here are some excerpts:
Of this i am sure: nothing “occurs” to anyone as an individual . . . except:

the person or mind in question has FIRST OF ALL, FEARLESSLY wiped
out, THOROUGHLY AND UNSENTIMENTALLY defecated WHAT
HAS BEEN TAUGHT HIM OR HER. . . . .
e.g. I am taught to believe that prostitutes are to be looked down on.
Before believing that,I will,unless I am afraid to do it,make the following
experiment:I will talk with,meet on terms of perfect equality,without in the
slightest attempting to persuade,a prostitute. Through my own eyes and
ears a verdict will arrive,which is the only valid verdict for me in the entire
world . . . . (Cummings 1969, 85-86)
Many of Cummings’ early “Sonnets-Realities” practice what this letter

preached, studying prostitutes from various perspectives, sometimes just
reproducing their speech—
70 Milton Cohen
“life?
Listen”the feline she with radishred
legs said(crossing them slowly)“I’m
asleep. Yep. Youse is asleep kid
and everybody is.”
(Cummings 1991, 226)—
sometimes observing with the cool detachment of a Degas:
“kitty”. sixteen,5’1”,white,prostitute.
ducking always the touch of must and shall,

whose slippery body is Death’s littlest pal,
skilled in quick softness. Unspontaneous. cute. . . . .

(126)
Other prostitute poems depict the speaker’s antithetical feelings of lust and
disgust in having sex with them:
the dirty colours of her kiss have just

throttled
my seeing blood,her heart’s chatter
riveted a weeping skyscraper
in me
(205)
These snapshots of low-life thus derive from the mixed motives of

shocking the Cambridgeans and paying homage to the most common of
common people—a proclivity Cummings showed all his life.
World War I focused Cummings’ rebelliousness in several ways and
established his life-long hatred of militarism and war. He volunteered for
the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service (on the day after America declared
war on Germany) partly from his sympathy for France (inherited via the
arts and Harvard), partly from not wanting to bear arms and be subjected
to army regimentation: “It will mean everything to me as an experience,”
he wrote his father, “to do something I want to, in a wholly new
environment, versus being forced to do something I don’t want to &
unchanging scene” (quoted in Kennedy 1980, 137). Ironically, the war
forced him to suffer the authoritarianism of two governments: the French,
when they imprisoned him for suspected disloyalty,2 and the American,
when they drafted him after his return to the States. His war experience
gave Cummings something to hate—not just war itself, but also the
chauvinism (hiding as patriotism) of the folks back home that made war
possible—and something to celebrate: some of his fellow prisoners in La
Ferté-Macé, who would become the “delectable mountains” of The
Enormous Room.
Cummings’ best World War I poems thus continue his war with
Cambridge:
my sweet old etcetera

aunt lucy during the recent
war could and what

is more did tell you just
what everybody was fighting
for, . . .
my
mother hoped that
i would die etcetera

bravely of course my father used
to become hoarse talking about how it was
a privilege and if only he
could . . .
Cummings’ father, who had once headed the World Peace Foundation,
changed his tune when America entered the war and cabled this ditty on
his son’s departure for France: “I envy your chance / of breaking a lance /
for freedom in France / by driving and mending / an ambulance”
(Kennedy 1980, 137). Apparently, the family could produce but one poet.
When Cummings refused to enter an officer’s training camp in 1918,
according to a conversation Cummings later reproduced, his father
exploded:
you dare to tell me that you refuse to answer that call, that your business is
more important than everybody's business, that you will not give yourself
to Save the World, will not avail yourself of the Greatest Opportunity that
the World has ever given a young man to prove himself worthy of the
sacrifices that have been made for him by his parents? (162-63)
No doubt, his father became hoarse in this diatribe.

Other war poems intend to shock, depicting, for instance, the “clean
72 Milton Cohen
upstanding well dressed boy” who goes to war “for God for country and
for Yale” and gets “clap and syphilis”—still unmentionable diseases for
proper folk in the twenties (Cummings 1991, 272). Still other war poems
give us the voice and view of the doughboy in the trenches:
you know what i mean when

the first guy drops you know
everybody feels sick or
when they throw in a few gas
and the oh baby shrapnel
or my feet getting dim freezing . . .
Tellingly, the poem contrasts this knowing how it really was with people
(those far from the front lines) who “don’t and never / never / will know”
because “they don’t want // to / no” (271). And since they choose not to
know, they will never say “no” to war.
All of these patterns—the desire to shock the proper middle class, to
satirize their most cherished beliefs, particularly their mindless patriotism,
and to express a vague kinship with the lowly and despised—apply to
Cummings’ satires of peacetime America in the twenties. Like his
contemporaries, however, he took relatively little interest in politics, so
early poems that can be labeled explicitly “political” are scarce. One such
was probably written just after President Warren G. Harding’s death in
1924, but did not appear until the 1931 ViVa:
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” . . .
(337)
The poem’s conclusion is as blunt as its opening is satirical: who cares?

Once again, the Cambridge mentality comes in for its share of ridicule:
the sweet & aged people

who rule this world(and me and
you if we’re not vary
careful)
O,
the darling benevolent mindless

He—and She—
shaped waxworks filled
with dead ideas . . .
OH
the bothering
dear unnecessary hairless
o
ld
(248)
America’s materialist resurgence after the war—and the advertising

slogans to promote it—also becomes a target for Cummings’ typewriter:
the season ‘tis,my lovely lambs,
of Sumner Volstead Christ and Co. ...

the age of dollars and no sense
(265)
my country,‘tis of
you, land of the Cluett

Shirt Boston Garter and Spearmint
Girl With The Wrigley Eyes(of you
land of the Arrow Ide
and Earl &
Wilson
Collars)of you i
sing:land of Abraham Lincoln and Lydia E. Pinkham,
land above all of Just Add Hot Water And Serve—
from every B.V.D.
let freedom ring

(228)
The first excerpt compresses several topical allusions: to Prohibition (the

Volstead Act), consumerism (“dollars and no sense”) and Bruce Barton’s
1925 depiction of Christ as a super-salesman in The Man Nobody Knows.
Here again, as in his antiwar and anti-Puritanical themes, Cummings’
irreverence aligned neatly with the views of his fellow artists and
74 Milton Cohen
intellectuals.3
Finally, one early political poem is especially noteworthy, given
Cummings’ later attitudes about Communism:
16 heures
l’Etoile
the communists have fine Eyes
some are young some old none

look alike the flics rush
batter the crowd sprawls collapses
singing knocked down trampled the kicked by
flics rush(the
Flics,tidiyum,are
very tidiyum reassuringly similar ...
Drawn from Cummings’ first-hand experience of seeing the Parisian

police (“flics”) charge into a May-Day demonstration with clubs flying,
the poem sympathizes entirely with the Communists. Significantly,
however, it avoids any ideological content and praises the Communists for
their individuality—for Cummings, if not for the comrades, an absolute
good—while it trivializes the police as boringly (“tediyum” puns tedium
and te deum) the same. A few years earlier, during the Russian civil war,
Cummings showed similar sympathies as he teased his father with gleeful
accounts in his letters of the Red Army’s successes against the American-
backed Whites in 1919.4
Placed in the context of his rebellious generation, and compared to the
views of Dos Passos and Hemingway, who had also driven ambulances in
World War I, Cummings’ politics were unremarkable in their satirical
criticism of mainstream American culture during and after the war.
Indeed, just as one can discern in Cummings’ Cambridge and antiwar
satires rebellion against his overbearing father, the same family rebellion
can be observed in Dos Passos’ early and intense hostility to everything
that later became known as “the establishment” (his father was an
influential Wall Street lawyer) and in Hemingway’s ruthless desire to strip
away genteel reticence (his parents were quintessential Victorians). But in
one important respect, Cummings’ rebellion differed from these others: he
remained close to his family and even depended on his father to support
him and bail him out of difficulties. Thus, no matter how sharply he
tweaked his father—with the political satires, with celebrations of floating
turds and delectable misfits in The Enormous Room, with “hips pumping
pleasure into hips” in the “Sonnets-Realities, ” and with reminders of
Soviet successes—Cummings knew that his rebellion would be tolerated:
that his parents would continue to love him and financially support him so
that he could paint and write. At the same time, he had become the center
of a new family of friends and artists who espoused modernism and
Menckenism. Dos Passos (1966) recalls that within this circle of ex-
Harvard artists and writers in New York in the late teens and early
twenties, “Cummings was the hub. Cummings and Elaine [Orr Thayer] . . .
Those of us who weren’t in love with Cummings were in love with
Elaine” (82). Moreover, his poetry and painting were highly regarded and
promoted by this circle.5 Thus, Cummings’ rebellions really had a double
safety net: while seeming daring and naughty, they cost him no parental
support and gained him the admiration of new “family.” How could he
lose?
Embattled iconoclast: Cummings in the 1930s

But he did lose: by the early 1930s, he had lost the center of his
biological family in his father’s early death and, perhaps more
distressingly, his central place among his family of modernist
contemporaries. His own efforts to create a family had also gone badly
awry. His first wife, Elaine Orr Thayer divorced him after thee months and
prevented him from seeing their child, Nancy. His rocky relationship with
his second wife, Anne Barton, finally ended in divorce in 1932. But it is
the second “familial” loss of his position as the darling of the avant-garde
that I wish to examine, particularly through the lens of critical reviews.
Compare, for example, two reviews by Gorham Munson. The first, in

1923, contains a detailed analysis of Tulips and Chimneys:
The result is, he sees freshly. Cummings sees words. . . . [His originality]
resolves into two elements. The first is accurate choice of words. The
second is the pains taken to display his accuracy unmistakably. . . .
Cummings makes punctuation and typography active instruments for
literary expression. . . . [Unlike Apollinaire’s Calligrammes] [h]is
typographical design in every example reinforces his literary content. He
has perceived that the printing press has made poetry something to be seen
as well as heard; he has realized that visual notation of auditory rhythms
stimulate the ears of silent readers. (reprinted in Baum 1962, 10; Munson’s
emphasis)
76 Milton Cohen
This perceptive and admiring review typifies others by Cummings’

contemporaries in the 1920s, e.g., John Dos Passos, Slater Brown, Laura
Riding and Robert Graves. Now look at Munson’s review of ViVa (1931):
He has been a gifted coterie writer, and ViVa will make it plain that he is
writing, as he grows older, for a diminishing coterie. In the direction in
which he is pushing he will eventually write for himself alone. . . . [t]he
general impression ViVa gives is of a complicated and refined
idiosyncrasy. . . . [H]e writes for the studio, and ignores the fact that a
guessing frame of mind is not suited to the nature and purposes of poetry.
(reprinted in Dendinger 1981, 113-4)
Horace Gregory’s review of ViVa goes even further: “Within a very few
years his typographical mannerisms will be forgotten or merely taken for
granted” (Gregory 1931, 22). As these reviews suggest, by the early
thirties, critics were growing impatient with Cummings’ typographical
dislocations, and they felt that the poet was growing stale. What had
seemed fresh and daring in Cummings’ first book of poems in 1923—in
an era of almost continuous literary experiment6—now seemed repetitive
and a bit irritating in Cummings’ fourth book of poetry.
Critics noticed, too, that Cummings’ satires in the early 1930s were
less subtle, his targets more scattered, as if he were lashing out at
everything. Malcolm Cowley wrote about ViVa:
He is depending more on anger—against politicians, officials, soldiers,

against literary fakirs, against humanity in general—as a source of poetry.
He is paying more attention to public matters like Einstein's theory and the
Russian Revolution, but his reaction to them remains private and unsocial.
(Cowley 1932, 299-300)
In her review of no thanks (1935), Babette Deutsch identified the real

problem with this scattergun approach:
What he fails to realize is that even the active force of satire loses its
efficacy when the satirist behaves like Tweedledum in his famous battle
with his brother, hitting everything within reach whether he can see it or
not. (Deutsch 1935, 14)
In one respect, though, these critics were wrong: diverse as these

satires were, one new target appears repeatedly by 1935: the political Left.
And this opposition, more than any other factor, alienated Cummings from
his times. Those times had changed markedly in the early 1930s even if
his poetry did not seem to. The Great Depression now paralyzed the
nation, and bread lines and factory closings made critics less patient with
verbal acrostics than they had been in the comfortable, experimental

Twenties. Moreover, these critics themselves had changed. In the face of
economic catastrophe, intellectuals and artists of all kinds turned away
from the apolitical modernism of the twenties and towards a new political
fascination with Marxism as a hope for the future. Inevitably, this new
interest in economics and political radicalism spread to aesthetics, and by
1932 one could see in any of a half dozen different journals articles asking
“Can We Have a Proletarian Literature?” the title of an article in The
Modern Quarterly (Calverton 1932). Critics and reviewers were part of
this intellectual migration, and Social Realist considerations increasingly
colored their literary judgments as the decade progressed.
Cummings’ response to this literary sea change tells us as much about
his sense of displacement within the avant garde as it does about his
politics:
IN)
all those who got
athlete’s mouth jumping
on&off bandwagons
(MEMORIAM
Cummings had come to despise Communism and its embodiment in the

Soviet Union after his 1931 trip there. Given his distrust of any authority,
this antipathy was hardly surprising. His Russian diaries, encoded in
Cummingsese, were later published as Eimi, Greek for “I am,” itself a slap
at collectivism, and they depict a Soviet state that is unrelievedly grim:
repressive, regimented, soulless, scary. Eimi appeared in 1933 at the apex
of Leftist enthusiasm for the Soviet Union as the hopeful embodiment of a
planned socialist society (Cowley 1980, 35). Not surprisingly, critics who
bothered to review the book, judged it according to their own views of
Russia. Leftist reviewers, of course, hated it and accused Cummings of
basing his judgments on limited views and subjective prejudices rather
than on comprehensive investigation (Asch 1933, 314; Canby 1933, 533;
K. D. C. 1933, 4-6; reprinted in Dendinger 1981, 136-8; 151-2).
In any case, Cummings had drawn his line in the sand against Marxism
and Leftist critics, as the bristling satires in his next volume of poems, no
thanks (1935) demonstrate:
beware of folks with missions

to turn us into rissions
and blokes with ammunicions
who tend to make incitions . . .
78 Milton Cohen
every kumrad is a bit

of quite unmitigated hate
(travelling in a futile groove . . .
(413)
An especially wicked satire aims at the new journals—presumably

leftist—that were now sprouting up:
“let’s start a magazine
to hell with literature

we want something redblooded
lousy with pure

reeking with stark
and fearlessly obscene
…
let’s not spoil it
let’s make it serious
something authentic and delirious

you know something genuine like a mark
in a toilet
graced with guts and gutted

with grace”
squeeze you nuts and open your face

(407)
Only the last line is outside of quotation marks—obviously, the poet’s

obscene suggestion to the would-be editors.
How much of this hostility to the Left can be attributed not to
Cummings’ high-minded love of independence, his iconoclastic refusal to
become a Marxist camp-follower, but to his bitterness over being
displaced as the bad-boy darling of the avant garde, his defensiveness
about being attacked by critics with a new agenda, his sense of having
fallen—seemingly overnight—from the avant garde to the rear guard?
Surely, it could not have been pleasant to read Philip Horton declaring in
Partisan Review that “the enfant terrible of 1923 has become the
professional vieux gaillard of today [1938]—a poet distinctly manqué…”
(58-63; reprinted in Dendinger 1981, 196-201). And perhaps the unkindest
cut was for this masterful parodist to be parodied in Babette Deutsch’s “e

e cummingsesq”:
:dearmrcummings it is
late
r than you th
ink ;printersink s
print
ingdownand sp (o)
ill
ing(
ver)
the
page doesnt
excite or delight us
the same way anymore ;not
that we ask you to stop (look Listen)
drinking
at the pierian sp
ring (aroundarosie)
;but you must be
careful or you will get
all
!wet
…we like your

impudent balla
dry
;but
it is
nineteenfortyone mrcummings
,and you must forgive us
if we sometimes
y
aaaw
n
;because it is
appallingly
late.
hell is a thirsty place
and only
a draught from the top of
helicon will do ;we are not asking you for
something new ,simply
80 Milton Cohen
few
and (er
)or better
?poems
(Deutsch 1941, 591; reprinted in Baum 1962, 112-3)
Undoubtedly, Cummings smarted from these attacks and launched a

few ad hominem sallies of his own, which his better judgment left
unpublished:
american critic ad 1935
alias faggoty slob with a sob in whose cot

tony onceaweek whisper winsomely pul
ling their wool over 120 mil

lion goats
....
The critic is not merely a bleeding heart—a “sob” sister—he’s

homosexual: note how lines 2-3 can be read “in whose cot [T]ony
onceaweek [visits?].” Garden variety jealousy emerges here as the poem
notes that “all he’s got to do is just men / tion something & it sells ten 000
copies.” This, at a time when Cummings’ no thanks couldn’t find a
publisher.7
Cummings was certainly not alone in this defensive reaction to Leftist
attacks and to feeling superannuated. One sees virtually the same
antagonism between Robert Frost and Leftist critics in the 1930s, even
similar critical accusations and poetic provocations. Modernists such as
Hemingway, Stevens, even Williams and Dos Passos were also attacked
by the Left in the 1930s, though their responses to hostile criticism
differed markedly. A revealing comment by Horace Gregory in 1938
perfectly captures the sense that Cummings was part of a larger, aesthetic
war between the generations of 1920s modernists and 1930s politically-
engaged critics:
For the critics of our times, there should be some significance in noting
that Mr. Cummings is not the only poet who has remained too young too
long. The same charge of seeming adolescent beyond their years may be
brought against many American writers who had reached the age of
twenty-one between 1914 and 1924. The desert of our “wasteland” period
in both prose and verse is white with the bones of those whose careers
may be best described as a lingering adolescence followed by a long
senility. (Gregory 1938, 368-70; reprinted in Dendinger 1981, 196)
But if predictable in some ways, Cummings’ political stances in the

Thirties were in other ways quite idiosyncratic. In losing his place in the
avant garde—his second family—he gravitated back to his first one, not
only resurrecting his father as hero in “my father moved through dooms of
love” (Cummings 1991, 520), but even adopting his father’s preacherly
voice at times:
Jehovah buried,Satan dead,

do fearers worship Much and Quick;
badness not being felt as bad,
itself thinks goodness what is meek;
obey says toc,submit says tic,
Eternity’s a Five Year Plan:
if Joy with Pain shall hang in hock
who dares to call himself a man? …
King Christ,this world is all aleak;

and lifepreservers there are none;
and waves which only He may walk
Who dares to call Himself a man.
(438)
Then, too, his satires in these years did not limit themselves to the Left,
but attacked all sides of the political spectrum. One even addresses “little /
mr Big / notbusy / Busi / ness notman,” informing him: “you / are dead /
you captain)” (389). And in the poem warning about proselytizers for the
“rissians,” the last stanza tells us to “pity the poor fool” who spews anti-
Semitism:
god help me it aint no ews

eye like the staek all ried
but eye certainly hate the juse (405)
This damning of all totalitarian extremes appears more forcefully in the

1940 nursery parody of “peas porridge hot”:
red-rag and pink-flag

blackshirt and brown
strut-mince and stink-brag
have all come to town
some like it shot

and some like it hung
82 Milton Cohen
and some like it in the twot

nine months young
(497)
Marxist propaganda (“red-rag”), “pink” fellow-travelers, Hitler’s

brownshirts, and Mussolini’s strutting blackshirts all dominate center-
stage now. Possibly, Cummings alludes here to their pacts—the Tripartite
Pact between Germany, Italy, and Japan, and the infamous Nazi-Soviet
pact of August 1939—that consolidate the evil. Nowhere present are the
Western democracies, which, to judge from his other poems, Cummings
had no faith in anyway: “uncle shylock” was “not interested,” for
example, when Russia invaded Finland in 1940 (Cummings 1991, 641).8
Totalitarian crimes—“shot” and “hung”—even invade what might be
considered a refuge of innocence, the womb,9 perhaps an allusion to Nazi
plans to propagate a new generation of the master race with breeding
homes and Hitler Youth camps.
Reviewers of Cummings’ books in the later 1930s did not credit this
damning of all totalitarian extremes. Marxist critics, smarting from poems
like “kumrads die because they’re told),” had already written him off as
“counter-revolutionary” (Humphries 1938, 23-5; reprinted in Dendinger
1981, 191-3), a romantic egotist (Seaver 1938). Leftist critics attributed
Cummings’ range to casualness and whim. Kenneth Burke (1935), writing
in The New Republic, felt he was “driven by his historical amorphousness
into personal moods as the last court of appeal” (192; reprinted in
Dendinger 1981, 171-3). Babette Deutsch (1935) wrote in the New York
Herald Tribune, that “the impression” his satires conveyed “is that they
were dictated by the whim of the moment and that another moment’s
reflection might have led him to leave them in his private notebook” (14).
One emerging trend in Cummings’ poetic attitudes of the Thirties
might loosely support Burke’s complaint about subjectivism: the poet’s
increasing tendency to dichotomize the world into “you and I” versus
“mostpeople.” His Introduction to the 1938 Collected Poems purports to
set out some differences:
The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople—
it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. . . .
Life for eternal us,is now;and now is much too busy being a little more
than everything to seem anything,catastrophic included.
Life,for mostpoeple,simply isn’t. . . . . (Cummings 1991, 461)
While the Introduction develops many of Cummings’ values (i.e., those of

“you and I”), it stereotypes “mostpeople” to a few negative traits: desiring
security, being afraid to live in the present moment, subscribing
mindlessly to American materialism and technology, etc. In this simplistic

opposition and scornful reductiveness, Cummings himself is liable to the
label he attributes to mostpeople: “snob.” Arguably, no other expression of
his social views—not even his tactless use of “kike” and “nigger”—has
done as much to alienate Cummings not merely from critics but also from
potentially sympathetic readers. Horace Gregory, for example, comments
on the 1938 Collected Poems:
The very latest of Mr. Cummings’s new poems are fixed in rigid attitudes
of youth, which now seem to show signs of weariness, caused by the strain
of a prolonged defiance against “the sweet&aged people who rule this
world,” against the “unhearts,” the “unminds,” the “unalives.” In this
defiance, there is less snobbery than evidence of fear… (Gregory 1938,
368; reprinted in Dendinger 1981, 194-6)
His Manichean mentality also raises an uncomfortable question of

Cummings’ increasingly self-willed isolation from the world, as the
iconoclast of the 1930s evolved into the curmudgeon of the later years.
Entrenched Curmudgeon: Cummings in the Later Years

Cummings’ attitudes about World War II tell us much about the
hardening subjectivism of his later years. In one respect—his pacifism—
he remained generally true to the poems he had written in the Twenties
and Thirties, such as his superb celebration of Olaf, the World War I
conscientious objector (Cummings 1991, 340). But where his World War I
poems typically aimed with rapier wit at the naïve patriotism of the folks
back home, the World War II poems are more sweeping and vitriolic in
their condemnation of America, the “hyperhypocritical D / mocra / c”
(635). In particular, he hated the ethos of total war, which could—and
did—encompass racism:
dem
gud
am
lidl yelluh bas

tuds weer goin
duhSIVILEYEzum
(547)
84 Milton Cohen
and revenge:
(sing
down with the fascist beast
boom
boom)two eyes
for an eye four

teeth for a tooth
(635)
Nowhere in his World War II poems does he condemn fascism or

contemplate what life in America might be like if Germany and Japan won
the war. This one-sidedness comes out most sharply in this sonnet:
why must itself up every of a park
anus stick some quote statue unquote to

prove that a hero equals any jerk
who was afraid to dare to answer “no”?
quote citizens unquote might otherwise

forget(to err is human;to forgive
divine)that if the quote state unquote says
“kill” killing is act of christian love.
“Nothing” in 1944 A D
“can stand against the argument of mil

itary necessity”(generalissimo e)
and echo answers“there is no appeal
from reason”(freud)--you pays your money and

you doesn’t take your choice. Ain’t freedom grand
(636)
Clearly, it took courage in 1944 to denigrate stereotypical heroism and to

decry the eclipse of Christian love, Enlightenment reason, and democratic
freedom (leaving aside whatever Cummings may have taken for granted
about his own freedom to write against the tolerant Uncle).10 But the
poem’s argument—that war values have replaced Christian values; hence,
we have no “choice” and therefore no real “freedom”—construes these
values as mutually exclusive. It therefore avoids the practical problem—a
problem faced by millions at the time—of trying to reconcile these moral
codes.11 To take the poem’s bait, what in 1944 could stand against the
argument of military necessity? As Bill Mauldin dryly observed in Up
Front (12-13), this war was not being fought by the rules of the Marquis
of Queensberry. How much militarization, then, would Cummings have
sanctioned to see Naziism defeated? The answer appears to be: none at
all—not because Cummings favored Nazi Germany, but because he
instinctively opposed all forms of authoritarian control, even when such
control was necessary to prevent an immeasurably more brutal
totalitarianism. “Instinctive” is the key word: Cummings did not reason
his position; he simply held it.12 Kennedy confirms that he was not well-
informed about the war (he seldom read newspapers) and that his political
opinions—like most people’s—tended to be based in emotion rather than
rational argument (388). Thus, unlike the theologian Rheinhold Niehbor,
who grappled seriously with the problem of reconciling the need to defeat
Naziism with the sin of killing, Cummings allows himself the luxury of
absolutism in avoiding the difficult realities of the problem. In his defense,
one might argue that a poet is not bound by the essayist’s rules: he need
not offer a balanced and carefully reasoned disquisition. But since
Cummings raises the moral issue explicitly, he invites us to evaluate how
seriously he treats it.
Increasingly, he reduced complex political and social issues, such as
nuclear war, to a shorthand code of his values vs. “mostpeople”’s:
when god decided to invent

everything he took one
breath bigger than a circustent
and everything began
when man determined to destroy

himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because
(566)
Nor was he always consistent in his pacifism. His poem about Russia’s
invasion of Finland in 1940 (641) implies that “uncle shylock” ought to
have taken an interest instead of remaining neutral. And when Russia sent
tanks into Hungary in 1956, while America stood by after encouraging
Hungary’s rebellion, Cummings’ response was the excoriating
“THANKSGIVING (1956),” which he read at the Boston Arts Festival,
much to the embarrassment of its organizers:
86 Milton Cohen
uncle sam shrugs his pretty

pink shoulders you know how
and he twitches a liberal titty
and lisps “i’m busy right now”
so rah-rah-rah democracy
let’s all be thankful as hell
and bury the statue of liberty
(because it begins to smell)13
(711)
Curiously, Cummings depicts American duplicity as being leftist (“pink”)

and “liberal,” (as well as effeminate), even though a Republican
administration had just been re-elected, and America had just undergone
the far-right depredations of McCarthyism (which Cummings supported).
His arbitrariness here squares with his feelings about Harvard in the early
50s, where he gave his non-lectures: “Have yet to encounter anybody in
any manner concerned with Harvard who isn’t primevally pink” (quoted in
Kennedy 1980, 443).
These views all seem to suggest that by the 1950s Cummings was so
deeply entrenched in his Manichean values and isolated subjectivity that
his capacity, much less desire, to achieve anything like an objective or
rational view of issues was tenuous at best. Hence, the political themes in
his late poetry acquire a kind of arbitary crankiness. This isolation also
helps explain some of the more offensive late poems about “niggers” and
“kikes,” the most notorious of which goes:
a kike is the most dangerous

machine as yet invented
by even yankee ingenu
ity(out of a jew a few
dead dollars and some twisted laws)
…
When this poem appeared in Xaipe in 1950, it caused an immediate

uproar, coming two years after the brouhaha over Pound’s winning the
Bollingen Prize and only five years after the revelation of the Holocaust.
Moreover, Xaipe had won an award from the Academy of American
Poets. It was not the first time he had used “kike” in a poem (see “Jehovah
buried,” 438), and, as Kennedy (1980) describes, “the question of
Cummings’s anti-Semitism [became] the subject of a symposium in the
Congress Weekly, in which Cummings was both attacked and defended by
a number of Jewish critics” (432). Cummings’ own explanation of the

poem (to his friend and dedicatee of the book, Hildegarde Watson) shows
that he intended to distinguish between “Jew” and “kike”:
Oddly enough, the little poem states (in effect) that a “kike” is what
becomes of a jew—not every jew & not any—thanks to the machineworld
of corrupted American materialism: i.e. that America (which turns
Hungarian into “hunky” & Irishman into “mick” and Norwegian into
“squarehead”) is to blame for the “kike.” (quoted in Kennedy 1980, 433)
He had been warned by two sympathetic readers of the manuscript that,

however he intended the distinction, the word “kike” would deeply offend
many readers and appeal to genuine anti-Semites. According to one of
these cautioners, “he greeted the warning with glee. Just another chance
pour épater le bourgeois” (432-33). When compounded with his use of
“nigger” in the poem “one day a nigger” (Cummings 1991, 622),
Cummings’ usages show not racism, but profound obtuseness. Kennedy
calls it “puzzling insensitivity,” but it is not really puzzling at all. It results
from a sheltered sensibility that sees the world only dimly through the
ever-thickening lens of its own dogmatic values.14
Conclusion
It would seem, then, that over the course of his career, Cummings
evolved from the playful enfant terrible of the 1920s, who valued open-
minded, independent thought above all and who naughtily resisted all
forms of the conventional thinking, to the embattled iconoclast of the
1930s, who reacted with increasing bitterness and dogmatism to being
displaced from the avant garde by Leftist critics, to the rigid, dogmatic
curmudgeon of the late years, whose reductive world view grew
increasingly solipsistic. Yet, in some ways Cummings had not changed at
all. He still enjoyed shocking the middle class, still opposed militarism,
still hated any form of organized authority exerted on his freedom to think
and write, still remained the little “i” supporting underdogs and
celebrating little people.15 But quite like his college friend, John Dos
Passos, Cummings redefined who the “enemy” was in his later years: not
the right-thinking, conservative, conventional American bourgeoisie, but
the Left in both Soviet Communism and American liberalism. What
changed most—and most damagingly—in Cummings’ political poems
over the years was the suppleness of his thought, the subtlety and
unpredictability of his wit, the open-mindedness of his inquiry. In his
nonlectures and in many poems, Cummings claimed only to feel, never to
88 Milton Cohen
“know.”16 In one sense this was quite true: we have seen how thoroughly
his values and world view issued from deeply-held subjective feelings and
intuition. But what Cummings never seemed to recognize is that even
feeling, when it grows increasingly reductive and entrenched, when it no
longer tests its beliefs against contrasting views and information, could
acquire the calcifying certainty of “knowing.”
References
Asch, Nathan. 1933. Descent into Russia. The New Republic. 26 April
1933:314.
Baum, S. V., ed. 1962. E. E. Cummings and the critics. East Lansing, MI:
Michigan State Univ. Press.
Burke, Kenneth. 1936. Two kinds of against. The New Republic 83. 26
June 1936: 192.
Canby, Henry Seidel. 1933. The great “I Am.” The Saturday Review of
Lit. 9. 15 April 1933:533, 536.
Calverton, V. F. 1932. Can we have a Proletarian literature? Modern
Quarterly, October 1932.
Cohen, Milton A. 1987. PoetandPainter: The aesthetics of E. E.
Cummings’s early work. Detroit, MI: Wayne State Univ. Press.
Cowley, Malcolm. 1980. The dream of the Golden Mountains:
Remembering the 1930s. New York: Penguin.
—. 1994. Exile's Return: A literary Odyssey of the 1920s. New York:
Penguin.
—. The last of the lyric poets. The New Republic 69. 27 January,
1932:299-300.
Cummings, E. E. 1991. Complete poems 1904-1962. Ed. George J.
Firmage. New York: Liveright.
—. 1974. i: Six nonlectures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
—. 1967. Santa Clause. In Three plays and a ballet. New York: October
House.
—. 1969. Selected letters of E. E. Cummings. Ed. F. W. Dupee and George
Stade. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
Dendinger, Lloyd N., ed. 1981. E. E. Cummings: The critical reception.
New York: Burt Franklin & Co.
Deutsch, Babette. 1935. [Review of no thanks]. New York Herald Tribune
Books. 26 May 1935:14.
—. 1941. e.e. cummingsesq. The Nation. 17 May 1941: 591.
Dos Passos, John. 1966. The Best Times: An informal memoir. New York:
The New American Library.
Gregory, Horace. 1931. An adolescent songster. New York Herald

Tribune. 13 December 1931:22.
—. 1938. The collected Cummings. The New Republic 94. 27 April
1938:368, 370.
Horton, Philip, and Sherry Mangan. 1938. Two views of Cummings.
Partisan Review 4: 58-63.
Humphries, Rolfe. 1938. Anarchist—poet—advertiser. New Masses. 12
April 1938:23-25.
K. D. C. 1933. Bookends. Harvard Crimson. 26 May 1933:4, 6.
Munson, Gorham. 1923. Syrinx. Secession 5: 2-11.
—. 1931. Studio Verse. New York Sun. 21 November 1931.
Seaver, Edwin. 1938. Books of the Day. Daily Worker. 10 March 1938.
DIVINE EXCESS: THE LOGIC OF GENERAL
ECONOMICS IN THE ENORMOUS ROOM
EHREN HELMUT PFLUGFELDER,

PURDUE UNIVERSITY
While a number of critics have explained the symbolic meaning of the

“Delectable Mountains” in E. E. Cummings’ The Enormous Room (1922),
many of their readings analyze these characters using like assumptions.
The three (or perhaps four1) characters known as the Delectable
Mountains are nearly always read through the symbolism in John
Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and connected to Cummings’
metaphysical concept of “IS.” “IS” is a particular transcendental state of
being, the full description of which was found in Cummings’ notes by his
biographer Richard Kennedy:
IS = the cold 3rd singular of the intense live verb, to feel. Not to completely
feel = thinking, the warm principle. incomplete thinking = Belief, the box
in which God and all other nouns are kept (Kennedy 1980, 217).
Cummings scholar William Todd Martin also describes the connection

between the character named Zulu (one of the Delectable Mountains) and
Cummings’ “IS” (a state of pure being) in his articles “The Mysteries of
Noyon: Emblem and Meaning in The Enormous Room” (2000) and in
“The Enormous Room: Cummings’ Reinterpretation of John Bunyan’s
Doubting Castle” (1996). For both Martin and Kennedy, the Delectable
Mountains are a clear and direct representation of the state of “IS.” Martin
(1996) claims, “Richard Kennedy establishes Cummings’ definition of the
essential being within a tradition that includes, among others, Socrates’
‘daimon,’ Plato’s ‘psyche,’ Shelly’s ‘genius,’ and Freud’s ‘id’” (116).
Though both Martin and Kennedy choose to read the Delectable
Mountains as illustrative of a transcendental concept, reading The
The Logic of General Economics in The Enormous Room 91
Enormous Room through critical theorist Michel de Certeau’s poetic use

of space and philosopher Georges Bataille’s theory of general economics
can provide an alternate answer.
In 1917, E. E. Cummings joined the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps,
befriended William Slater Brown, and because of Cummings’ refusal to
condemn Brown’s seditious letters, was imprisoned by the French
government on suspicion of treason. The narrative which Cummings
created out of his time in the Camp de Triage de La Ferté-Macé retells this
story, although with poetic license and dubious accuracy, through a
narrator named “C.” The Enormous Room both chronicles the events that
happened in La Ferté-Macé and symbolically parallels John Bunyan’s The
Pilgrim’s Progress (more on the connection of the two texts in Pickering
1978; Smith 1965; Martin 1996). Any reading which claims to interpret a
primary theme in The Enormous Room must then responsibly negotiate the
connections to Bunyan’s text and the more immediate context of World
War ǿ France.
The key to understanding The Enormous Room, and more specifically
the actions of the inmates, the presence of the Delectable Mountains, and
C’s reverence for these individuals, is both economic and spiritual in
nature. Because many inmates attempt narratives that subvert the goals of
those in charge, we can examine their actions through what Michel de
Certeau ([1984] 1997) calls “tactical uses of space.” The most forceful
narratives of resistance directly respond to the economic logic that the
government of France and the Directeur of La Ferté-Macé wish to enforce.
France’s economic logic closely corresponds with the classical economic
principles of self-control, increased production, regulation, and re-
investment. The inmates who reject the logic asserted by wartime France,
and who embody a substantially different logic, remove themselves from
the literal order of the prison and the metaphorical “order of things”
(Bataille [1967] 1988, 56). C then interprets these actions as a spiritual
shift that we can align with Georges Bataille’s theory of general
economics. General economics relies upon sacrifice, gift-giving, and the
expenditure of excess as guiding principles, as opposed to the principles of
classical economics. The Delectable Mountains, then, are spiritually
significant for C because they reject the imposed system of economics and
instead sacrifice themselves in order to escape their symbolic and literal
confinement. In order to understand the actions of the inmates, we must
first evaluate Cummings’ text through its most distinct and imposing
feature—the literal confines of the room itself.
Considering how the characters in the The Enormous Room are so
frightfully confined by the walls of the prison and the dull routine of
92 Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder
enforced detention, perhaps the novel’s vibrancy is unexpected.

Cummings’ wordplay and sense of the absurd account for much of the
liveliness, though the narratives enacted by the inmates represent much
more than a floorshow. Their actions, at times spectacular and at times
subtle, are measures by which the “weak make use of the strong” (Certeau
[1984] 1997, xviii). Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life
([1984] 1997) provides a heuristic through which we can evaluate the
inmates’ actions and claim that many subvert the logic of their captors. De
Certeau explains how through tactics and rhetorics, individuals can
produce their own independent, logical action through everyday life. The
ordinary language of the popular and the practices of everyday life are the
“tactics” of individual consumers that oppose the “strategies” of those in
power. Though the use of “strategies,” those in power are able to produce,
tabulate, and impose “places,” whereas individuals use “tactics” to
manipulate and divert through the creation of “spaces.” People’s use of
tactics can render structured places into vibrant and subversive spaces. In
de Certeau’s model, “places” are static, while “spaces” are dynamic; in
other words, spaces are practiced places (117). Considering this
terminology, The Enormous Room depicts a structured place of intentional
stability—the Camp de Triage de La Ferté-Macé—a place because the
government of France has created the borders and walls, but also a space
because the inmates enact narratives never intended by the government of
France or the controlling powers within the prison.
The prison, or more accurately, the camp de triage, where C and B
spend their time is a very clearly limited, strategized place. The actions of
the inmates are tightly controlled by the plantons and the Directeur, who
are careful to impose spatial and temporal regulations so as to reduce
individuality and increase efficiency and control. La Ferté-Macé is also a
liminal space that exists as a meeting ground and nether-world on a
number of indivisible levels. An architecturally defined middle-ground, La
Ferté-Macé was once a chapel—now a prison. As a temporal locale, La
Ferté-Macé is a way-station for inmates who have not been formally
charged, a provisional stop between two potential outcomes—death or
freedom. As a borderland of cultures, the prison also acts as a
heteroglossia, a site of not only numerous, stratified voices, but also of
conflict and cultural interaction. The French government interns inmates
from throughout Western Europe in this unique space, confining them
under a rule of law growing increasingly absurd.
Though the camp de triage exists as a borderland, the governing
powers define the environment using the logic of the rule of law, which
suggests that prisoners will act lawfully if their daily routines are tightly
controlled. The regimentations of times and places are strategies through

which the French government attempts to control those it sees as
dangerous to the war effort, though the inmates develop tactics which help
put the effectiveness of these strategies into question. The strategies of the
French government represent a rule of law so stringent it borders on the
absurd (“absurd” in the sense that the government arbitrarily imposes
power regardless of context). C’s interpretation of two permissionnaires,
soldiers on leave, as they discuss the state of the French rail system,
illustrates the irrationality of a nation exhausted and confused by war:
Do you know, there are no more trains?—The conductor is dead, I know

his sister.—I’ve had it, old friend.—We’re all lost, you know.—What time
is it?—My friend, there’s no more time, the French government has
forbidden it (Cummings 1978, 29).
Whether these soldiers are joking or not is not an issue, because the tone
of what they say is real for many others in wartime France. The absurd
horrors of World War ǿ have been well documented, from crackdowns on
the “live-and-let-live” logic of trench warfare, to incidents where soldiers
were shot for refusing to fight (Axelrod 1984, 73-87). C claims that all of
the inmates are in La Ferté-Macé precisely because they are caught within
the paradox of a government operating under an irrational logic. He states
that “anyone whom the police could find in the lovely country of France
(a) who was not guilty of treason and (b) who could not prove he was not
guilty of treason” could be sent to prison (Cummings 1978, 83). In La
Ferté-Macé the French government has effectively outlawed free time and
free use of space. They have displaced “rational” conditions of time and
space with a system of repetitive action enforced to the point of absurdity.
The inmates’ reactions to this perceived absurdity fulfill a number of
different functions—some are meant as deeply rebellious, while others are
simply retaliatory.
Of the retaliatory gestures, the actions of the inmates in the cour, a
small recreation area surrounded by a ten foot high stone wall and barbed
wire, are the most obvious. The cour contains a wooden sentry box, a
small wooden shed, a water-wagon, a horizontal iron gymnastics bar, a
couple of iron girders intended for use as seats, a huge iron cannonball, a
six-foot axle from a wagon and a dozen apple trees. The rules of the cour
are as follows: no using the horizontal bar for any purpose other than
chinning, no throwing anything over onto the women’s side, no throwing
the cannonball, no climbing onto the shed or in the trees, no trying to get
fruit from the trees, no exiting the gate without permission, no making
secret signs to the girls in the windows, and no using the axle as a weapon.
These rules are arbitrarily confining and are seen as such, because the
inmates know the plantons would not shoot a man for climbing a tree. C
relates, “having acquainted me with the various défendus which limited
the activities of the man on promenade, my friends proceeded to enliven
the otherwise somewhat tedious morning by shattering one after another
all rules and regulations” (57-58). The ridiculously stringent rules of the
cour are met with actions that achieve no real objectives, because the goal
in breaking the rules of the cour is to break the rules of the cour and
expose the arbitrary nature of the rules as such. We can read the prisoners’
actions of climbing apple trees as a tactical use of space, though not a very
effective one. The effect of the inmates’ actions is instead rather symbolic;
by breaking the rules of such a narrowly defined space, they are breaking
the repetitive cycle of prison life and introducing transgression. The
prisoners find tactics by which they can gain some control over their daily
activities, even though larger powers still control their fates.
For C, these modest tactics represent the spirit of human nature, a
simpler and more direct reality than the irrational and destructive reality
the French government attempts to enforce. He believed the actions of
individuals, while perhaps more symbolic than directly radical, and
perhaps more about human dignity than social change, can collectively
expose and disrupt the logic of the French government. C suggests that it
was not very intelligent of France to put an inmate nicknamed the
Machine-Fixer in La Ferté-Macé:
I should have left him in Belgium with his little doll-wife, if I had been
You; for when governments are found dead there is always a little doll on
top of them, pulling and tweaking with his little hands to get back the
microscopic knife which sticks firmly in the quiet meat of their hearts
(103).
Though the literal image is intentionally comic, C reads the actions of the
small and presumably powerless as a direct catalyst for the destruction of
an illogical and irresponsible bureaucracy. These acts are what will expose
the greater injustices of the government of wartime France.
In order to understand the deeply rebellious actions of the prisoners,
we have to understand the logic implicit within La Ferté-Macé. Aside
from the physical walls of the prison, the most substantial method of
control used by the French government is economic. France’s wartime
economy was shaped by the logic of classical economy and an increased
emphasis on efficiency, which became progressively more important to a
country beset by military, ideological, and economic pressures. To meet
the increasing demands of the war, France became more bureaucratic,
expecting more economic production and return from its citizens and
exerting more control over their lives. The ideology of the day was “the
idea with a sword” attributed to a rise of French nationalism in the face of
a growing German army. This wartime “l’ élan vital” that philosopher
Henri Bergson described was crudely interpreted through the New Field
Regulations of October, 1913. Historian Barbara Tuchman (1962) claims
that these “fundamental document[s] for the training and conduct of the
French army, opened with a flourish of trumpets: ‘the French army,
returning to its traditions, henceforth admits no law but the offensive’”
(42-44). These New Field Regulations suggest an aggressive campaign on
all varieties of economic and ideological complacency—a campaign that
influenced all government matters before and during the war.
Accordingly, it comes as no surprise that the economic structure of the
prison was an attempted microcosm of the logic of wartime France. La
Ferté-Macé is a discrete functioning unit of France’s prison system, and,
considering how most of these inmates are political prisoners, a discrete
representation of France’s wartime ideology. Though a makeshift
institution, the primary rationale for the existence of La Ferté-Macé is to
contain inmates with a stable, controlled environment that replicates and
enforces the rule of law (regardless of how illogical it may seem to those
caught in the system). The absurdity of this rigid system was also
heightened because of the economic pressures felt by France even before
the start of World War ǿ.
Prior to the war, France’s economy was among the strongest in
Europe, though most economists argue France had not taken full
advantage of its resources and was lagging significantly behind England
and Germany (Dormois 2004, 13-14). The French suffered from a narrow
domestic market, a slower pace of industrialization than its large
neighbors, and a deep financial commitment to colonial enterprise. By
1911, France was one of the least urbanized countries in Western Europe,
and its agricultural base regularly fell short of demand. Because of the
war, France went from the second-largest creditor in 1914 to the net
debtor to British and American financial institutions (14). In response to
these economic pressures, France became more bureaucratic and more
desperate for increased production from all corners of the country.
This logic of this control and bureaucratic efficiency is clear within La
Ferté-Macé; the plantons attempt to regulate all functions with prison,
from rationing food to shouting commands which govern the times and
places of all prisoners’ activities. Those with jobs, the Maître de Chambre
(chief excrement handler) and the baigneur (bath attendant) are awarded
more respect and authority than those who either act irresponsibly or
refuse to act. “Prudent” actions are prized, while “detrimental” or

“dysfunctional” actions are punished with a dry bread diet called the “pain
sec,” or with confinement to the cabinot. The inmates who comply with
the underlying logic of the French government are rewarded, while those
who refuse are punished. These prized actions also correspond to the basic
requirements of a classical economy, another logic that the French
government attempts, with some measure of success, to enforce within the
prison.
The French government determines that La Ferté-Macé is a place
where classical economy, as defined by several principles initially posited
by Francois Quesnay, Adam Smith, Thomas R. Malthus and David
Ricardo, will persist. Classical economics is defined by several key
principles: competitive markets and secure private property, both surplus
activities and dependent activities, the re-investment of surplus, and
competitive market prices determined by the long-term costs of production
(Eltis 2000, xviii). Outside the prison, France can require its citizens to
accept these logics, act efficiently, and produce a surplus for re-investment
into the war. Re-investment, especially considering the pressures upon
France’s economy, is necessary for the survival of the state. While La
Ferté-Macé provides a stable environment for a few of these principles
(stable property and control over populations and wages), the prison does
not produce any surplus, nor can it truly “produce” or “re-invest.”
Therefore, within the prison, France cannot fully enforce a classical
economic model, a substantial component of the logic of wartime France.
La Ferté-Macé is then a highly paradoxical place. France labels those who
are unwilling to accept a bureaucratic regimentation of time and place,
embody the logic of efficiency, and submit to the ideology wartime France
as treasonous. These “traitors” are then placed within a prison that expects
and attempts to enforce more of the same logic, even though the basic
conditions within the prison undermine the ability to achieve such
economic goals. The result is a situation which C recognizes as truly
absurd—a highly bureaucratic system, oblivious of its own illogic, intent
on accomplishing that which it cannot.
A number of reasons exist why La Ferté-Macé can neither produce
surplus nor re-invest, though the prison’s position as a liminal space is
primary. As a way-station, hastily set up and commanded by a rotating set
of plantons, La Ferté-Macé is a poorly defined place (though it is highly
regulated). Its prisoners have not been sentenced, many are held under
“absurd” laws, and the logic of the enforced economy is self-
contradictory. If La Ferté-Macé were any other French wartime prison, the
government would require inmates to perform a service to the state or to
produce for the war effort (even though this type of work was supposedly
illegal). By November, 1915, prisoners of war were used as cheap labor
for so many projects, “the war ministry was unable to satisfy the demand”
(Speed 1990, 90-91). The prisoners in La Ferté-Macé do not produce or
work, but instead exist in a unique borderland of logic and culture. Outside
the prison, wartime France demands a continually expanding economic
system and seeks more products and services for the war effort. Elements
of the economy that do not produce are less valuable and detract from the
aggregate expansion of the economy. Simply, classical economy requires
energy to be re-inserted back into the system in order for the system to
continue. Most of the prisoners of La Ferté-Macé did not contribute to this
continually expanding system before their capture and will not and can not
contribute inside the prison, though the logic of the prison system
demands they adhere to other attributes of classical economy. La Ferté-
Macé’s economic model leads to conditions typical of a classical economy
which an economy that does not produce any surplus cannot sustain.
Though La Ferté-Macé is a liminal space, it is also a highly regulated
place. France enforces a stable economy by controlling the prisoners’
personal economies and the number of inmates. Nothing is produced
except resentment, so the system never expands. Inmates can extract
twenty francs twice a week and spend that money at the canteen where
they may purchase candles, chocolate, cigarettes, pinard, and cheese—
luxury items in La Ferté-Macé. However, inmates cannot over-indulge in
any of these comforts, because they are limited by the money they can
withdraw; effectively, the prison forces inmates to comply with a
protestant work ethic. Restrained behavior and rational spending are
required, though there are other instances in La Ferté-Macé where the
inmates carry on additional manifestations of a classical economics, most
notably narratives of cultural capital. To reach the Delectable Mountains,
C must move beyond quiet contemplation of his own elevated position and
must apprehend the economic and spiritual nature of the world.
Economist and philosopher Thorstein Veblen’s articulation of the
transformation of gift-giving into what he calls the “quasi-peaceable”
stage of civilization is quite useful in considering C’s spiritual
transformation (1994, 70). Veblen understands the potlatch (a system of
gift exchange imbued with “spiritual mechanisms,” engaging the honour
of both giver and receiver) only as a more modern activity (Mauss 1990,
3). He describes the potlatch as a system where:
The aid of friends and competitors is therefore bought by resorting to the

giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and entertainment.
Presents and feasts had probably another origin [conviviality and religion]
than that of naïve ostentation, but they acquired their utility for this
purpose very early, and they have retained that character to the present
(Veblen 1994, 75).
According to Veblen, gift-giving has moved from the sacred to the

profane—from a spiritual method by which individuals shared good
fortune and worshipped, to one where an individual can further delimit
and delineate another by means of class differentiation. Understanding The
Enormous Room through the inmates’ tactical use of space and resistance
or acceptance of classical economics imposed by the state also illuminates
C’s struggle within this framework. C rejects certain elements of classical
economy and accepts others; he grows to abhor the conspicuous
consumption of Spanish Whoremaster, Count Bragard and Judas, yet he
still values his elevated position as a young American within La Ferté-
Macé. C has an elevated social standing in the room, partly because of his
money, but primarily because he is respected for his status as an educated
American. As his spiritual journey advances, and as he approaches the
Delectable Mountains, C values individuals for their ability to transcend
traditional human desires and the narratives of a classical economy. C
realizes that he is not confined by the logic of wartime France, that he can
embrace the angelic Delectable Mountains and at least come to recognize
their beauty. Essentially, this realization is what makes C understand the
enormous room to be “the finest place on earth” (Cummings 1978, 46).
Because La Ferté-Macé exists in a separate arena of time and space,
resistant economic narratives can happen; the space of the prison gives
rise to alternate economic logics, empowers the Delectable Mountains,
and presents C with an opportunity to comprehend what Georges Bataille
terms “general economics.”
In The Accursed Share ([1967] 1988), Georges Bataille proposes that
classical economics, what he labels “restrictive economics,” is a
temporarily dominant system and that the world’s economy can and
should function alternately. Bataille’s theory of general economics
(“general,” because it takes the energies of all systems into consideration)
is based upon his assumption that:
the living organism […] ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary
for maintaining life; the excess of energy (wealth) can be used for the
growth of the system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer
grow, it must be necessarily lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly
or not, gloriously or catastrophically (Bataille [1967] 1988, 22).
Bataille claims that societies of growth, those theorized by Adam Smith

and enforced by guards at La Ferté-Macé, are “plagued by the social and
environmental problems that are caused by the hoarding of wealth: greed,

envy, exploitation, pauperization, and so on” (Clark, Doel and Housiaux
2003, 220). Excess, rather than scarcity, governs energy in a general
economy; all systems produce an excess of energy and the methods by
which they use that energy define a number of social codes. According to
Bataille, an increase in energy, and the resulting buildup of pressure, can
result in a number of possible scenarios. A system under pressure from an
excess of energy can either expand or squander; classical economics looks
to continually expand, while general economics looks to squander
(Bataille [1967] 1988, 29-31).
Bataille’s theory suggests that the industrial growth and development
of pre-war France was a sign of France’s desperation to expand in the face
of impending German attack. He asserts that the logic of classical
economics is not only responsible for the catastrophic expenditure of
mechanized war, but also characterizes the logic of a general economy as
alien and hostile (35-37). But from a general economic worldview,
expansion can only go on for so long—at some point, even societies which
depend upon expansion will reach a limit to their growth. Accordingly,
nations must then stop developing productive forces and focus their
energy on sanctifying objects or giving gifts, for Bataille, also a form of
sacrifice. Clark, Doel and Housiaux also explain:
For Bataille, it is precisely this form of servile self-sacrifice [the Protestant

work ethic] which must be sacrificed in its turn. Only destruction can
release people from ‘the order of things.’ However, sacrifice need not
destroy the thing itself—only the functional ties that bind it to servitude,
usefulness and profitability. This is exactly what one does when one gives
or receives a gift. Properly speaking, a gift is not a thing that one can
possess, but the expression of a profound social relationship (221).
The logic of general economics was influenced by Marcel Mauss’ work on

gift exchange and what he calls “archaic societies.” Mauss questions the
logic implicit within classical economics and suggests that there exists an
alternate logic based upon gift-giving. In Mauss’ context, gift-giving
accomplishes much more than what Veblen claims. Archaic gift
economies depend on complex rules which govern exchange, create
hierarchical power relationships, and communicate personal and moral
messages (Clark, Doel and Housiaux 2003, 219). Bataille uses Mauss’
theory of an alternate gift economy and expands upon it; he presents
“Mauss’ description of squandered wealth—the potlatch—as the general
rule (220).”
While Bataille presents gift-giving as the general rule, he considers
gift-giving as part of a larger network of sacrifice, the main principle of

which is destruction. A sacrifice, whether symbolic or literal, is a method
by which an economy can reduce excess energy, govern exchange, create
hierarchical power relationships, and communicate personal and moral
messages. Instead of a desire to expand and the catastrophic expenditure
of mechanized war, a sacrifice (luxury, squander, or gift-giving) removes
the sacrificed from the world of objects. Bataille claims that “sacrifice
destroys an object’s real ties to subordination; it draws the victim out of
the world of utility and restores it to that of unintelligible caprice”
(Bataille 1992, 43). A spectacular sacrifice, then, is meant to destroy the
“accursed share,” the unwieldy and dangerous excess of energy, and
remove it from the “order of things,” a transformation that removes an
object from its useful place in a hierarchy and places it in a symbolic
spiritual realm.
We can now see how La Ferté-Macé is a space where the logic of
classical economy fails and where a window is opened for the logic of
general economics. The prison is a liminal space—a temporarily
established, hastily managed, and absurdly enforced area of confinement.
The inmates also speak a number of different languages and represent a
range of cultures in conflict and in concert. Though classical economics is
enforced by the plantons and the French government, they can never fully
institute it, because of the limitations on labor and expansion. The
resultant collision of these issues creates a space where the prevailing
economic logic is exposed. Tension from these competing logics then
causes inmates to act in one of four ways which we can view as spiritual
“steps” to economic enlightenment. A few inmates continue to act out
narratives of classical economy, others spasm in incomprehension and
release energy in violent and excessive means,2 C acts passively and
contemplates the issues at hand, and the Delectable Mountains remove
themselves from “the order of things” and enact narratives that operate
under general economics. C recognizes these inmates as qualitatively
different, understands the “truth” of their actions, and comes to question
his own beliefs in comparison.
So what does a narrative that subverts classical economy look like? If
classical economics orders objects and individuals according to their
usefulness in creating more capital, and mechanized warfare orders
individuals in correspondence with the primary goals of conflict, then
objects are reduced to the “order of things” when they are vulgarized and
ordered according to their value or “use” (Bataille [1967] 1988, 57). In
war, “the warrior reduces his fellow men to servitude. He thus
subordinates violence to the most complete reduction of mankind to the
order of things” (Bataille 1992, 60-61). A general economy which

includes gift-giving, because it follows a different logic, removes objects
from the “order of things” and values them as symbolic, spiritual
representations of cultural status. The Delectable Mountains remove
themselves from established logical hierarchies through a number of
different tactics.
The Delectable Mountain named Zulu has a particularly unique
method of giving gifts. He approaches B and C at one point, after they
have already recognized his stoic nature, and asks them to purchase some
food for him. C and B accept and later attempt to give Zulu his purchases,
Zulu rejects their offer. As C explains, Zulu instead “winked and told us
wordlessly that we should (if we would be so kind) keep them for him”
and later wordlessly said, “you may offer me a little” (Cummings 1978,
176). After Zulu insists that C and B eat what they have purchased with
his money, he “rose up, thanked us tremendously for our gifts, and—
winking solemnly—floated off” (176). Zulu later repeats this exchange,
giving and then claiming to be the recipient of the gift, in order to create a
bond that explicitly does not establish his dominance. By creating his own
reception of these gifts, the Zulu negates the traditional exchange value of
the food, enacts a narrative of general economy, and creates an emotional
bond between C, B, and himself.
But gift-giving isn’t the only action that also enacts narratives of
general economics. Zulu and the other Delectable Mountains are also
experts at self-sacrifice. According to Bataille, if people cannot re-invest
energy back into the system and actualize it as growth, they must spend
this pent-up energy, “willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically”
(Bataille [1967] 1988, 29-30). If the individuals responsible for spending
such energy sacrifice their bodies in the demonstration (a fight or
acceptance of abuse) and release energy vicariously for others, they have
created a human sacrifice. This sacrifice is much like the object of the gift
in a potlatch, and as such, it is removed from the order of things. Surplice,
easily the most socially reviled of the inmates, continually gives the gift of
his respectability. William Todd Martin correspondingly describes
Surplice as a Christ-like sacrificial lamb because of his intentional
suffering (1996, 117; 2000, 129). When a sign is pinned to his back,
Surplice pretends to become enraged and when a pun is made of his name,
“SIX CENT SIX SYPH’LIS!”, he screams and acts as if he were in a
frenzy (Cummings 1978, 192). Surplice is almost universally taunted,
though his actions as pariah are for the benefit of those around him.
Similarly, Jean le Nègre, responding to the Trick Raincoat Sheeney’s grab
for his handkerchief, brutalizes him and is then filled with guilt. He then
allows the Fighting Sheeney and the Trick Raincoat Sheeney to beat him
while he cries out, “Laissez-moi tranquille!” and refuses to defend himself
(207). Jean also strikes his own head against a pole and proceeds to throw
plantons around like paper dolls. He makes himself the center of a
spectacle (a glorious and catastrophic release of energy) and receives
shouts of “Vive Jean!” from the women. These sacrifices are read by most
critics as the somehow “natural” actions of a person who lives as “IS,” but
we can see them as economic reactions as well.
In The Accursed Share ([1967] 1988), Bataille reasons that while the
act of giving frees the gift from the “order of things” (the logic of classical
economics and the value of use), a human sacrifice frees the individual
from the same system of logic. Bataille states that “sacrifice restores to the
sacred world that which the servile use has degraded, rendered profane”
(55). The victim of the human sacrifice is the accursed share; he is the
excess that must be ritually and spectacularly destroyed. This symbolic or
literal destruction “tears [the sacrificed] away from the order of things; it
gives him a recognizable figure, which now radiates intimacy, anguish,
[and] the profundity of human beings” (59). The Delectable Mountains
represent this sacrifice, because their symbolic sacrifices and their selfless,
humble actions transcend the logic of classical economics and allow them
to enact narratives of general economics. Their state of “IS” represents a
return to the true state of humanity and spirituality as depicted by
Bataille’s general economics.
Richard Kennedy, William Todd Martin and Taimi Olsen find
adequate methods to describe the symbolic purpose of the Delectable
Mountains, but each relies upon a direct correlation between Cummings’
“IS” and the Delectable Mountains, and to be fair, C clearly suggests this
interpretation when he calls Zulu “IS” (Cummings 1978, 168). Martin
claims that such individuals “demonstrate a humaneness, a quality that
results from their spiritual state” (1996, 117). They parallel the shepherds
who live in John Bunyan’s Delectable Mountains whose main purpose is
to guide “the pilgrim, C, toward his goal of obtaining salvation” (117).
Olsen explores issues of language and silence in her investigation of the
Delectable Mountains in both Transcending Space (2000) and in
“Language and Silence in The Enormous Room” (1992). She believes that
the transcendent nature of the Delectable Mountains is conveyed through
their silence (Zulu, the Wanderer) and their pure sound (Surplice, Jean le
Nègre). For Olsen (1992), the “IS” represents a simple state of being and a
simple verb: “the Zulu exists as both a mobile personality and a verb of
being” (83). C admits he is unable to adequately describe the Delectable
Mountains, a sign for Olsen that C realizes that transcendent natures are
virtually indescribable. Bataille’s theory of sacrifice can explain the logic

behind the Delectable Mountains’ ability to achieve transcendence and
remove themselves from the “order of things” and why C values their
transcendence so highly. C finds the true nature of human life within the
actions, thoughts, and feelings of the Delectable Mountains—they
represent the “pure” form of humanity. This pure form appears to function
under the logic of Bataille’s general economics and his natural system of
cosmic energy. C finds his true self, his “IS,” not merely because the
Delectable Mountains have modeled a simpler way to live and think, but
because they are free from the “unnatural” logic of scarcity, expansion,
thrift, and re-investment. The Delectable Mountains act as an answer to
Bataille’s question: “How can man find himself—or regain himself—
seeing that the action to which the search commits him in one way or
another is precisely what estranges him from himself?” ([1967] 1988,
131).
Of course, any explanation of the Delectable Mountains in The
Enormous Room must also attempt a correlation with the accepted
interpretations of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. This task is
easily performed, because as Bunyan’s text is more than a critique of
seventeenth-century Christian spirituality, Cummings’ text is more than a
critique of early twentieth-century Western spirituality; both works also
attack dominant forms in the surrounding culture. Most critical responses
to Bunyan’s work center on the meaning of Christian’s resistance to the
highly symbolic characters that accost him throughout his voyage.
Bunyan’s work is widely read as an attack upon establishment positions
within Christianity, inordinate wealth, the legal system, papacy, gentry,
and the Cavalier parliament (Mullett 1997, 193). Christian’s ascension
through The Pilgrim’s Progress represents a triumphant defiance of
conventional social status, the acceptance of non-conformism, and the
desire for wide-scale reform (Sim and Walker 2000, 131). Clearly, these
elements of Bunyan’s work inspired Cummings to create the unmistakable
symbolic parallels within his text, but Bunyan’s massive repudiation of
accepted social, governmental, and economic norms also suggests The
Enormous Room comments on more than the spiritual transcendence of
the Delectable Mountains. C’s eventual economic understanding parallels
Christian’s eventual spiritual understanding, because many of the
symbolic detractors in both texts represent larger cultural formations each
author considers substantially harmful.
C’s journey begins with a gift to a mouse on his cell window and ends
with his observations of the men and women of New York lifting, along
with the lines of the buildings, “with a great undulous stride firmly into
immortal sunlight…” (Cummings 1978, 242). C reaches this greater

understanding3 because of the particular narratives which happen inside
La Ferté-Macé. As a very unique space, partially separated from the rest of
the world, La Ferté-Macé houses opportunities to understand and enact the
logic of general economics. Taimi Olsen (2000) is right in stating that in
The Enormous Room, “opposites unravel… Instead of mirroring and
reflecting back on society, concepts are refracted and dispersed” (66).
General economics is not in opposition to classical economics, but is
instead an entirely different system. La Ferté-Macé is liminal space, an
alternate sphere where a unique narrative can be observed. Olsen also
remarks, “C asserts that in prison, time consists of the ‘actual Present’”
(67). Where else but in the “actual present,” a single ongoing instant, can
individuals fulfill the idea of “IS”? C’s spiritual growth happens because
he views other possible human narratives—narratives that are only
rendered obvious because the defiant economic narratives of the
Delectable Mountains transcend accepted belief systems. Georges
Bataille’s theory of general economics can be used to suggest that the
Delectable Mountains enact different economic narratives and that the
main conflicts and spiritual solutions for C in The Enormous Room are
economic.
References
Axelrod, Robert, M. 1984. The evolution of cooperation. New York: Basic
Books.
Bataille, Georges. [1967] 1988. The accursed share: An essay on general
economy. Vol 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books.
—. 1992. Theory of religion. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone
Books.
Clark, David B., Marcus A. Doel and Kate M. L. Housiaux, eds. 2003. The
consumption reader. London: Routledge.
Cummings, E. E. 1978. The Enormous Room. New York: Liveright.
De Certeau, Michel. 1997. The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: Univ.
of California Press.
Dormois, Jean-Pierre. 2004. The French economy in the twentieth century.
Cambridge Univ. Press.
Eltis, Walter. 2000. The classical theory of economic growth. Hampshire:
Palgrave.
Martin, William Todd. 1996. The Enormous Room: Cummings’
reinterpretation of John Bunyan’s doubting castle. Spring: The Journal

of the E. E. Cummings Society 5:112-9.
—. 1999. “The mysteries of Noyon”: Emblem and meaning in The
Enormous Room. Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society
9:125-31.
Mauss, Marcel. 1990. The gift: Forms and functions of exchange in
archaic societies. London: Routledge.
Mullett, Michael. 1997. John Bunyan in context. Pittsburgh: Duquesne
Univ. Press.
Olsen, Taimi. 1992. Language and silence in The Enormous Room.
Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society 1:77-86.
—. 2000. Transcending space: Architectural places in works by Henry
David Thoreau, E. E. Cummings, and John Barth. Lewisburg:
Bucknell Univ. Press.
Pickering, Samuel. 1978. E. E. Cummings’ Pilgrim’s Progress.
Christianity and Literature 28.1:17-31.
Smith, David E. 1965. The Enormous Room and The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Twentieth Century Literature 11 (2):67-75.
Sim, Stuart, and David Walker. 2000. Bunyan and authority: The rhetoric
of dissent and the legitimation crisis in seventeenth-century England.
New York: Peter Lang.
Speed, Richard B. 1990. Prisoners, diplomats, and the Great War: A study
in the diplomacy of captivity. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Tuchman, Barbara W. 1962. August 1914. London: Constable and Co.
Veblen, Thorstein. 1994. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York:
Penguin.
Part III: Cummings in Space
“AS USUAL I DID NOT FIND HIM IN CAFÉS”:
I-SPACE, “I” SPACE, AND SPATIAL COGNITION
IN E. E. CUMMINGS’ POETRY
TAIMI OLSEN, TUSCULUM COLLEGE
Spatial thinking is crucial to almost every aspect of our lives. We consult

our spatial memories constantly as we find our way across town, give
route directions, search for lost keys…
—Stephen Levinson, Space in Language and Cognition
Topography originally meant the creation of a metaphorical equivalent in

words of a landscape…sooner or later, in a different way in each case, the
effort of mapping is interrupted by an encounter with the unmappable.
—J. Hillis Miller, Topographies
Linguists are examining closely how language conveys spatial aspects,

as Stephen Levinson emphasizes in his call for more research into where
“spatial information is encoded across language.” He asks, “can one say
something about what kind of spatial information is encoded in which
form-classes?” (Levinson 2003, 98). Manfred Bierwisch basically asks the
same question: “which components of natural language accommodate
spatial information, and how?” The chapter containing this question is
entitled “How Much Space Gets Into Language?” For Cummings, a lot of
space, and not just as a record of his travels abroad nor his wandering of
New York City streets. He was interested in many aspects of spatial
representation, and critics have remarked most often on his attention to
issues of visual perception and “seeing around” objects, in the vein of the
Cubist painters of his time. Through manipulation of words, strings of
phrases, and entire sentences in his poetry, Cummings creatively examines
and re-imagines real spaces and serves to demonstrate not just how space
is represented traditionally in the English language but how our cognitive
structuring of space can be influenced by reconfiguration of language
I-space, “i” space and Spatial Cognition in E. E. Cummings’ Poetry 109
about space.
Cognitive science currently describes spatial cognition as a complex
system involving a great deal of input and many processing systems;
according to one recent study, “neurobiological evidence suggests that a
relatively large number of distinct representations or “maps” of space and
spatial information exist in order to gather information regarding auditory,
visual, motor, haptic, and other spaces (Peterson et al. 1996, 556). Spatial
representation “integrates” these maps through computational systems,
and language, then, expresses this information (562). Bierwisch (1996)
theorizes that since all these sensory systems provide nonspatial
information as well as spatial information (for instance, the visual system
identifies colors as well as topographical features), then there must be an
organizing system which selects information and integrates it into a
system of spatial representation—this organizing system is called “I
space” (44). This theory also provides a metaphor for Cummings’ work,
since he acts as “I space,” gathering, selecting and organizing language in
order to create new and creative representations. He takes the spatial
elements embedded in language and manipulates these elements for his
own aesthetic goals, his own ‘i space.’
As a painter and poet, Cummings thought about space and form in
terms of what is conveyed by language. In a private note, Cummings
explains that “(pure form)…[is] the heard or Seen word…& the Unseen
Unheard…ie, language based on ANTITHESIS…on Syntax (position) &
on Grammar” (quoted in Cohen 1987, 119). In his typical shorthand,
Cummings appears concerned with development of form in terms of word
choice and position, and the impact of syntax and grammar generally; for
him, shape and structure is created from not only arrangement of words on
the page but also by juxtapositions and accumulative impacts of spatial
descriptions. What is communicated through his language will be
synthesized into a whole at the end of the poem—or into a grouping of
spaces which play off of each other. As Cohen notes, “new and potent
structures” emerge out of Cummings’ work with language and structure
(120).
Representation of Physical Space: External Settings

I have identified numerous poems by Cummings which contain enough
descriptive words to identify the setting, either explicitly by street name or
place name or by identification of an external setting: a street scene, public
square, cityscape, coastline, or foreign town (identified by architecture or
geography, if not by name). The countryside poems have less specific
110 Taimi Olsen
groundings and more often imply the presence of “nature” through bird
songs and glimpses of mountains. Although Cummings spent his time in
the country specifically in New Hampshire, most of these I did not count
since the scenery was generalized. For the rest, the physical settings offer
Cummings a chance to play with spatial relationships and perspectives in
ways that portraitures and interior poems do not. These are a few of the
titles with place names or street numbers, or similar identifiers:1
“a fragrant sag of fruit distinctly grouped.” (Grand Central station NY)

“as usual i did not find him in cafés,the more dissolute atmosphere” (NY)
“at the ferocious phenomenon of 5 o’clock i find myself gently decompos-
” (NY)
“at the head of this street a gasping organ is waving moth-eaten” (NY)
“a/mong crum/bling people(a” (France)
“i think you like” (“ionian isles”)
“by god i want above fourteenth” (14th street)
“—G O N splashes-sink” (East 8th Street)
“my eyes are fond of the east side” (NY)
“Paris;this April sunset completely utters” (Paris)
”sunlight was over” (Mediterranean)
“that melancholy” (14th street)
“Take for example this:” (Paris)
“will out of the kindness of their hearts a few philosophers tell me”
(Calchidas)
Unlike the titles above, the following poems contain concrete descriptions
and seem to refer to specific places (although this is a more unstable
category):
“any man is wonderful” (skyscrapers)

“at dusk/ just when” (village)
“but observe;although” (cathedral and street)
“candles and” (street processional)
“how this uncouth enchanted” (“exquisite” city, probably Paris)
“how// ses humble.” (houses)
“memory believes” (town)
“only as what(our of a flophouse)floats” (city shelter)
“so standing,our eyes filled with wind,and the” (ocean and a ship)
“sunset)edges become swiftly” (tilted streets)
In these and other poems, Cummings writes about interplays between

cathedrals, skies, crowds of people, lone and unidentified individuals,
houses, streets, even ships—set in New York, New Hampshire, and
foreign spots like Paris and Lisboa. He revisits the basis of language about
place and plays with words in such a way as to act upon our spatial sense,
involving us in spatial aspects of the poem. His writing uses and even
manipulates the ways in which our brains linguistically represent spatial
concepts and conditions, in ways that cognitive science is just starting to
clearly codify. For instance, even in the first few lines of “sunlight was
over” we know that we are on a cliff, given the directional prepositions of
“over” and “under,” and we float in a middle ground between yellow sun
and sea blue, just as the sounds of people “drift” through “high” air. The
directional adjective “high” applied to air is a misnomer, while the
directional verb “drift” lets us imagine a complex path that we would not
image with a more precise term like “straight.” We are not only on a cliff
but hovering and imaging the experience of the dizzying perspectives that
this height gives us. Cummings does not tell us we are on a cliff, however,
until the fourth line from the end of the poem. In focusing on poems such
as this one, I will show that Cummings is as fine an artist of spatial
representation (SR) as he is of typography. To understand better how SR
is used aesthetically in his poetry, we will look at poems which use a
range of linguistic spatial devices and spatial frames of reference.
Techniques of Spatial Representation

Steven Pinker asserts that language is primarily about two concepts—
space and force—and that:
location in space is one of [these] two fundamental metaphors in

language…. [A] handful of concepts about places, paths, motions, agency,
and causation underlie literal and figurative meanings of tens of thousands
of words and constructions.2 (Pinker 1997, 354-5)
Fundamental concepts about space are fed by complex perceptual

information that we gather from our interactions with the world and which
we also manipulate in our imaginative lives. Our system of spatial
representation (SR) draws from various mental conceptual structures,
which in turn contributes information to our language constructions. The
information in SR is drawn from visual and kinesthetic systems, as well as
vestibular, auditory, and haptic systems.3 Aspects of space—size, shape,
place, motion and subsequent paths of objects, more generally dimension,
location, topology, and orientation—all feed into our depictions of space
(Bierwisch 1996, 44). The linguistic features which select from SR and
organize information into expressions of spatial qualities include basic or
strict spatial terms (these are morphologically simple, like “up”),
dimensional adjectives, adverbs of place, spatial prepositions,
112 Taimi Olsen
demonstratives (this, that), spatial nominals (nouns), locative (directional)

verbs and verbs of motion, and also object schema and rich concepts
(those terms which carry more information than strict spatial words). As
Levinson (2003) maintains, there are spatial words in all parts of the
sentence, since “spatial information is typically distributed throughout a
sentence and in many different word classes” not just in “prepositions”
(98).
Cummings draws on this ability of language to encode spatial
information throughout the sentence; he uses syntax and word selection to
draw our attention to the creative, malleable spaces he forms in poems as
he plays with spatial representation. Consider the construction, alternation,
movement between places, directional cues, and other spatial terms in the
poem “sunlight was over:” I have added visual coding. Most “strict” or
basic spatial words are in bold print; in general, these words indicate
direction or size. Richer words are italicized, to indicate that they have
spatial content, such as verbs of motion. Most of the concrete words are
underlined; these are also elements of the ground (object words) or of the
figure (words indicating perspective, like the eyes of the narrator’s lover).
sunlight was over

our mouths fears hearts lungs arms hopes feet hands
under us the unspeaking Mediterranean bluer

than we imagined
a few cries drifting through
high air
a sail a fishing boat somebody an invisible spectator,
maybe certain nobodies laughing faintly
playing moving far below us
perhaps one villa caught like pieces

of a kite in the trees,here
and here reflecting
sunlight
(everywhere sunlight keen complete
silent
and everywhere you your kisses your flesh mind breathing

beside under around myself)
by and by
a fat colour reared itself against the sky and the sea
…finally your eyes knew

me,we smiled to each other,releasing lay,watching
(sprawling,in
grass upon a
cliff)what had been something
else carefully slowly fatally turning into ourselves…
while in the very middle of fire all
the world becoming bright and little melted.
The themes of this poem are not difficult; we easily recognize that
Cummings is laying on the grass with a lover, looking out over the
Mediterranean sea, yet focused more on her and their union (a common
theme in his poetry of “me” and “you” becoming “us”4) and only
peripherally acknowledging the landscape, until they both notice the
colors of the sunset over a villa. What makes the poem even more
intriguing than a simple statement on love and nature is the way that all
these topological spaces intertwine, as Cummings weaves among spaces
of different sizes: large (the sea, cliff, village, and sky), middling (a
fishing boat and laughing people on the shore), and small (the grass, her
breath). To do this, he uses many grammatical elements: spatial adjectives
like “high”; prepositions for distance, orientation, and direction (under us,
below us, on a cliff); spatial or place nouns like “middle”; adverbs of place
(“here and here”); spatial, locative verbs of motion (drifting, playing,
moving); and verbs and adjectives of place (rear against). Cummings
creates his scene by sequencing spatial markers that include movement
and sound as aspects of that place.
When the couple ‘turns’ into ‘ourselves,’ several meanings are bundled
together in this ambiguous phrase. What is the meaning of this phrase?
Does the primary meaning of change and transformation (turn into) cancel
out the slow turn, as the couple rolls over and changes perspective? This
interesting phrase is preceded by phrases establishing the plastic qualities
of the air, the ‘high air” and also her breath, which is in motion and also
pervasive—beside, under and around him. At the end of the poem, the
silent exchange of this couple is couched in the largest space, “all the
world” (juxtaposed with the inserted word “little” for balance, as
Cummings’ aesthetic theory of antithesis would dictate). The world is not
entirely fixed but “melted” not even finally melted but “becoming” or in
the process of melting. Just as the architectural planes of the villa are
unstable and destabilizing, appearing in modernist pieces dispersing
reflections of sunlight, the world is also refigured by the sunset as a space
114 Taimi Olsen
in flux. Geographer Nigel Thrift (2006) notes that our new sense of space
includes understanding it through the metaphor of “a knot tied from the
strands of the movements of its many inhabitants, rather than as a hub in a
static network of connectors. Life is a meshwork of successive
foldings…” (141-2). Given that most critics would focus on the lovers and
their transitional moment, why pay attention to the representation of space
around them? The answer is that their “turning into” is mirrored in, and
reinforced by, the fluid movement around them, the “over” “under”
“through” and “around.” Just as the couple retains something of
themselves—the individual entities of ‘me’ and ‘you’—the spaces around
them are identifiably distinct elements of the topography (sea and cliff);
yet just as they watch themselves turning into “ourselves,” they watch the
landscape spaces being penetrated by the colors of light refraction. The
features of the land are distinct elements passively set in a painterly scene,
yet they also ‘mesh’ in a pervasively fluid “everywhere.” For the couple,
the new condition of their relationship infuses their individual selves while
they watch this process happening likewise to the landscape during a
sunset.
Versions of Space
Previous examinations of Cummings’ use of space involve not so
much his grammatical manipulations as the space on the page.5 Several
critics have looked at his place among visual poets, at how he arranges his
lines and ‘draws’ out the line lengths to form blocks of stanzas and various
shapes. Rushworth Kidder is an early critic in this vein; Richard
Kostelanetz (1998) devotes a section of his EEC anthology to “visual
poetry and sound poetry.” Richard Kennedy (1994), also, reserves an
anthology chapter to Cummings’ visual poetry, of which he notes that
“[p]atterns are the main feature of many of these poems…arranging words
in columns according to their vowel sounds… [or giving] visual
presentation to whatever is being stated or described.” He quotes
Cummings as saying that “the poem…builds itself, three-dimensionally,
gradually, subtly, in the consciousness of the experiencer” (33). The
emphasis is on how the poem is formed into a more dimensional
experience, into shapes and patterns that bring dimensionality to mind.
Milton Cohen (1987) examines more closely the links between
Cummings’ careers as painter and poet, and how Cummings used the
space of the canvas and page. Cohen’s chapters on how Cummings
thought about and worked with ideas of visual perception, and how he
engaged with Cubist ideas of “seeing around” form and manipulating
ideas of form, serve as touch point for my own approach.6 Cohen, though,
is more interested in the spatial planes formed by the organizations of the
poems and shows several stanzas in diagrammed planes, as in the poem
“Again:who / dancing ing / goes utter ly.” Cohen remarks that “the
detached suffixes “ing” and “ly” effect different semantic and spatial
patterns as they variously adhere to “dance” and “utter” (103). And later,
Cohen remarks on Cummings’ use of vocabulary to create spatial effects,
particularly three dimensionality:
One of Cummings’s most daring translations of his “seeing around”

aesthetics was to apply the visual dynamics of complementary colors to
the psychological dynamics of antithetical words. In retrospect, it seems
perhaps a small step to assume that if complementary colors are optically
related and mutually enhancing, the same could be true of contradictory
words, emotions, even ideas…Cummings’s technique is to design unusual
oxymorons: phrases of contradictory words that secretly enhance each
other. (129)
If we assume that Cummings includes spatial terms in this aesthetic

system of poetic composition, it could explain the numerous combinations
of high / low and small / large and other spatial pairs often found in his
poems. Cohen notes, as well, that “underlying all of his spatial devices
was a subversion of the poem’s essential linear sequence” and that when
he used arrangement of words—imbedding one phrase within another—he
enacted a simultaneity through spatial, rather than linear, construction
(138).
Martin Heusser’s (1997) primary interest in Cummings’ poetry is in
exploring the workings of his metaphors, identifying his techniques and
overarching aesthetic theories. His chapter on the cathedral includes
notations on the spatial qualities of this image but primarily examines the
“double effect” of this metaphor, how the cathedral symbolizes the
inseparable nature of spirit and body (143-144). Heusser divides
Cummings’ language into two categories: “strictly referential, i.e. his
words are signs pointing to a reality outside themselves” and “non-
referential or self-referential” language through which Cummings attempts
to capture a deeper meaning of “original” thought (219-20). In his in-depth
discussion of the “falling leaf poem” (“l(a”), Heusser looks at the impact
of spatial arrangement of letters and words in relation to themes of unity in
diversity. In reference to its composition and meaning, he concludes that:
Although the words of the falling leaf poem are obviously indispensable,
they are far from being the starting point for an understanding of it. Before
they can take effect, the spatial arrangement assumes control and operates
116 Taimi Olsen
in two different but related ways; on the other hand, the poem’s spatial
structures create meaning which is not present in the words themselves,
and on the other, they amplify the meaning of the words of which they
consist. (278)
He proposes that spatial arrangement meets the eye first, before we can
fully take in the meaning of the poem, and that spatial structure (the
emphasis is on spatial formation of the poem on the page) in and of itself
creates meaning.
Grammars of Space
In their book of this title, Grammars of Space (2006), Levinson and
Wilkins ask, “what does the semantic typology of space look like?” (5). In
Cummings’ work, we see that the spatial typology of a poem is complex,
with all the syntactical pieces working together. As in the “sunlight” poem
above, Cummings uses more than just descriptive language to accomplish
the development of complex spatial representations—he includes other
devices such as word formation and deviant syntax, and he concentrates
on word choice and syntactic arrangement to create spatial effects.
Levinson and Wilkins maintain that “there are no simple, hard
generalizations about exactly where in the clause different kinds of spatial
information are encoded,” although they point, generally, to locative
verbs, adpositions, spatial nominals, and cases (5).
While critics of Cummings have been drawn more to thematic aspects
of Cummings’ poetry, exceptions include Irene Fairley’s study of syntax
and Richard Cureton’s articles. Fairley (1975) provides a catalogue of
Cummings’ syntactic violations of standard English, his use of deletion,
repetition, dislocation, and selected deviance in his sentences. When
addressing “place adverbials” she notes that these do not usually shift but
that Cummings has several strategies: he places them in unusual pre-
verbal positions, moves adverbials when also inverting the subject and
verb, and “indicate[s] direction more strongly than location” (77-78). She
suggests a multitude of aesthetic purposes for syntactic dislocations—
creating rhythms, opening up multiple interpretive possibilities through
word modification, adding emphasis in the line, or creating ambiguity of
meaning. Cureton (1979), in his study of deviant morphology, catalogues
word creation, including Cummings’ use of affixes “un-” “-ingly” “-fully”
and “-lessly,” and conversions of word function (i.e. a verb to a noun). His
argument is that “Cummings used the morphological processes of English
in a highly systematic manner to perform traditional poetic tasks of
metaphor, personification, poetic reference, aesthetic perception, semantic
compression and universal statement” (Cureton 1979, 243-44). Of the

critical process, Cureton remarks that:
Existing discussions of Cummings’s deviant morphology have failed on

all counts. They have told us neither what grammatical processes
Cummings violates, nor what effects these violations entail; they also fail
to describe how Cummings utilizes these effects to convey his poetic
message. (214)
In all these critical approaches, the emphasis is on Cummings’ entire

work, so that the implications of linguistic innovations and deviations are
multiple. This type of criticism works best when the focus is on one type
of change, with specific implications for interpretation (as Cureton does
with the affix “-un,” for which an “unworld” is everything the “world”
should be but is not). In his creation of space, Cummings designs deviant
syntax and morphology, although he also uses traditional poetic skill with
word choice and placement (within standard English rather than deviating
from it). Does he use more spatial words or use them in new ways in
comparison to ordinary language use or uses by other poets? Does he have
a deliberate pattern of attention to spatial cues, for specific aesthetic
purposes?
In the poem “as usual i did not find him in cafés” (Cummings 1991,
71), Cummings uses spatial markers intentionally; he uses names,
provides non-specific spatial descriptors, and identifies social and natural
locations (street, cave, and room). As in other poems with many spatial
markers and topographical references, he creates multiple spaces which
contrast and triangulate and change around the speaker. Space is
fluctuating and unstable and there is potential for disintegration as well as
beauty for the person who inhabits this space. At first, we are on the street
with the narrator, a location which is “a soft first clue” as we learn that
“he” (the object of the narrator’s search) could be anywhere (“innumerable
whereabouts”). The Woolworth Building on Broadway is a second place
marker, setting us on a specific New York City street. This cityscape is
“furnished” by shop girls and people on the street at 5 o’clock, so that the
space seems civilized and typical, if very active. Yet from the start of the
poem, the “dissolute” atmosphere (is it also dissolution, dissolving?) is
seen as “superimposing” not light but “imperfectness” and traveling in
“peregrinations” as if the atmosphere were controlling the scene:
as usual i did not find him in cafés,the more dissolute atmosphere

of a street superimposing a numbing imperfectness upon such peregri-
nations as twilight spontaneously by inevitable tiredness of flang-
ing shop-girls impersonally affords furnished a soft first clue to
118 Taimi Olsen
his innumerable whereabouts violent logic of annihilation demon-

strating from woolworthian pinnacle a capable millennium of faces
meshing with my curiously instant appreciation […]
This amorphous scene is overshadowed by the Woolworth Building, a

destructive presence (“annihilation demonstrating from its…pinnacle”
oddly describes the orientation of this threat as emerging from within its
structure). The street “meshes” with the narrator’s perceptions into an
“amiable” scene, yet it is a trap, a cage in the “largest” sense.
In this same excerpt below, the strict terms are in bold, generally, the
terms with more complex spatial information are italized, and the figure /
ground words are underlined.7 We can see that he is building complex
space in contrast to simpler, concrete forms, creating layers
(“superimposing”), outlines (“contours”), and lines of movement
(“peregrinations”). The most unusual word has to do with activity
peripheral to the scene: the shop girls are “flanging” in that they are either
“flinging” (“flanging” is an obsolete dialect past tense of fling) or
widening, spreading out (derived from “flange). Either way, they are
taking up space with their movements:
as usual i did not find him in cafés,the more dissolute atmosphere

of a street superimposing a numbing imperfectness upon such peregri-
nations as twilight spontaneously by inevitable tiredness of flang-
ing shop-girls impersonally affords furnished a soft first clue to
his innumerable whereabouts violent logic of annihilation demon-
strating from woolworthian pinnacle a capable millennium of faces
meshing with my curiously instant appreciation exposed his hiber-
native contours,
amiable immensity impeccably extending the courtesy of five o’clock
became the omen of his presence it was spring by the way in the
soiled canary-cage of largest existence
Even the syntax challenges us in this passage. How is logic demonstrated

“from” the pinnacle when this verbal usually takes the prepositions “as” or
“to” or is followed by a noun, by whatever is being demonstrated? Should
“millennium” be modified by “capable” (when are numbers capable)?
After these disorienting dichotomies in which non-biological items
seem personified, we switch scenes and read an extended “aside” in
parentheses in which a small room with a single light bulb is compared to
a prehistoric cave. Again, we are grounded in concrete forms, and both
room and cave exhibit “geometrical putrescence” (as if the closed-in
bedroom smells of human occupation—a friend from the street, perhaps
even Joe Gould):
(when he would extemporize the innovation of muscularity upon the

most crimson assistance of my comforter a click of deciding glory
inflicted to the negative silence that primeval exposure whose elec-
tric solidity remembers some accurately profuse scratchings in a
recently discovered cave, the carouse of geometrical putrescence
whereto my invariably commendable room has been forever subject his
Earliest word wheeled out on the sunny damp of oblivion)
a tiny dust finely arising at the integration of my soul i coughed
,naturally
As in the first stanza, this one creates a complex weaving of spatial

vocabulary—adjectives, verbs, directional indicators, determiners and
prepositions. Certain words—cave, room, geometrical—suggest specific
spatial forms. Otherwise, most words only suggest the use of space—as
occupied by electricity, marked with scratched cave art (a slight
suggestion of dimensionality), and filled with smells. Again, the
vocabulary is challenging; can “muscularity” be innovated or improvised?
And what sort of transference occurs when electricity remembers a cave?
Is Cummings talking about photographing discovered cave drawings?
The poem turns metaphysical at the end, a movement anticipated by
the shifting and filling of spaces in this aside. Spaces are transgressed by
what happens in and with the space until:
a tiny dust finely arising at the integration of my soul i coughed
,naturally
In these last two lines, the upward movement of dust following the
expansion of smells and sunlight makes the location, the “where,” a
metaphysical question of place, direction, and time. In fact, the word
“where” is never used in the poem (as in “where was he?”). Instead, a less
specific nominal “whereabouts” and a conjunction “whereto” are used, as
well as the temporal stamp “when.” The poem has less strict spatial
indicators and more complex terms than the previous poem “sunlight was
over,” indicating different configurations of space, many of these
indicators in juxtaposition. The last line races into the last word, and
Cummings implies that a real, natural world can be profoundly challenged
by the naturally complex perceptions of human existence and our
environment.
120 Taimi Olsen
Spatial Frames of Reference

In this discussion of “i space,” one last aspect remains to be
considered—the frame of reference. In the poem above, “i the non-hero”
appears in the first and last lines (“i coughed”); in most poems by
Cummings, this non-hero provides an intrinsic perspective. With this
personae in mind, Norman Friedman (1960) organizes Cummings’ poems
into five major classifications of narrative intent. The first type is
description, which “locates its speaker in the presence of some sensory
stimulus and represents him as perceiving” (59). The other types are
praise and eulogy (which “place[s] him in relation to some person, type,
or idea and represent[s] him as admiring),” satire (which represents the
speaker as a critic of society), reflection (which “places him before scenes
and people and represents him as interpreting and commenting”), and
persuasion (which “places him in the presence of someone else and
represents him as speaking to him or her”) (59). In four of these five
categories, we notice that the imaginative space created by the poem is
intrinsic because it relies on a speaker’s perceptions, the speaker serving
as the “figure” and the scene serving as the ground. Cognitive
psychologists and linguists identify two other primary types of frames in
addition to intrinsic: relative (in which objects are relative to each other,
rather than to one perceiver), and absolute (based on fixed bearings such
as fixed direction provided by gravity or by cardinal directions) (Levinson
1996, 145).
The diagram below shows typology as related to the reference frame in
a static experience of space; motion cuts through this space.8
The Language of Space
Stasis Kinesis
Typology ĺ Frames of Reference Motion
Figure and Ground 1. Intrinsic specified to goal or source

Deixis (orientation) is 2. Relative
Personal 3. Absolute
Spatial
Temporal
Fig. 3-1: Typology related to the reference frame
Typology and reference frames are interrelated, and Cummings uses this
relationship to intensify our experiences of various spatial forms by
shifting and doubling frames of reference within a poem. One of his
methods is to move out of intrinsic space and into relative space and then
back again, within one poem, changing the reader’s experience of the
frame of reference. A second method is to switch intrinsic perspectives in
a poem, moving from one observer to another, adding a second or even
third perspective. In “sunlight was over,” an invisible spectator is present,
who may represent another viewpoint, yet this would represent a minor
shift. In “as usual i did not find,” the frame is an intrinsic observer (a draft
of the poem has the title “Portrait”).9 Nevertheless, the observer’s
orientation and perspective is immediately subsumed by the relative
frame. The poem restarts, leaving the first phrase hanging incomplete (“as
usual i did not find him in cafés”) as the line abruptly shifts into a new
sentence, with a new subject and verb (“the more dissolute atmosphere
[…] superimposing”). The narrator returns later in the stanza, yet tension
remains between relative description and intrinsic observation.
The poem “a/mong crum/bling people(a” (321) contains several
referential shifts or destabilizations of the referential frame. This poem
exhibits many characteristics already discussed: the identification of
physical places (town, harbour, hotel, sea); the use of much of the poem to
convey spatial information through pronouns, prepositions, directional
adjectives, verbs of motion and location, all to create differing senses of
the space described; and the use of sensory input (sight, smell, touch) to
122 Taimi Olsen
fill this space. Part of the poem is written in a relative frame of reference,
in which the streets and houses wind throughout town and also lead out of
town to a harbor and a hotel. An observer, though, is present as well.
Cummings’ alternating use of phrases within and without many
parentheses gives the poem an interesting multiple modality. In this way,
Cummings separates the poem into two streams of phrases, suggesting that
the poem can be read both continuously and in parts. I have coded the
poem below so that it can be seen more easily how the main poem
alternates with descriptions and comments in parentheses, as if Cummings
has interlaced two poems. Words in bold indicate this interweaving of
lines; notice the different uses of spatial cues:
a
mong crum
bling people(a
long ruined streets
hither and)softly
thither between(tumb
ling)
houses(as
the kno
wing spirit prowls,its
nose winces
before a dissonance of
Rish and Foses)

until
(finding one’s self
at some distance from the
crooked town)a
harbour fools the sea(

while
emanating the triple
starred
Hotel du Golf…that notable structure

or ideal edifice…situated or established
…far from the noise of waters
)one’s
eye perceives
(as the ego approaches)
painfully sterilized contours;
within
which
“ladies&gentlemen”
—under
glass—
are:
asking.
?each
oth?
Er
rub,
!berq;
:uestions
The narrative perspective quietly emerges in certain lines, in an unusual,

distancing third person rather than Cummings’ usual “i” voice. The phrase
“finding one’s self at some distance from the crooked town” is tucked into
parentheses. Over halfway through the poem, we reach a more explicit
statement of perspective (although still in the third person), “one’s eye
perceives” (and given Cummings’ play with eye / I, this line can also be
read “one’s i perceives”). It could be argued that the entire poem is written
in an intrinsic frame under narrative control, yet the narrator is so distant
as to be absent in many places. After all, who is “among crumbling
people”—houses, a harbor, or one’s eye?
Although the poem has a certain stability anchored by the “notable
structure” and the “eye” in the middle, the poem disturbs the reader with
questions as well—and not only the question on which it ends. Who
delivers the single line of circus announcer’s dialogue, the classic call
“ladies and gentlemen”? Who or what do we see under glass, something
from the harbor or people in the hotel? Despite the curious ending to this
poem, structural issues are central and provide poetic structure by
extension, as the crooked town is contrasted with the clean lines of glass.
Overall, there is the sense of painful “sterilization” and the cubist scene
seems to trap the lower-classes, the “crumbling” people of the village,
who have no straight path to the resort. The resort itself presents a
problem, a Baudrillardian “singular object” whose meaning is difficult to
decipher (and therefore completely own) despite its glass transparency and
public situation. As readers, we almost place ourselves within the glass,
asking ridiculously emphatic questions.
124 Taimi Olsen
Language of Space
The linguistic project of identifying the language of space in all
languages is a much different project than interpreting Cummings’ use of
space. However, there are useful lessons—in looking at more than
prepositions for information about spatial relations, for examining
Cummings’ use of frames of reference, and for looking at his use of
sensory systems—sight, smell, hearing and touch—as a way to convey
information about the poem’s created space. Cummings plays with
syntactic categories to draw us into a complex spatial experience (what
better phrase to exemplify this than his more famous line “up so floating
many bells down”?). His compound use of different spatial cues forms a
complicated space, influenced by a painterly perspective but also filled
with movement, sound, and smells and perspectives. When linguists like
Levinson and Wilkins (2006) note that “in some ways human spatial
cognition is puzzling” in its variability and in the influence of culture on
spatial cognition (1), we can point to Cummings as a poet who early on
showed us the potential of thinking about space, of freeing ourselves to
move in it, and feel the spaces around us in a more visceral way.
References
Bierwisch, Manfred. 1996. How much space gets into language? In
Language and space, ed. Paul Bloom, Mary Peterson, Lynn Nadel, and
Merrill Garrett. Cambridge, Mass: MIT.
Cohen, Milton. 1987. PoetandPainter: The Aesthetics of E. E.
Cummings’s Early Work. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press.
Cureton, Richard. 1979. E. E. Cummings: A study of the poetic use of
deviant morphology. Poetics Today 1 (1-2): 213-244.
Cummings, E. E. 1991. Complete poems: 1904-1962. Ed. George
Fairly, Irene. 1975. E. E. Cummings and ungrammar: A study of syntactic
deviance in his poems. New York: Watermill.
Friedman, Norman. 1960. E. E. Cummings: The art of his poetry.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
Heusser, Martin. 1997. I am my writing: The poetry of E. E. Cummings.
Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
Kennedy, Richard S. 1994. Commentary to E. E. Cummings: Selected
Poems. New York: Liveright.
Kostelanetz, Richard. 1998. Introduction to Another E. E. Cummings. New
York: Liveright.
Levelt, W. J. M. 1993. Speaking: From intention to articulation.

Cambridge, Mass: MIT.
Levinson, Stephen C. 1996. Frames of reference and Molyneux’s
question: Crosslinguistic evidence. In Language and space, ed. Paul
Bloom, Mary Peterson, Lynn Nadel, and Merrill Garrett. Cambridge,
Mass: MIT.
—. 2003. Space in language and cognition: Explorations in cognitive
diversity. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003.
Levinson, Stephen C., and David Wilkins. 2006. Grammars of space.
Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Miller, J. Hillis. 1995. Topographies. California: Stanford Univ. Press.
Peterson, M. A., L. Nadel, P. Bloom, and M. F. Garrett. 1996. Space and
Language. In Language and space, ed. Paul Bloom, Mary Peterson,
Lynn Nadel, Merrill Garrett. Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1996.
Pinker, Steven. 1997. How the mind works. New York: Norton.
Thrift, Nigel. 2006. Space. Theory, Culture, & Society 23 (2-3):139-155.
SACRED-EVIL NEW YORK:
URBAN SPATIALITY IN TULIPS & CHIMNEYS
ZÉNÓ VERNYIK, MASARYK UNIVERSITY,

TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF LIBEREC
The urban sphere has primary importance in the work of E. E.

Cummings. This is the case even if available writings on his art tend to
ignore the role of the city and focus more or less solely on the poet’s
“lyric vision” of a “transcendent world which is one, and full of love”
(Friedman 1960, 9), as coined by Norman Friedman, his most important
commentator. Friedman has been trying to establish Cummings as a major
American poet since the second half of the 1950s through emphasizing the
importance and complexity of the said lyric vision. However, even though
Friedman’s focus is justified and logical, his first two books on
Cummings, right because of their excessive focus on showing the vision
and the improvement of E. E. Cummings respectively, let the reader fall in
the trap of oversimplification, and without being aware of it, channeled
most of the later research into similar fields.
The failure to notice the importance of city poems by Cummings,
however, is of course not to be blamed on Friedman. First of all, he did
not discourage or try to prove wrong this field of research. Furthermore,
because later on he himself emphasized the importance of analyzing the
role of the city in the poetry of E. E. Cummings, referring to Guy
Rotella’s “very useful list of things remaining to be done” (Friedman
1996).
The negligence to deal with the question of the city, however, seems
quite curious, since poems dealing with the American city comprise a
major part of Cummings’ poetic œuvre—although their percentage is
slowly decreasing towards the later volumes. In the volume in question,
for example, the complete number of poems is 152. Out of these, I found
48 presumably dealing with topics that can be demonstrated to have at
Sacred-Evil New York. Urban Spatiality in Tulips & Chimneys 127
least some connection with the American city or the volume’s city-
conception in general. Those poems that visibly deal with Paris are of
course ignored. Furthermore, New York City is also a prominent topic in
Cummings’ short prose works. “Coney Island,” “The Soul Story of
Gladys Vanderdecker,” “An Ex-Multimillionaire’s Rules for Success in
Life,” “How to Succeed As an Author,” and “Why I Like America,” all
deal with the American City, some directly, some indirectly (Cummings
1965).
Some of the early critics, however, realized the importance of the city
and the material world in Cummings’ works. For example, Joseph
Auslander ([1927] 1981) talked of an “ego moving and delighting in a
material world, an awareness particularly intense where it concerned itself
with buildings, old bottles, loose lips, dirty hair and low women” (83).
Emphasizing the newness of topic and handling, he goes on to state that
the poems’ persona “waxes sentimental about skyscrapers and gum
chewing molls and sweat and sunsets just as other poets have been
sentimental about pale ladies and panting bosoms” (84). Maurice
Lesemann ([1926] 1981) also called our attention to the fact that one
species of the poems of Cummings is concerned with the external world
of the city: these are poems that “pick out specific objects, persons, street-
corners and anecdotes,” often presented “in the manner of James Joyce”
(51).
The statement of Norman Friedman about the necessity of analyzing
the role of the city in the poetry of E. E. Cummings, mentioned above, is
from 1984 (and Rotella’s is from 1979). The 29 years that have passed
since, alone would justify my venture. It is time to show that the poet who
is said by Isabelle Alfandary (2002) to have introduced space in the
poems, space that is mobile and non-linear, space that is an object of
experience without precedent (18) did that not only formally: not only on
the page. Urban space is just as important an aspect of the poetry of
Cummings as typographical space is, even if many share the opinion of
Rushworth M. Kidder (1979) that most of his poems dealing with the
city—or at least in Tulips & Chimneys—“do not bear up under much
questioning; they have no profound answers for the reader” (43-4).
In the present paper, focusing on the volume Tulips & Chimneys, I
show that Cummings’ poems provide more than mere sketches of city life:
they can be interrogated in search of a unified city concept. I point out that
this is a city full of life, showing a dualism of organic and mechanistic
features. More than being organic, the city of Tulips & Chimneys is
anthropomorphic and gendered: the New York City portrayed in this
volume is feminine. I also argue that it is dynamic, full of force and
128 Zénó Vernyik
movement, and the city’s dual nature (mechanical-organic) is pointing in

the direction of attaining an organic existence. The city achieves this
transformation through a sacred act of self-sacrifice. In effect, in this
volume of poems, the city becomes a modern day savior, saving both
herself and those of her body—the citizens—through the said self-
sacrifice and her (the city’s) repetitive, commemoratory act of Symbolic
Feast or Holy Communion. Furthermore, I show that this modern day
savior is showing, at the same time, the features of an ancient
earth/mother goddess.
In addition, I also map the urban space of the volume. This is carried
out in three steps. First, I chart what I call the cartographic fictional space
of the volume by drawing a map of the localities that the volume refers to.
Then, I also devise a chart of what I termed the sacred fictional space of
Tulips & Chimneys, a space that is derived from the use, importance and
value of localities as they appear in the volume, through establishing the
central heterotopic locus, or “temple”, of the textual universe. Finally, I
give a characterization of the socio-spatial dialectic of the volume by
placing its spaces and spatial practices in Lefebvrian functional
categories, as set by McCann (1999) and Soja (1980), and identify the
position of the lyric voice.
Before starting the concrete analyses, however, it is important to state
what I mean by Tulips & Chimneys. Cummings’ first volume of poetry
appeared in 1923, entitled Tulips and Chimneys. A volume with the title
that I refer to, however, was published only in 1976, edited by George
James Firmage. The story of the volume is as follows: “Sometime in 1919
Cummings had assembled a hefty manuscript of poems entitled ‘Tulips &
Chimneys,’ […] [but he] tried six publishing houses without success”
(Kennedy 1994, 53). Cummings, therefore, “removed some of the poems
that an editor might find either unpoetic or obscene, rearranged their order,
and tried again in 1922” (53). The 1922 collection “eventually saw
publication, but not all at once. Dos Passos managed to persuade Thomas
Seltzer to publish a selection of sixty-six of the poems under the title
Tulips and Chimneys in 1923” (53). The rest of the original collection
appeared in XLI Poems and in & (both published in 1925). The reason
behind my reverting to the “original” version is not that I am in search of
any kind of intention of the author. Instead, it is partly because the bulk of
poems is available in this form in Complete Poems, 1904-1962, also edited
by George James Firmage, partly because any of the three volumes is too
slim to contain enough poems for a thorough analysis of the urban sphere
of this length, and finally because the three volumes do not show any kind
of development anyhow, as all of them were written before 1919.
The percentage of poems dealing with the American city is the highest
in this volume out of all volumes of poetry written by Cummings. As I
have already mentioned, out of the 152 poems, 48 deal with the topic of
the city. It is a bit more than 31.5%, almost one third of the poems. Two
major American cities are represented in the book: Boston and New York
City, and a smaller town: Cambridge, MA. There is also a non-American
city that appears in the volume: Paris. Several different facts spring from
these. The first is that if I did not exclude the poems dealing with Paris
from my calculation of those that deal with the topic of the city, the
percentage would be even more impressive. The second is that the volume
probably contains poems from different periods of Cummings’ early years
as a poet: poems written before the First World War at Harvard and in
Boston, poems written during the war, and the rest that is the result of the
two periods that Cummings spent in New York before and after the war.
The third result is that because of so many different urban spheres that
might appear represented in the volume, one can only be certain of which
city a given poem refers to, as long as there is an obvious hint in it, such
as the name of a recognizable building or street, and so on. The method I
followed was that I excluded all those poems that contained French
references of any sort, and also those that contained any sort of hint at the
possibility that their topic or setting might be Boston or Cambridge. The
rest I considered as poems referring to New York City. Although this
method is of course not absolutely precise, it seems to me the best
available without being able to consider the manuscripts.
The Nature of Urban Space in Tulips & Chimneys

The Organic and Anthropomorphic City: “[in the rain-]”
The topic of “[in the rain-]” is visibly the praise of the loved one.
However, even if it is so, this poem still remains an important source if
one is to establish the city-concept of the present volume. Curiously,
however, commentators of the poem do not seem to realize that. Martin
Heusser (1997) mentions this poem as an example of the case when the
loved woman is linked to a religious experience (158). Robert E. Wegner
(1965) also ignores the presence of the city in the poem when he also
describes the images of “[in the rain-]” as “those [that] Cummings
loves—rain, sunset, flowers, a star—but they seem artfully rather than
artlessly posed” (149).
Their negligence to do so becomes even more striking if one considers
the possible reference to the Holy City, Jerusalem, a sacred locality for
130 Zénó Vernyik
three world religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Not only does this
amplify the possible religious connotations of the poem, but also
conforms to Cummings’ sublimated way of experiencing faith, somehow
uniting and at the same time transcending established religion.
It is true that it can be inferred from the lines “the holy / city which is
your face” (Cummings 1994, 42) that the face of the lady is holy,
however, it is to be noted that the attribution of the feature is only indirect.
Her face is first a city, and then and only then is that holy.
It is important to note that the space of the lady’s face is not the only
locality in the poem. There occurs also the space of the poet who is
meditating in the rain, remembering to his love:
in the rain-
darkness, the sunset
being sheathed i sit and
think of you
[…]
a single star is
uttered,and I
think
of you (42)
What it entails is more than just the presence of two different localities:
these localities also stand for different types of space, in harmony with the
space concept of the religious man, as defined by Mircea Eliade. Such
space is fractured rather than homogenous, defined by the basic
dichotomy of sacred vs. profane spatiality (Eliade 1979, 21). The words
“angel” and “single star” further emphasize the religious/sacred tone of
the poem. The star may stand for Jesus in the Christian tradition (Num
24:17), or alternatively for the Virgin Mary from medieval times on (Pál
and Újvári 2001, 98), while there is no need to explain the religious
character of the word “angel.” The poem’s possible reference to the Holy
City, Jerusalem, further supports this point.
Another feature of this city is that it is full of life: there are thrushes,
flowers, some water, dance, song, and pirouette. It behaves as an organic
whole, even as a living organism, similar to the city-concept of Walt
Whitman and William James (Campbell and Kean 1997, 165). Taking a
further look at some points of the poem, it becomes apparent that this city
is not simply organic, but anthropomorphic:
the holy
city which is your face
your little cheeks the streets
of smiles
your eyes half-

thrush
half angel and your drowsy
lips where float flowers of kiss
and
there is the sweet shy pirouette
your hair
and then
your dancesong soul (Cummings 1994, 42)
Its anthropomorphism springs from the fact that the city itself is identified
with a woman’s face, but also from the identification of its various parts
with certain organs of the human body.
The most important of these is probably the soul, as this can lead
further with respect to the city-concept of the volume: its presence
suggests that it is very probably unrelated to the city as imagined by the
expressionists who integrated the social machinery of Hamilton and the
organic city of Whitman into one complex ambiguity. They thought of the
metropolis as a dystopic, “noisy and unpredictable machinery […] that
continuously threatens any vestige of individual autonomy,” and at the
same time a devouring, primeval jungle (Walker 1998, 119).
Not only does Cummings’ poem totally lack the machine-aspect, its
soul and joyful human face also clearly differs from the expressionist idea
of the devouring jungle. The pirouette of the hair is too orderly a figure to
be so instinctive and ancient, or animalistic. Not to mention the angel and
the thrush that would definitely not appear in such a context, except if the
angel were fallen.
Mechanical to Organic: the Act of Sacrifice in “[writhe and]”

Even if Richard S. Kennedy characterizes “[writhe and]” as a “poem
describing the sunset in a city, but employing imagery in which city
rectangularity bumps against the traditional presentation of the dissolving
colors of sunset” (Kennedy 1994, 25), it features more than that. It offers
a cityscape that—at least at first sight—conforms surprisingly well to the
ideas of the expressionists. This town is suffering. It is tortured. The first
132 Zénó Vernyik
part’s “unusual diction gives a sense of wrenching and stress” (25) not
only because of the “harsh consonant sound—g, p, k, z—in clusters” (25),
but also to emphasize this suffering:
writhe and
gape of tortured
perspective
rasp and graze of splintered
normality
crackle and
sag
of planes clamors of
collision
collapse (Cummings 1994, 61)
There are obvious differences, however. Even though the city is

mechanical, man-made and is suffering, it is the city that is in this
condition. Here, the city is not the “noisy and unpredictable machinery of
the metropolis [that] confronts the subject as an alien force that
continuously threatens any vestige of individual autonomy” (Walker
1998, 119). It is not the perpetrator, but the victim. Strange as it may
seem, this city lives, it “writhes” and “gapes” and is being “tortured”
(Cummings 1994, 61). This is not a mad jungle or a destructive machine.
It is much more human than that. It provides a strange mixture of organic
anthropomorphism and the possibly rigid existence of a machine.
The human existence of the city is even more emphatic in the second
part of the poem. For one thing, it turns out that the city is a woman, just
as in the case of the previous poem, plus it is young, and it blushes.
Through rising into the sunset, she practically transcends her own limits
and leaves behind her mechanical half. And she enters what is becoming
the garden of her agony, or enters a garden of agony that suits her,
depending on how one understands the word “becoming.” The latter
alternative seems more likely, considering the possible allusion to the
Christian theme of the Agony in the Garden (Matthew 26:36-39). It is
curious that Kennedy (1994) could stop at the suggestion that the
“personified city disrobing herself of angularity in pinkish dusk becomes
more natural, and thus associated with a garden” (26). Even though this is
definitely true of the poem, it simply ignores a vast range of other,
possible connotations that show how much more interesting this poem can
be than it was suggested by his reading. What the reference to the Bible
means is not only that this poem also has a strong religious tone, but also
that the poem’s perception of the city is positive and also radical to the
point of being thoroughly new and subversive. Not only is the city here a
modern day savior, suffering for us, but also this savior is feminine and
mechanistic.
Kennedy, however, is right in assuming that this is a poem of a
developing city, but not only through offering “a cityscape changing at
twilight from the noise of the day to the quiet at night” (25). The poem
visualizes the city in transformation from a mechanical existence to an
organic one. The mechanical-organic dichotomy behind this
transformation is the same that propels Cummings’ poetic persona’s
critique of human existence, exemplified by such poems as “[anyone lived
in a pretty how town]” (1994, 515) and “[the greedy the people]” (801).
Thus, just as the individuals’ options in the poetry of Cummings ranges
from “lives [that] are as empty and meaningless as the mechanical ‘dong
and ding’ of the clock which rules […] coming and going, […] eating and
sleeping, […] work and ‘play’” to being “able to grow and finally
blossom” (Marks 1964, 41), the possible forms of existence of the city
range from clockwork mechanism to blossoming organic existence.
Transubstantiation as Self-saving and the Way to Organic

Heaven: “[at the ferocious phenomenon of 5 o’clock i find
myself gently decompos-]”
The volume’s city conception seems closest to that of the
expressionists in “[at the ferocious phenomenon of 5 o’clock i find myself
gently decompos-],” even if it is also organic and anthropomorphic. Here,
it seems no longer true that the city is threatened or suffering or that the
picture of the city is positive. The speaking voice is a mere morsel in a
gigantic monster mouth, the city. This lone piece of bread provides an
insightful picture of “the isolated and alienated character of the modern
subject” (Walker 1998, 119). The enormous mouth with its “financial
teeth,” “murderous saliva of industry” and the noise of “digestible
millions” (Cummings 1994, 111) forms a complex figure both for the
“monolithic entity [of the city] that antagonizes and annihilates the
isolated energies of the subject,” as well as how “the individual is
dissolved into the mob” (Walker 1998, 119-20). Even the wording is
similar: “decomposing” vs. “dissolving.”
However, this conformity is only virtual: the tongue does not fit into
the picture of an evil town, nor does the Woolworth Building, for that
matter. This tongue is not trying to destroy or annihilate anything: it
supports the said building, and at the same time tastes it. The expression
134 Zénó Vernyik
“devouring” loses its negative tone, as the tongue here devours music, not
people or the speaking voice. What this music is, or where it comes from
is unclear, unless it refers to the proportions of the Woolworth Building.
The Pythagoreans and later Plato extended their findings about musical
ratios to a model of the sky that consisted of ten spheres. These spheres in
turn (or sirens at these spheres) produced sounds conforming to the same
harmony, (Plato 1977, 691) bringing about musica universalis or the
music of the spheres. The idea that those ratios that are pleasurable to the
ear should be equally pleasurable to the eye brought about the application
of the ratios found by the Pythagoreans in architecture.
So the speaking voice can reasonably talk of “sharp algebraic music”
referring to the Woolworth Building. The devouring of this music then
becomes a synaesthesia of three different sensory areas: taste, vision and
hearing. This harmonic conception of the said building denies the
possibility to attribute thoroughly negative features to the city-concept of
the poem: not only the supportive tongue, but also the building it surveys
and supports becomes highly positive. The large number of words
referring to movement and dynamism in this part only further supports
this positive reading. And there is the paradox situation of devouring the
music of a building that is at the same time referred to as a “squirming
cube of undiminished silence” (Cummings 1994, 111). However, it fits
neatly in if one refers to the first two lines of another poem by E. E.
Cummings, a poem of highest praise: “yours is the music for no
instrument / yours the preposterous colour unbeheld” (160).
In the latter part of the poem, the speaking voice changes perspective:
the morsel stops being “buoyed on the murderous saliva of industry.” It
surveys instead from the top of one tooth what lies underneath. According
to Rushworth M. Kidder (1979), this poem is “a self portrait narrating the
poet’s trip to the top of the Woolworth Building during New York’s rush
hour” (40). So this change of perspective then is due to the speaking
voice’s mounting the said building. However, it is not necessarily so. The
text refers to “a delicately experimenting colossus,” and to “one immense
tooth” (my emphases) in this part, no longer to the Woolworth Building
specifically (Cummings 1994, 111). And what the persona of the poem
sees underneath is
the complete important profane frantic inconsequential gastro-

nomic mystery of mysteries
,life (111)
This life is an “ecstasy” that “wags and rages,” it is full of “Laughters

jostle grins nudge smiles” (111). That is, this city is again dynamic, filled
with movement and force. With all their “putrid spikes of mad-/ness,” the
large mass of people’s “various innocent ferocities” still compare rather
agreeably to “the sole prostituted ferocity of silence” (111) that presides at
the level from where the lyric voice is surveying the crowd.
The expression “digestible millions” also loses its negative air, as the
lips of the evening have particularly positive adjectives. The procession
seems at first ambiguous, but poems of Cummings often hail and
celebrate obscenity. It is true, digestible can mean shallow and simplistic,
and there are quite enough poems by Cummings that support this
reading.1 However, there are some other options. This poem is about a
city that is made of a mouth and the black depth of a stomach. People are
morsels in the mouth (and later the stomach) of the city that devours them.
Through eating something, the human body dismantles the food it
consumes into its constituents and builds its own material from these
constituents. In this sense, then, the act of devouring is nothing but a
symbol of becoming part of the organism or the body of the city as a
living being. Furthermore, digestible can also refer to the people as such
kind of food that can be digested. Food that is not poisonous or unhealthy.
Something that is good and valuable for the body of the city.
Valarie Meliotes Arms (1979) in her article on the other poem of
Cummings that features a morsel as its protagonist, “[morsel miraculous
and meaningless],” points out that the morsel of bread can be precisely the
host of the body of Christ. This is a “crumb” that “only becomes
‘miraculous’ and ‘fabulous’ when we feast our souls on it after
transubstantiation” (293). Is it possible to think of the morsel(s) of the
present poem as similarly referring to transubstantiation, or in a little more
general way, to the Holy Communion? Although it is a quite strange
supposition, it seems to me that it is, indeed, possible. The waffle or bread
that is taken in Holy Communion is valuable and important precisely
because it is no longer bread, but the living body of the savior. And these
morsels are indeed living bodies, people moving around in the city. And
they really are of the same substance as another living body: the city, of
which they are parts, and as it follows from the concept of the city as one
large living organism. That it is possible to think of the city as the savior
of the people I have already shown above, in connection with the poem
“[writhe and].” What happens then, is that the city continuously partakes
of the Holy Communion, carrying out a ritual sacrifice to herself,
commemorating her own sacrifice for the life and wellness of her people,
or more generally, for herself. The act of saving is no longer outer,
external or divine: the savior is the saved, the two are one, and life carries
on as an eternally returning cycle. The word “always” emphasizes the
136 Zénó Vernyik
endless eternality of movement, whereas the word “procession” has its

own Catholic connotations. The presence of the myth of the eternal wheel
of time, at the same time, can quite easily be pointed out in other poems of
Cummings’.2
The City as Mother Earth: “[i am going to utter a

tree,Nobody]”
One of the emphatic figures of “[i am going to utter a tree,Nobody]” is
the mouth, just as in case of the previous poem: “earth ,the reckless oral
darkness / raging with thin impulse” (Cummings 1994, 114). However,
the mouth is not the only common feature of the two poems. The lyric
voice of both of them leaves behind the perspective of the mouth through
climbing into the height of silence:
(afterward i’ll
climb
by tall careful muscles
into nervous and accurate silence.... (114)
What these two poems have in common, however, is more than a

similarity in motifs. “Mouth” and “height” are not just any two motifs, but
those two motifs that structure the two poems’ space(s). There are only
two localities in both of them: in the mouth, and up in the silent height.
Furthermore, the route of the lyric voice also leads from the mouth to
above it. That is, it seems safe to conclude that the two spaces are at least
similarly structured, if not the same.
The striking thing about this similarity is the fact that while the space
of “[at the ferocious phenomenon of 5 o’clock i find myself gently
decompos-]” is urban space, that of “[i am going to utter a tree,Nobody]”
is rural space. One reason for this can be that the ideal urban space of
Tulips & Chimneys is organic, and it is no wonder that two instances of
organic space are similarly structured.
However, there is another possible reason behind this similarity. The
motif of the mouth in “[i am going to utter a tree,Nobody]” stands for the
earth: “earth ,the reckless oral darkness / raging with thin impulse” (114).
There are several reasons why this passage can identify the earth as
mouth. First of all, both of them have an interesting dual character that
this poem seems consciously foregrounding. The mouth can create
through enunciation, and also act as a receptacle. The first line of the
poem is itself an example of creation through utterance: “i am going to
utter a tree” (114), just as (John 1:1) and (John 1:14) are. The duality of
the earth is approximately the same as that of the mouth: “darkness” can
refer simultaneously to the earth as a tomb through its association with the
afterlife and with mourning, and to the color of the earth as a fertile
material, the cradle of life (Pál and Újvári 2001, 158).
Their similar dualistic nature is not the only reason, however, why this
identification is possible. There are clear Biblical references to the earth as
having mouth, although not exactly as being mouth: (Revelation 12:16),
(Numbers 16:32), (Numbers 26:10) and (Deuteronomy 11:6).
Furthermore, the mouth is often the symbol of different earth goddesses
(Pál and Újvári 2001, 428).
In the above chapters, I have identified the city of these poems as a
feminine savior. Here, comparing the city to the (rural) earth through the
identical nature of their structuring pair of localities, it seems apparent that
this savior is not simply a feminine version of Jesus Christ, but rather an
ancient earth/mother goddess. Just as the earth is nurturing and protecting
(Revelation 12:16; Pál and Újvári 2001, 159), so was traditionally the city
(Pál and Újvári 2001, 501). Although this protective aspect of the city is
no longer present in modern cities and in Tulips & Chimneys, there are
other aspects in common that are featured. In the eternal repetition of the
commemorative act of the Holy Communion by the city, there appears the
simultaneous death and birth characteristic of the earth. When the city
self-cannibalisticly feasts on itself (or on the citizens), it is also reborn at
the same time. Furthermore, as I have pointed out just above, the mouth
can stand for the earth/mother goddess, and the city is identified in “[at the
ferocious phenomenon of 5 o’clock i find myself gently decompos-]” as a
mouth. The organic nature of the city of Tulips & Chimneys also fits in
well with the idea of identifying it as an earth/mother goddess.
Mapping the Urban Space of Tulips & Chimneys

The Cartographic City
In the following paragraphs, I will call cartographic fictional space
the space comprising those areas, streets, buildings, institutions—and so
on—represented by the text which are identifiable outside the lyric
universe of the book and can be highlighted on an actual map of the city
in question. This usage, of course, relies heavily on the supposition that
“if we know the name of an object it generates a greater network of
personal meaning [than if we do not know it], as names distinguish
objects and network rather intelligently with other names” (Bollas 2000,
138 Zénó Vernyik
33).
Applying this concept to the volume, one might come up with a chart
that shows right this kind of space by simply highlighting on a map those
loci that are mentioned by name in the poems, and then erasing anything
but the highlighted parts. For this project, “[by god i want above
fourteenth],” becomes highly important, as it contains most of those
concrete references that can be traced back: East and West Fourteenth
Street,3 Fifth Avenue, Broadway, the Singer Tower, Wall Street,
Washington Square, Greenwich Village, whereas “the Baboon”
(Cummings 1994, 119) can stand for The Bronx Zoo (Norman 1972, 130).
East Eighth Street is supplied by “[—G O N splashes-sink]” (Cummings
1994, 170), while the Woolworth Building is provided by “[at the
ferocious phenomenon of 5 o’clock i find myself gently decompos-],” and
McSorley’s by “[i was sitting in mcsorley’s. outside it was New York
and beauti-].” The poem “[a fragrant sag of fruit distinctly grouped.]”
provides “Grand” that is probably Grand Central Terminal, and also
Second Avenue and Sixth Avenue Elevated,4 while “[ladies and
gentlemen this little girl]” adds Coney Island.
Figure 3-2 provides a map that charts the cartographic fictional space
of the volume. East and West Fourteenth Street is marked, just as Fifth
Avenue is, another line shows Second Avenue, Wall Street is also
represented, Broadway likewise, plus East Eighth Avenue and Sixth
Avenue (because of the Elevated). Washington square is shown by
parallel slanting lines, the Village by a non-continuous frame and reverse
slanted thin lines, with two alternatives, while different slanted lines
highlight the Bronx Zoo, and Coney Island.5 A dot highlights the
Woolworth Building, another one the Grand Central Terminal, a different
one marks the place of McSorley’s and the last one shows the Singer
Tower.
The map shows that the New York City of Tulips & Chimneys is
different from an actual New York City even in a strictly cartographic
sense, as it features only a limited set of its spaces. Of course, it would be
oversimplification to suppose that the poems refer to no other part of the
city than those explicitly mentioned. However, one can safely conclude
that these localities are perhaps more emphatic than the rest: they stand
out from the non-descript “mass” of the rest.
Also, Figure 3-2 shows that the cartographic fictional space has three
more-or-less distinct nodes: the Manhattan area, Coney Island and Bronx
Zoo. While it cannot be seen in the picture, the Bronx Zoo and Coney
Island nodes should nevertheless be considered to be connected to each
other and the Manhattan node, as the poems handle them in an integrative,
rather than distinguishing way. They are featured in poems dealing with
New York City in general, not in poems dedicated specifically to them.6
Fig. 3-2: Cartographic fictional space in Tulips & Chimneys

140 Zénó Vernyik
Finally, even though it is true that localities other than those explicitly
shown by Figure 3-2 are part of the New York City of Tulips &
Chimneys, it points out that the limits of the urban space of this volume
are set by the three nodes. The urban space of the volume roughly
comprises Manhattan, the Bronx and Coney Island. The rest is missing.
McSorley’s and Dick Mid’s Place: Heterotopic Localities

According to Richard S. Kennedy (1994), “[i was sitting in
mcsorley’s. outside it was New York and beauti-]” is “a suggestion of
evil as it makes its appearance in a barroom” (61). He does not assign any
kind of further meaning to it. Although he rightly stresses that the poem is
a brilliantly evocative sound painting, however, just because a poem is
full of sounds, highly onomatopoeic and suggestive of atmosphere, it does
not automatically make it necessarily simplistic in its message. Not to
mention language, as the language of the poem is anything but simple, as
it is noted by Rushworth M. Kidder (1979): “Reading the poem requires
an open-minded willingness to abandon grammatical restrictions, a good
deal of patience, and a liberal sprinkling of parentheses” (48).
First of all, this poem is important because in contrast to the previous
ones, it does not only deal with the city in general, in an abstract way, but
is linked to a concrete locality, McSorley’s Saloon, which still exists and
is now called “McSorley’s Old Ale House,” and is “fronting Hall Place
east of the Bowery on Seventh Street” (Norman 1972, 125). Considered
by most the prototypical Irish Pub in America, the institution celebrated
its 150th anniversary in February, 2004. It “was already in business when
Abraham Lincoln spoke at Cooper Union, a bottle’s toss away, in 1860”
(125).
The first two lines exemplify the most important division of the poem:
i was sitting in mcsorley’s. outside it was New York and beauti-

fully snowing. (Cummings 1994, 110)
That large space between “mcsorley’s” and “outside” stands for the
physical as well as mental distance between the two distinct spheres. That
space in the poem is a visual device existing to point out the stark contrast
between the two.
After another hard cut in the form of a break between paragraphs, the
poem continues with the statement: “Inside snug and evil” (110). Standing
in clear contrast with the last sentence’s “outside”, this “inside” seems to
refer to the other side of the dichotomy that exists between McSorley’s
and the rest of the city, or the streets. However, there comes another
visual gap in the text and only then the description of the inner space of
the bar. Figure 3-3 illustrates the point. If Section 3 and Section 4 were
referring to the same inner space (or inside), the visual break were
unnecessary.
i was sitting in mcsorley’s. outside it was New York and beauti- Inside snug and evil. the
slob-
bering
walls…
INSIDE OUTSIDE INSIDE INSIDE
Section 1 Section 2 Section 3 Sect. 4
Fig. 3-3: Partitions of space in “i was sitting in mcsorley’s”
It is possible, however, to understand Section 3 referring to the mind

of the speaking voice and Section 4 to the pub. This reading would of
course contradict the interpretation that attributes positive values to the
outside sphere, and negative ones to the bar. To some extent, however, the
poem itself does the same. Whereas except for the monotonous falling of
snow, there is no action or life outside, the bar is full of movement and
action:
the slobbering walls filthily push witless

creases of screaming warmth chuck pillows are noise funnily swallows
swallowing revolvingly pompous a the swallowed mottle with smooth or
a but rapidly goes gobs the and of fleck of and a chatter sobbings
intersect with which distinct disks of graceful oath, upsoaring the
break on ceiling-flatness (Cummings 1994, 110)
There are quite a lot of verbs in this part of the text (“push,” “chuck,”
“are,” “swallows,” “goes,” “gobs”7), as well as other words that suggest
movement and dynamism: “revolvingly” and “rapidly.” And whereas
there are some expressions that would support the snug and evil reading
(“slobbering,” “filthily,” “screaming” and “sobbings”), there are several
others that contradict it. Although the word “witless” may normally
signify something negative, for the persona of Cummings’ poems, being
witless, unthinking and uncalculated, purely sensuous, is the absolute
perfection of existence.8 And there is the word “warmth” and there are
those “pillows” that have a distinctively homely, comfortable and
reassuring air. If one contrasts these features with those of the outside, the
contrast becomes even more striking.
The inside is noisy, warm, comfortable and lively. As for the outside,
even though snow through its color can stand for purity and innocence
(Protas et al. 2001), it is also cold and through its association with winter,
142 Zénó Vernyik
it may also stand for death.9 As there is a complete absence of any other
signifier in the outer space besides the snow and its monotonous falling,
the latter reading of the snow as cold, rigid and standing for death seems
more probable than the other one. There is nothing outside, but cold and
monotony and death. And “ceiling-flatness” comes into the picture right
here, separated from the rest of the paragraph with the usual break. That
is, this “ceiling-flatness” does not belong to or the space of the inside, but
rather outside. Or even, this “ceiling-flatness” is the outside sphere, as
such, and the pub is “the break on ceiling-flatness.”
This points out two different things. First, how the point of view
moves: bar ĺ outside ĺ speaker’s psyche ĺ bar ĺ outside. The second,
however is right in the detail that the visual break is in-between “break
on” and “ceiling-flatness.” That is, the bar as “the break on ceiling-
flatness” is neither inside nor outside. It is both and neither at the same
time, establishing what Robert Langan (2000) claims to be the very
function of architecture and buildings: “an exploration of the permeability
of the boundary between inside and outside. A building establishes in the
physical world an inside, an outside, and the possibilities of exchange
between them” (70). The presence of the same duality between the inside
of the speaking voice’s psyche and his outside which is the bar’s inside is
present right because of “the metaphorical equivalence of body and
building [that] vitalized architecture from archaic times” (70). That is, a
right kind of building is able to give what Langan calls “pause” to the
person inside. A pause “entails an exchange between the outside (the
building) and the inside (the person), so that one becomes other than took
oneself to be” (70). This bar is unique locus, a place of transference,
between three spheres of space: outside, bar and inside. Profane space (the
outside, through its homogeneity), sacred space (more on that in the next
paragraph) and the inner space of the speaker’s psyche.
There are several reasons why McSorley’s as set in the poem qualifies
as sacred space. First, the very fact that it is set against and contrasted to
the homogeneous space outside, makes it sacred. Furthermore, the poem
talks about “creases,” “flecks” and “dint,” just as Eliade talks about
ruptures, fractures and splinters. And finally, there are some features of
this space that qualify it as heterotopia, a special type of sacred space.
Heterotopias are “counter-sites, […] in which the real sites […] that can
be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested and
inverted” (Foucault 1998, 239). Even though not the whole society is
represented in its physicality in this bar, they are represented and
contested in the ongoing conversation of those present:
she says I ploc spittle

what the lands thaz me kid in no sir hopping sawdust you kiddo he’s a
palping wreaths of badly Yep cigars who jim him why gluey grins topple
together eyes pout gestures stickily point made glints squinting who’s
a wink bum-nothing (Cummings 1994, 110).
Out of the two basic types of heterotopias, McSorley’s is a heterotopia of

deviation: that “in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation
to the required mean or norm are placed” (Foucault 1998, 240). However,
differing considerably from rest homes and psychiatric hospitals,
McSorley’s does not require but temporary presence and those who act in
a deviant way are not closed off from society against their own will.
People come to McSorley’s to behave in a deviant way: they “belch,”
“chuckle,” there is “screaming” and “noise”. It is a place that provides a
way of transference between deviance and normality. McSorley’s is also
heterotopic in that it is “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place
several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (241).
Here, it is enough to refer back to the last paragraph where I showed how
the poem brought together—and provided ways of passage between—the
three spheres present: the inner space of the speaker’s psyche, the space of
the bar and the outer, homogeneous space. McSorley’s is also a
heterotopia in the sense that it “presuppose[s] a system of opening and
closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. […] [T]he
individual has to submit to certain rights and purifications” (243). In order
to “get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures”
(243).
For one, based on Langan’s article, I have already pointed out above
how this venue is one of those special types of architectural spaces that
are neither inside, nor outside, closing and at the same time connecting.
However, McSorley’s has much more specific relations to special rules
and a set code of behavior. That the poem’s persona asks the mysterious
shadow “won’t you have a drink?” and comments on it as “(thE. E.ternal
perpetual question)” (Cummings 1994, 110), is not only an ironical
reference to the habit of the customers of bars and pubs to ask others
whether they would like to have a drink, or to the possible alcoholism of
some of the regular guests. It also refers to one of the house’s customs:
the group seating that forces everyone to mingle, talk, drink, be merry.
The speaker asks the fearsome shadow-figure not (only) because he is
brave and friendly, but also because this is the rule to follow and obey.
Similarly, the two words “get out” refer to the power of someone in the
place to decide whether one can stay or should go. And finally,
McSorley’s is also heterotopic in the sense that it is “linked to slices of
144 Zénó Vernyik
time” (Foucault 1998, 242), a place that is capable of “indefinitely

accumulating time” (242), and providing a means of moving between
various periods and epochs. Easily so, as “McSorley’s, established in
1854, popularized by John Sloan’s paintings of its interior and Joseph
Mitchell’s New Yorker stories of its habitués, had plenty of tradition”
(Kidder 1979, 48). That is why the shadow, Darkness, could appear and
pass by the speaker: it was not a mere hallucination, but possibly a real
ghost from an earlier time.
Dick Mid’s Place appears in three poems: “[the young],” “[when you
rang at Dick Mid’s Place]” and “[Dick Mid’s large bluish face without
eyebrows].” However, regardless of the triple presence in the volume, and
Dick Mid’s later appearance in is 5, these poems are usually only briefly
mentioned, if at all, by available studies. Norman Friedman (1960) calls
“[Dick Mid’s large bluish face without eyebrows]” a sonnet, “in which the
speaker narrates the situation of a certain kind of man in a certain state of
mind” (101), remaining euphemistically silent about what the two
“certains” stand for. Rushworth M. Kidder (1979) is much more specific
and honest, although still extremely brief. He summarizes “[the young]”
as “a conversation with Death at Dick Mid’s brothel” (28), and “[when
you rang at Dick Mid’s Place]” as “a visit to Dick Mid’s brothel” (32).
Richard S. Kennedy (1994), however, mentions this poem only to
emphasize through the quotation “eet smeestaire steevensun” (Cummings
1994, 120) that “the speaking voice […] is an imagined one, […]
Cummings never visited prostitutes in the United States” (Kennedy 1994,
63).
This place, however, is much more than a simple brothel. One has to
gain admission, “have a certain permission” (Foucault 1998, 243). This
place is not open to just any customer, when just anyone rang, “the
madam was a bulb stuck in the door” (Cummings 1994, 120). However, if
the one who rings is one of the select few, if he has the credentials, he is
allowed to enter: “---If they knew you at Dick Mid’s / the three trickling
chins began to traipse / into the cheeks” (120). Only then did the lady say
“kum een” (120). Although this is one of the conditions that Foucault lists
for identifying a heterotopic locality, this alone would not make Dick
Mid’s into one. It would barely be anything else but a private club
requiring membership.
However, if it is possible for “the young / man sitting / in Dick Mid’s
Place” (83) to say to Death: “teach me of her” (83), then it must certainly
be more than a usual private club. Death seems to be a similar character to
the Shadow in “[i was sitting in mcsorley’s. outside it was New York
and beauti-],” perhaps it is even the same. But not only speaking with
Ɣ Ɣ Ɣ
X X X X
X X
Fig. 3-4: Binaries into a triad
Death is possible here, one can glance back to the past through the
narrative told by Death: “teach me of her” is an inquiry about things past.
This place, just like McSorley’s, is “linked to slices of time” (Foucault
1998, 242), a place that is capable of “indefinitely accumulating time”
(242), and providing a means of moving back and forth in time. As I have
mentioned above, Dick Mid’s Place is mentioned in three poems. The
expression “Dick Mid’s” appears twice in each of the three poems. What
we have then, is that “Dick Mid’s” appears six times, in a combination of
(3 x 2). That is, the locality appears three times on the macro level in the
volume (in three poems), but two times on the micro level in each poem.
Observing this phenomenon as a succession from the micro level towards
the macro level, it is a metamorphosis of binaries into a triad, as
represented in Figure 3-4. This is a change of even to odd, from division,
conflict, incompleteness and imperfection to order, totality, completeness
and perfection (Hoppál et al. 2004, 268). However, the direction can be
understood in the other way round as well. This might be parallel with the
two routes possible in the heterotopic site of Dick Mid’s place, as
exemplified by the speaking voice of “[the young]” and the prostitute
and/or her client in the same poem.
Mapping the Sacred Space of the City

Traditional cities were built in a way that there was the temple or
church in the very middle of the space of the city (Pál and Újvári 2001,
501). This is obviously not true in case of the physically existing
organization of New York City. Establishing the center itself would be a
futile venture, as the plan of the city is not symmetrical at all, although the
grid plan instituted by the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 was setting the
structure of the city on a highly symmetrical grid. The unsymmetrical
nature springs from several factors: unlike ancient towns, New York City
146 Zénó Vernyik
has no walls to restrict it; it lacks a purposefully designed center; and it

has a rather amorphous layout of five boroughs that define the structure of
the city.
Woolworth Bld
2nd Av Wall Str
Coney Island Greenwich Village

Grand Central Term
Broadway
D M Singer Tower
Washington Sq
Bronx Zoo 6th Av L
5th Av 14th Str
E 8th Str
Fig. 3-5: Sacred fictional space in Tulips & Chimneys
There is a possibility, however, to think of the space of the New York

City of Tulips & Chimneys as separate and different from that of the
existing city, as exemplified by the cartographic fictional space of the
volume, as shown by Figure 3-2. But cartographic fictional space is but
one kind of fictional space to map. Eliade (1979) mentions that sacred
space is always structured around a central manifestation of the sacred
(25), a temple or other sacred place, located in the axis mundi that
connects the three zones of the upper world, the lower world, and our
world (37). Based on this understanding, it is possible to come up with
another type of fictional space that I will call in the following as sacred
fictional space. This type of space is a non-homogeneous space that can
be derived from the use, role and importance of localities in the given
literary work of art. Sacred fictional space is having the heterotopic locus
in its center that stand in for the church or the temple, and the rest of the
localities that disrupt the homogeneity of abstract space.
Figure 3-5 shows my reconstruction of the sacred fictional space of
Tulip & Chimneys. In the middle of the chart is the duality of Dick Mid’s
Place and McSorley’s as the central heterotopic places of this space.
Figuratively speaking, the two of them together are the temple of the
volume’s New York City. The next sphere is occupied by those localities
that are mentioned in the poems, whereas the rest of the loci—those not
named by the poems—belong to the outermost sphere. The chart shows
that except for the central locality of the Dick Mid’s Place/McSorley’s
dual heterotopic center, the exact position of the rest of the places is not
interpretable in this type of space. Locality can be ascertained only to the
level of spheres. Also, position here is relational and not absolute: it is
related to the heterotopic center and to the level of representation. Of
course, this chart is a bit simplified, as it uses only three levels:
heterotopic; represented and named; only represented. Further divisions
could have been made, if the number of occurrences were counted and
further spheres devised in relation to that parameter.
The Socio-spatial Dialectic of Tulips & Chimneys

One manifestation of the fictional space of Tulips & Chimneys may be
sacred; nevertheless, one is not to imagine this sacred space as elitist. The
dual locality of the temple of course remains a place that is available for
entry only to those who submit themselves to the set rituals; nevertheless
the priests are bartenders, waiters, pimps and madams. The believers are
“corking brute[s]” (Cummings 1994, 126), Bill, Eddie (127) and Jimmie
(134), bums (130), “digestible millions” (112), “derbies-with-men-in-
them” and paperboys (82), “dirty circle[s] of habitués” (84), men whose
“fingers toss trunks / shuffle sacks” (85), “blind irisher[s]” who fiddle
“scotch jig in a stinking / joyman bar”, turks, taximen, “jew[s”,
“nigger[s]” and “black preacher[s]”, aesthetes and sailors (98). Women
are not missing, either. Most of them are prostitutes, of course,
considering that one half of the heterotopic duality is Dick Mid’s brothel.
Besides prostitutes, “Mrs. Somethingwich” (121), Jimmie’s sister (134), a
“negress” (172), “perpetual girls” (122), an “unnoticed woman” (129), the
untouchable “lady in her limousine” (132) and numerous loved ones.
This is a world of women and men who “mingled openly in the demi-
monde of bars and vaudeville houses” (Zukin 1998, 827), in spaces with
“a reputation for promiscuity and vice” (827). These places, however, are
also quite democratic and fairly open to all nationalities. It is also
important to note that this happens in the era of the prohibition, yet
alcohol is visibly available to everyone: “beer nothing,the lady’ll have a
whiskey-sour” (Cummings 1994, 126). Even though existing localities
and structures that were set up by the dominant culture—the Woolworth
Building, Coney Island, the Bronx Zoo and the Singer Tower—are used
by the actors of Tulips & Chimneys, they are not central. Also they are
used for other purposes than intended: the Woolworth Building, for
example, is a tooth in the mouth of the town, and a belvedere, not a
business center. Even if “the corporation accesses the tower as a symbol
148 Zénó Vernyik
of its power” (Campbell & Kean 1997, 168) and the rest of the city should
exist “down below in its shadow” (168), something thoroughly different
happens. “Despite owners’ and managers’ efforts to maintain an air of
exclusivity” (Zukin 1998, 827), these places are taken by the marginal
groups and given a new value. The “’abstract space’—space represented
by elite social groups as homogeneous, instrumental and ahistorical in
order to facilitate the exercise of state power and the free flow of capital”
(McCann 1999, 164) is restructured and reconfigured, as seen in the
previous paragraphs. Space is continuously “shaped, reshaped, and
challenged by the spatial practices of various groups and individuals”
(168). The girls of the madam “make bright their eyes” (Cummings 1994,
98) and turn the “unspontaneous streets” (98) into their working place:
under the window

under the window
under the window walk
the unburied feet of

the little ladies more than dead (98)
And this space is further reappropriated by the “twentyseven bums [who]

give a prostitute the once / -over” (130). They do not start a business
relationship and use the prostitutes “as they are meant.” Instead, they
rather turn the street from brothel into a strip-tease bar. Their “eyes say
the breasts look very good” (130) and their “pants have a hunch” (130),
but nevertheless, for them, it is just a matter for the eyes. On these streets
at times “a hurdy-gurdy accurately pants” (121), or “Monia’s mouth / eats
tangerines” (121), or even some sort of mini-circus production is
performed:
—Children,stand with circular frightened faces glaring at the

shabby tiny smiling,man in whose hand the crank goes desprately,
round and round pointing to the queer monkey
(if you toss him a coin he will pick it cleverly from,the air and
stuff it seriously in,his minute pocket) (109)
Even brothels can be used for purposes other than intended, it is possible
just to sit, watch, and perhaps converse with Death (83).
This is a resistance that “often works outside the law” (McCann 1999,
168), as it is exemplified by the already mentioned drinking and serving
of alcohol, the turning of the streets into brothels, and other similar
practices. Dick Mid’s “gang got shot up twice” (Cummings 1994, 134)
and he was not afraid to kill Jimmie, just for the simple fact that they “had
some rows / over percent” (134). It is a place where bodies on the curb are
everyday, both murdered and drunk:
on the frying
curb the
quiet face
lay
which had been dorothy (76)
The resistance that works outside the law even “uses violence in order
literally to take space” (McCann 1999, 168), in order to be able to
effectively transform space. The people of Tulips & Chimneys “have the
unique capacity to interpret, create and subvert aspects of planned
development envisaged by policy makers” (Jacobs 2002, 103), even if it
takes violence. These places that spring from these struggles are what
McCann (1999) calls after Lefebvre as “counter-spaces” (180).
The spatiality of Tulips & Chimneys in Lefebvre’s conceptual triad can
be set as follows: the layout of New York City as it was given in the
period when the poems take place is the basic representation of space that
the volume builds on. It is “the space of planners and bureaucrats,
constructed through discourse. […] It is only encountered through the […]
abstractions contained in plans, codes, and designs” (McCann 1999, 172).
The representational space of the volume—or “the space of the
imagination through which life is directly lived” (ibid)—is multi-layered.
The first layer of it is what I have termed as cartographic fictional space.
This space is still in connection with the representation of space, as it is
still cartographic in nature, but it differs from that in its unwillingness to
appear as homogeneous. The cartographic fictional space already entails
an act of deliberate and visible selection. The second layer is what I have
termed as sacred fictional space, a thoroughly regrouped and restructured
space; a space that is restructured according to the intensity of experience.
This restructuring is done through the spatial practices of the volume’s
active agents: workers, prostitutes, pimps, aesthetes, and so on; through
their “everyday routines and experience that ‘secrete’ their own social
spaces” (172).
The position of the speaking voice of the poems that describes, or
rather inscribes this world seems close to what Zukin (1998) after Walter
Benjamin calls the flâneur, “an independent but impecunious single man
who strolled the city’s streets and frequented the consumption spaces of
cafés, nightclubs and shops, on the lookout for the new, the exciting and
150 Zénó Vernyik
the unfamiliar” (828). However, although the position of this voice is

close to that of the flâneur, it is not equivalent with it. Hardy (1995)
rightly points out that the flâneur is more than an independent young man
looking for some excitement. This kind of man is a “nostalgically
aristocratic figure […] lost in contemplation of myriad Otherness” (Hardy
1995, 127). The key words here are aristocratic and Otherness. The
flâneur is in a position outside the circles of those whom he surveys, and
above them. However, the speaking voice of the volume is not necessarily
in such a position, or at least not always. Although he just “paused a
moment” (Cummings 1994, 76) to take a look at the drunk body of a
prostitute that lay on the curb, he states sentimentally, seeing the poor
monkey of the street musician:
for i am they are pointing at the queer monkey with a little

oldish doll-like face and hairy arms like an ogre and rubbercolour-
ed hands and feet filled with quick fingers and a remarkable tail (109)
There are other poems like the one above; poems where the speaker really
“waxes sentimental about skyscrapers and gum chewing molls and sweat
and sunsets just as other poets have been sentimental about pale ladies and
panting bosoms” (Auslander [1927] 1981, 84). An example can be “[by
god i want above fourteenth],” where the speaking voice continuously
talks in the first person about his emotions about the city, or “[i was sitting
in mcsorley’s. outside it was New York and beauti-],” where he takes
part in the action, not only observes what is happening.
However, even if the speaking voice is not to be considered a flâneur,
his capacity to walk around in the space of the volume’s New York City is
crucial. It is so because “[w]alking disrupts the order of cities and enables
the individual to establish their own imaginary or conceptual space”
(Jacobs 2002, 108). This is the characteristic that makes this speaking
voice capable of describing more than the representation of space,
showing also spatial practices in action, and making it possible for
coming up with some representational space.
Conclusion
Although it was possible to show that E. E. Cummings’ Tulips &
Chimneys has a unified, intriguingly complex and somewhat subversive
city concept that would deserve much more critical notice than has been
paid by critics, the present essay can be nothing but a short and
incomplete introduction to the field. Through incorporating the analysis of
the city of the remaining volumes, no doubt a much more comprehensive
and complex understanding of the role and importance of the city in the
work of Cummings can be gained. The intriguing question of how the city
changed in later volumes, if it did, could then also be answered.
Furthermore, beyond establishing the general character of the socio-
spatial dynamics of the urban space, a precise, poem-to-poem analysis of
the racial, gender and ethnical characteristics of the inhabitants of
Cummings’ New York City would be of much use. A comparison of New
York City to other cities and towns that appear in his poetry, or even in
his prose, would also deserve some serious analysis. Paris, Boston and
Cambridge, MA are obvious choices. Moscow, although less evident, can
also bring fruitful results. How is the city of Cummings’ œuvre related to
the cities of other American or Modernist writers? What is the relationship
of the idealized concepts of Nature and countryside to that of the city?
How does the city appear in his paintings and drawings? In what ways are
the visual and the textual city related? Is it really true that whenever
Cummings dealt with city scenes and everyday people, he was scorning
and elitist, not knowing any voice other than that of sarcasm and irony as
claimed by many? How and when do trademarks and advertisements
appear in the space of his urban poetry? What is the exact relationship
between the lyric voice and the people that populate the cities of
Cummings’ volumes of poetry? What is the status of the prostitutes in
these cities?
These and similar questions that are yet to be answered show that there
is still much to do in connection with the topic of the city in the œuvre of
Cummings. Although up to this point ignored by critics and scholars, this
seems to be one of the most intriguing aspects of his poetry. The results
springing from the analysis of the city in Tulips & Chimneys show that it
is worth considering the poetry of E. E. Cummings from points of view
heretofore neglected. They underline that there is a possibility, indeed, to
discover new aspects of his œuvre that might even lead to a radical
reconsideration of his art, but at least to a more thorough understanding of
the scale and variety of the œuvre.
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—. 1994. Complete poems, 1904-1962. Ed. George James Firmage. New
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—. 1996. (Re)valuing Cummings: Further essays on the poet, 1962-1993.
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Part IV: Amongst Arts
CROSSING GENERIC BOUNDARIES:
SCULPTURE, PAINTING AND ENGRAVING
AS COMPENSATIONS FOR E. E. CUMMINGS’
HERMENEUTIC SHORT-CUTS
CLAUDIA DESBLACHES,
UNIVERSITÉ RENNES 2—HAUTE BRETAGNE
Following Cummings’ ambidextrous talents, our project here is to

study how the poetic image can get some inspiration from the visual
image; indeed it is this interaction between the idea and the image that we
would like to focus upon, while looking at the various techniques of the
fixed or mobile image which Cummings adapts in his written work. Some
of E. E. Cummings’ poems turn language so much upside down that the
hermeneutic codes of mimesis are finally abolished. However, the
obstacles encountered are palliated owing to abundant references to
images. Certain clues for the interpretation of his difficult poems might be
found in various sculptures, paintings (among which some are by the poet)
and engravings. For example, “my lady is an ivory garden” (1918) seems
to be constructed in the same way as Arcimboldo’s La Flora (end of the
16th century): both are based upon the repetition of a single signifier. Other
poems like “children singing in stone a” (1940) are built upon the
repetition of a limited number of signifiers such as “children”, “stone”
which call to mind the implicit reference to Donatello’s sculpture La
Cantoria (1433-1439). A comparison between the composition of diverse
images and Cummings’ poem may merit a return to textual signs.
“my lady is an ivory garden” / La Flora: Diverted

Composite Portraits on an Easel
What is surprising in “my lady is an ivory garden” (Cummings 1991,
VIII, Poems left with Elaine Orr, 1918-19, 964), is the systematic
The Visual Arts as Compensations for Cummings’ 157
Hermeneutic Short-Cuts
repetition of the same term, the noun “flower”, which should traditionally
be understood as the final aesthetic achievement of a poem dedicated to
the beloved. It might not be so surprising if we remember Arcimboldo’s
composite paintings, such as La Flora, Vertumnus or L’Amiral, these 16th
century anthropomorphic still lives which bring together on a bust
structure a referent and its unique odor, be it a flower or a fish. The
apparently easy humorous analogy between two clearly opposed smells or
perfumes unfortunately does not reflect the obstacles the reader
encounters faced with Cummings’ poem and Arcimboldo’s painting. Our
concern here is the idea that Arcimboldo’s heads could be regarded as
pedagogical illustrations for Cummings’ poem and contribute to the
understanding of the depletion of the floral imagery. Indeed, the painted
flowers are juxtaposed to such an extent that the combination ends up
being figurative, finally representing a human face, that of Nina Flora.
Similarly, by whispering sweet nothings in the woman’s ear or
according to the French translation (counting flowers), sending flowers to
the woman counting them one by one, Cummings covers the woman with
flowers, showering pastoral praise on his beloved. The poet seems to
apply the French metaphor literally as he counts the flowers (“her eyes
and her mouth are three flowers/ her hand is five flowers”) like the painter
who places numerous flowers on her bust. The narrator’s feelings are
grafted on a generic flower, the adjectives qualifying the desiring subject
only (“her nostrils are timid and exquisite flowers”). Poem and painting
resort to a “rotary image” (Barthes 1978, 18) in so far as the possible
permutation between woman and flower (as signifier and signified) is
added to the untimely presence of the desiring subject :
my lady is an ivory garden

who is filled with flowers.
Under the silent and great blossom

of subtle colour which is her hair
her ear is a frail and mysterious flower
her nostrils
are timid and exquisite
flowers skilfully moving
with the least caress of breathing,her
eyes and her mouth are three flowers. My lady
is an ivory garden
her shoulders are smooth and shining
flowers
beneath which are the sharp and new
158 Claudia Desblaches
flowers of her little breasts tilting upward with love

her hand is five flowers
upon her whitest belly there is a clever dreamshaped flower
(…)
the sudden flower of complete amazement

(CP, VIII, Poems left with Elaine Orr, 1918-19, 964)
The stuttering of desire at work in both poetic and pictorial productions

has heuristic virtues: the flower is proposed as a space open to
interpretation (Barthes [1953] 1972, 38). Truly indeed, the reader can
endow this signifier with all his fanciful ideas since “my lady” and Nina
Flora are fake portraits. Deceived by these images which bypass the
intentions of the initial portrait, the reader wonders about the hermeneutic
path to be followed. Obviously, one could speak about the proliferation of
images or the swarming of signs:1 along the body or the bust, the floral
comparing element is multiplied. The description which does not tell us
anything about the beloved, leads to a discovery on the reader’s part: the
poem is literally discoloured (the object is no longer qualified) whereas
the painting transforms itself into a floral mosaic.
If we look at La Flora after reading the poem, it could be interpreted as
an allegory of desire; in other words, Cummings’ poem enables
Arcimboldo’s still life to be reactivated by projecting the desiring
subject’s narcissism. Cummings’ words might help to sublimate the
image, preventing the excessive proliferation of connoted signs or
“dysphoric values” (Barthes 1993b, 1422) such as the debasing
interpretation put forward by Barthes for whom “a leprosy of flowers
contaminate the face, the neck and the bust” (Barthes 1978, 68). Without
yielding to euphoria, we tend to notice that owing to the act of reading
Cummings’ poem, the skin disease or the pulverulence is cured by the
emerging efflorescent desire.
Conversely, if we read the poem after contemplating the flower-
bearing bust, the reader notices that the floral metaphors understood
literally (“compter fleurette”, “Flore is a flower”, “my lady is a (...)
garden”, “the woman’s flower”) have taken shape, that the linguistic
metaphor which could only be read, is now visible to the naked eye.
According to our analysis, desire is partly hidden beneath the flowers and
partly shown with the series of adjectives. There are other works which
can be deciphered at first glance without any diversion or hidden message.
This is the case of Cummings’ performative or performing poems which
simultaneously propose to read and see their meaning.
The series of poems entitled “Chansons Innocentes” (27) offers a
literal application of mimesis. The onlooker is invited to an interactive

game with the children who play hopscotch or jump rope. The way words
are mimetically distributed on the page is a visual metaphor for the playful
jumps while the reader’s gaze bounces from one line to another. It could
be argued that the text stages the characters’ physical jumps, the reader’s
optical leaps as well as the sudden changes of meaning. The observer is
thus connected to a text which ruptures “stick out a mile” and invite to a
deciphering process:
Chansons Innocentes (CP, 1922, I, 27)
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
(…)
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it’s
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
To take just one or two examples of the performative quality of the

poem, one could have a quick look at the way meaning is conveyed by
typography when the balloon man’s limp is visible at the enjambment,
where the line is mutilated: “luscious the little/ lame balloonMan”. Then
he compensates this faint masculinity by urinating as far away as he can.
The word “far” is more and more performative of its own etymology, the
visible performance of the balloon man is aptly represented in the text:
“far and wee/ far and wee”, then “far/and/ wee;”.
The urinary performance of the lame balloon man is an invitation to
the reader to be more and more performing in his interpretative gesture
with blanks and punctuation marks replacing images. Cummings proposes
a re-appropriation gesture, that of the reinvestment of the sensual world
via signifiers. It is this re-appropriation gesture which is at stake in a poem
inspired by Donatello’s bas-relief.
The Sequential Image: Cummings’ Dwarfed Signifiers

and Donatello’s Dwarfed Reliefs
Cummings’ “these children singing in stone a” (CP, 525) goes beyond
the simple homage to Donatello’s sculpture (Fig. 4-2), La Cantoria (1433-
1439): one could even interpret it as the textual reproduction of the plane
relief invented by the Florentine artist (Breuille 1990, VI, 115). The
preliminary visualisation of the sculpture enables the reader to understand
the surprising repetitive use of four combined signifiers: “children”,
“flowers”, “singing”, and “stone”. The poem’s being taken over by the
sculpture can partly provide a clue to the lexical restrictions of the poem
with a look at the construction of the bas relief. Indeed, the successive and
repetitive planes of the sculpture aim at conveying the idea of maximal
space with minimal relief. Similarly, Cummings tries to offer maximal
realistic impact with few signifiers. The meaning of the text is thus
directly accessible to the reader in a moment of explosive realism,
Donatello’s successive planes corresponding to Cummings’ repetitive
variations.
these children singing in stone a
silence of stone these

little children wound with stone
flowers opening for
ever these silently lit

the children are petals
their song is a flower of
always their flowers
of stone are
silently singing
a song more silent
than silence these always
(…)forever to always children singing forever

a song made
of silent as stone silence of
song
“these children singing in stone a”, CP, 50 POEMS, n°37, 525,

1940.
While reading the sculpted image, one understands how the poet
strives to reproduce the pathetic and expressive force of the singing
children by the recurrence of the same lexemes. The repetition and
combination motifs of the sculpture are an echo of Cummings’ variations
on the same series of signifiers. Cummings’ “flowers of stone” correspond
to the round flowers frieze above the relief and the duality of characters is
rendered by the poem’s two-two association of words (“children wound
with stones”/ the children are petals”).
It seems crucial to note that both artistic modes converge all the more
since both artists remain faithful to the laws of linear perspective: the
unbroken friezes of putti correspond to the refrains and lexical
combinations along the syntactical chain interrupted at the enjambment:
these children singing in stone a

silence of stone these
little children wound with stone
While the frieze is inspired by the syntax of Roman art and Egyptian
sarcophagus (Lemaître and Lessing 2003, 103), one could argue that the
frieze enables us to mark out the poem’s syntax. The enjambments remind
us of the frieze’s brutal interruption which gives the illusion that
characters have been displaced (Pope-Hennessy 1993, 75). In the
sculpture, the linear perspective is combined with the illusion of
perspective also obtained by the dwarfed relief. The characters stand out
slightly forward on a flat surface. In the poem, the lexeme “children”
stands out from the architecture of the page as the key word, turning into a
combination of different words (singing children, children of stone,
flowery children). Both works of art are thus built around the tight
superposition of successive spatial (Donatello) or semantic (Cummings)
planes. The reader leafs through the different layers of meaning before
grasping a story, whereas the observer goes over different superposed
architectural levels before grasping the figures standing out. Both
creations are understood progressively, via this invitation to develop
viewpoints. The poem and the sculpture reach a compromise between the
semantic and spatial emphasis of singing children and their insertion in
diegetic time. The low relief and its flattened objects, the poem and its
depleted signifiers throw light on each other using sequential planes.
There are other cases when Cummings’ textual message is doubled by
an iconographic one: on top of Cummings’ “may i feel said he” (CP, No
Thanks, 399), a poem written in 1935 and illustrated by one of Marc
Chagall’s paintings (1887-1985), one could here deal with the poet’s “twin
obsessions” expressed in the poem “the surely” (CP, W, ViVa, 1931, 313)
itself illustrated by the poet’s oil on canvas Noise Number 13 (Fig. 4-1).2
Cummings’ Diptychs or Dynamic Cones: Noise Number 13

and “the surely”
The duet formed by the oil painting Noise Number 13 (Fig. 4-1, 1925)
and the poem “the surely” (CP,W, ViVa, 1931, 313) is one example of
Cummings’ eagerness to reinforce the verbal by the visual. This painting
is an abstract piece of work and corresponds to the aesthetic movement
Cummings followed up to 1922 when he finally dedicated himself to a
more realistic or representative kind of art as in Portrait of the Artist’s
mother (1942), Suicide (1931), or Sea (1944), these paintings being an
echo of his mimetic or iconic poems.
In “the surely” (313), the disorder resulting from the shortened or
lengthened lines displays the meaning of the abstract painting with its
conflicting and combined lines and curves. Contrary to the colors or
shapes which question the relevance of the painting’s figurative force, the
poem’s words are not deprived of their meaning but tend towards the
clarification of the pictorial image. It is as if poetic words made up for the
painting’s fragmented images. The text gives the cue to the pictorial
motifs which are a delightful sight and refract in the written language: “the
surely/ Cued/ motifs smites truly to Beautifully/ retire through its
English.”
Indeed, some verbal tricks seem to work hand in hand with the
pictorial ones. For example, formal spirals seem duplicated in sound
spirals: the repetition of curves and lines are transcribed in the poem by
sound repetitions, alliterations in “o” or “p” (“whipped the top leaps
bounding upon other tops to caroming”). The painting’s plastic rimes are
illustrated by the poetic rimes, an analogy that Picasso underlines in his
words about Art: “a painting is never akin to prose, it is poetry, it is
written with lines which correspond to plastic rimes. Plastic rimes are
rimes which reverberate, answer other shapes and the surrounding space.”
(my translation). Like Picasso’s paintings, which, according to Cummings,

offer moving things to the onlooker (“Picasso/ You give us things which
bulge”) as well as judicious cuts (“you hew form truly”, “Picasso”, 95),
Cummings’ twin works embrace the same dynamic of dissolution.
Cummings forgets icons to yield to cones, spheres, pipes, spirals and other
Cézanne-like forms. The mobile, dissected shapes convey a spatial
structure whereas the sound-colored poem turns into a resonance chamber.
Sounds carom like the circles which collide with rectilinear pipes:
“Concentric geometries of transparency sligtly/ joggled sink through
algebras of proud/ inwardlyness to collide spirally with iron arithmetics/
and mesh with.”
Figure 4.1: E. E. Cummings 1894-1962, Noise Number 13, 1925, Oil on canvas,
59 9/16 x 42 ¾ in (151.29 x 108.59 cm) Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York. Photograph by Geoffrey Clements.
Sounds and colours are associated owing to this parallelism between

visual and verbal spaces, a visible correspondence in the creation of an
adjectival neologism “noisecoloured curvecorners.” Curve corners
coloured with noise, simultaneously ascending and descending trajectories
(“uPDownwardishly”), “freezing fire”): text and image give victory to
oxymoron, synesthesia, tensions and oppositions peculiar to abstract art.
Another correlation is the added superposed suffixes (“fast er ish ly” )
which (paradoxically) slow down the reading process and correspond to
the different stratum and oblique lines whose forward or backward
movements come up against superposed circles. The aesthetic quality of
dilatation and distortion is expressed by grafted grammatical morphemes
and overlapping visual forms:
III
the surely
Cued
motif smites truly to Beautifully
retire through its english
the Forwardflung backwardSpinning hoop returns fasterishly

whipped the top leaps bounding upon other tops to caroming
off persist displacing Its own and their Lives who
grow slowly and first into different deaths
Concentric geometries of transparency slightly

joggled sink through algebras of proud
inwardlyness to collide spirally with iron arithmetics

and mesh witH
Which when both
march outward into the freezing fire of Thickness)points
uPDownardishly
find everywheres noisecoloured
curvecorners gush silently perpetuating solids(More
fluid Than gas
«the surely», CP, W, ViVa, 313, 1931.
Like an analytical cubist work of art, where competing shapes coexist

in space without representing anything, Noise Number 13 debunks the
laws of linear perspective and whole objects. It is difficult for the reader to
take into account all these multiple points of view : the four eyes in the
painting which face him and give him a sidelong glance, the jerky spirals,
abrupt lines which converge towards semi-circles themselves hidden under
other shapes. Without being unintelligible like all the expressionist works
of art which blur the grammatical nature of words or the identification of
objects, Cummings’ poem and painting make meaning and angles of
vision proliferate.
With words and lines “giving him the tip-off towards the unknown”3,
the painting’s centrifugal force and the poet’s imaginary drive suggest to
the reader a frameless vision and an interpretation he has to come up with.
The pedagogical strength of text and painting is handed over to projections
beyond the work of art. The poem strives to decipher the painting, giving
voice to the emotional vein of the abstract work of art but it is in its turn
contaminated by this play on fluid imaginary forms that verbal language
can not grasp (“More/ fluid Than gas.”) The reader’s imagination is
appealed to by outward lines and by polysemy or grammatical metaphors
(“find everywheres”), all the deformations which only demand to be
straightened out. Text and image tear their explanatory frame open to
favor the frameless flight of imagination. These deformed lines, curves
and words may call to mind the cylindrical anamorphic quality of Noise
Number 13 and the deformation Cummings often imposes on a poem’s
signifier to give birth to an unexpected signified. One could imagine that
Cummings’ signifiers have been forced through a semi-cylindrical mirror
which distorts words as we get closer to its surface (Baltrušaitis 1984,
215). The distorted image expects the reader to give it a meaning in a
retrospective gesture, when he looks at it from a different angle.
Optical Changes: Cummings’ Disguised Images and Hans

Holbein’s Anamorphosis (The Ambassadors, 1533)
Christian Prigent is one of the first critics who has dealt with the
anamorphic quality of Cummings’ language. I would like to go back to
this idea, drawing a parallel between the poet’s distortions and Hans
Holbein’s famous painting (Fig. 4-2) or Bracelli’s less famous Tuscany
engravings (Fig. 4-3). Let’s first have a close look at the Ambassadors’s
cuttlebone, which as we get closer to the painting, looking at it from the
top left angle, appears as a skull:
Similarly, the mutilations of the signifier Cummings imposes on language

entail a surplus of meaning and the imaginative reader, stepping back and
striving to reconstruct the poem succeeds in finding a new equilibrium for
its morphological aspect. Distorted grammar provides an enigma to be

deciphered. The solution is found when the reader tries to unravel the
meaning of these grammatical metaphors, hence generating an unexpected
surge of meaning.
Fig. 4-2: Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533,

National Gallery, London
For example, a unique grammatical function occupied by two terms

questions the generic role of grammar. In the poem, “on the Madam’s best
april” (CP, One, 1926, 249), the juxtaposition of two articles (“eyes and
making twice the a week”) revives the fixed syntagm as if intensity was
counterbalanced by habit. This grammatical spoonerism conveys an
oblique truth and infers the same restructuring process necessary to the
understanding of a pictorial anamorphic image. The disconnected forms
destroy the intuitive understanding of the work of art to entail a fruitful
return on their oblique truth.
Thus, in the poem “l(a” (CP, 673, 95 Poems, 1958), Cummings stretches
the writing of the word to represent the signified: the falling of the leaf:
l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
The abstract signifier (letters) is thus converted, while we are reading, in a

concrete signified : the fixed word in its etymology becomes a falling leaf.
Cummings’ poem turns the denotative into the figurative, a bit like J. F.
Niceron who succeeds in stretching a chair to give it the aspect of a bench in
his Anamorphosis of a chair (1638; in Baltrušaitis 1984, 7).
Cummings’ Grammatical Conversions and Bracelli’s

Bizarreries (1624)
Like the word “leaf” unfolded on the page or like the chair stretched to a
bench, meaning surges from every corner, from linear disorder, from the
places where Cummings makes sign or syntax burst into several units,
inviting the reader to patch things up, detach them or unfold them further in
a sole aim: getting more semantic perspective. Thus, Cummings would
undermine his signifiers to condense meaning. The poem
“swi(/across!gold’s” (429, n°46, No Thanks, 1935) is one example of that
strategy. In the formation of the expression “blac/kl(ness)y”, the reader is
invited to decipher a tripartite word : “black” and its derived forms
“blackness”, “blackly” have the same status in the sentence. Similarly, the
onlooker is invited to break up Bracelli’s engravings into several component
parts made of conflicting signifiers. For example, in his Composed Figure,
dated 1624, two figures (apparently a man with a bunch of flowers and a
woman next to him) are represented with either full or empty assembled
triangles (the same technique appears in Fig. 4-3, Duel pour la Toison d’Or,
1624). Whereas Cummings converts letters into a falling leaf or an adjective
into a lengthened agrammatical adverb, Bracelli converts the couple’s
anatomy into formal cubes.
Fig. 4-3: Giovanni Battista Bracelli, “Duel pour la Toison d’Or”

in Bizzarie di Varie Figure, 1624, Livorno
If we wish to analyse the reasons for Cummings’ invented severed

expression, the game can be read as a reflection on perception or the
impossibility to dissociate (as in language) the lexical root (“black”), the
adverb (“ly”) and the notion (“ness”). The adjectival formation (“blac”)
distorted during the act of reading, would be the minimal reference (since
“ck” is a morphological convention). One also notices that the adverb
anticipates the substantive (“kl”) but can only be formed once the notion is
assimilated (“ness”). In other words, three elements amount to one: sign,
emotion or perception (which implies the subject projecting himself to look
at the world) and abstract meaning (which is more global). Indeed, this
weird agglutination of suffixes urges the reader to cut the anamorphic
adverb to reveal and understand afterwards (at second glance) a little
revolutionary and accurate linguistic lesson on the artificial quality of
language…
With his abundant use of images, can we consider Cummings as an
imagist poet? The clarity of fixed words is counterbalanced by the
movements of signs, anamorphosis and the moving image advocated by
Cummings. The possibility of retracing the fixity of icons and images in
his poetry, whose meaning can be unravelled at first glance, seems
fortuitous. Cummings invites the reader to go through the image to
understand the hermeneutic short-cuts which abound in his poetry. For

example, the litotes of signifiers in “Children singing flowers of stone”
consists of a veiled reference to the technique of the dwarfed relief applied
in La Cantoria by Donatello. These references to the sculpted, painted or
engraved image permit the initiated spectator to find useful links to come
back to the poetic network and to better understand the mental images
which shape it.
References
Baltrušaitis, Jurgis. 1984. Anamorphoses ou thaumaturgus opticus. Paris:
Flammarion.
Barthes, Roland. [1953] 1972. Le degré zéro de l’écriture. Paris: Seuil.
—. 1978. Arcimboldo. Milan: Franco Maria Ricci.
—. 1985. Sémantique de l’objet. In L’aventure sémiologique. Paris: Seuil.
—. 1993a. La civilisation de l’image. In Œuvres complètes. Vol. 1. 1410.
Paris: Seuil.
—. 1993b. Rhétorique de l’image. In Œuvres complètes. Vol. 1. 1417.
Paris: Seuil.
—. 1993c. Le problème de la signification au cinema. In Œuvres
complètes. 869. Vol. 1. Paris: Seuil.
—. 1993d. Le message photographique. In Œuvres complètes. Vol. 1. 938.
Paris: Seuil.
Breuille, Jean-Philippe, ed. 1990. Histoire universelle de l’art, Paris: Larousse.
Cohen, Milton A. 1995. Disparate twins: spontaneity in Cummings’ poetry
and painting. Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society 4:83-94.
Cummings, E. E. 1991. Complete poems 1904-1962. Ed. George J.
Legrand, C., and F. Sluys. 1955. Arcimboldo et les arcimboldesques.
Bruxelles and Paris: La Nef de Paris.
Lemaître, Alain, and Erich Lessing. 2003. Florence et la Renaissance.
Paris: Editions de l’Amateur.
Michael Webster. 1995. Reading visual poetry after futurism: Marinetti,
Apollinaire, Schwitters, Cummings. New York: Peter Lang.
Olsen, Taimi. 1996. E. E. Cummings and the futurist art movement.
Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society 5:155-161.
Pope-Hennessy, John. 1993. Donatello. New York and London: Abbeville
Press.
Prigent, Christian. 1985. La Langue et ses Monstres. Saint-Siffret: Cadex.
Rigolot, F. 1975. Le poétique et l’analogique in Sémantique de la poésie.
Paris: Seuil.
“WITH CHASTENESS OF SEA-GIRLS …”
BJÖRK’S ADAPTATION
OF E. E. CUMMINGS’ POETRY
EMÍLIA BARNA, UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL
Introduction
The adaptation of poems to music—as the adaptation of any one work
of art to a different art form—involves a reinterpretation of the original
work, focusing on specific meanings or levels of meaning and placing
more emphasis on some aspects than on others; it also involves removing
signifiers from one context and placing them into a different one where
they come into contact with other signifiers and acquire different or
additional meanings. The significance of studying adaptations lies
precisely in this fact; such a study allows us to think about the ways a
work of art acquires meaning; indeed, to think about what works of art
are—the study of adaptations remind us that they are by no means to be
viewed as fixed entities with fixed meanings.
It is with the proposition above in mind that I attempt an analysis of
three songs by the Icelandic singer and songwriter Björk, the lyrics of
which are all based on poems by the American poet E. E. Cummings. My
intention is to focus on the meanings conveyed by the songs in relation to
those conveyed by the poem, and the way those meanings come into
being: the associations and channels that partake in establishing the
context of the works and that influence their interpretation. In other words,
I intend to reflect on the process of meaning construction itself in the
interrelationship of the poet and the published poem, the songwriter and
artist, the recording, the audience, and various other media specifically
related to popular music, such as promotional videos, the album artwork,
the artist’s website, and the music press.
Björk’s Adaptation of E. E. Cummings’ Poetry 171
The Process of Signification in Popular Music

Firstly, it is important to make a number of general notes regarding the
specificities of signification in popular music.1 In popular music, images
are transmitted through the following main channels of signification:
lyrics, music—including instrumentation, melody, musical structure and
vocal—, and associations or intertextual references (Kruse 1999, 87;
Shepherd 1999, 171-174); these channels, however, are in a constant and
close interaction with one another. With their help, members of the
audience construct meanings, to which their own contexts also contribute
(Shepherd 1999, 165). Connell and Gibson define music in general as
consisting of text on the one hand and social uses and practices on the
other, and as something that can be interpreted on many levels: “popular
music refuses to provide a uniform or static text to manipulate or
deconstruct” (Connell and Gibson 2003, 3). John Shepherd and Jennifer
Giles-Davis define meaning as “a consequence of an intense dialectical
interaction between text, other adjacent texts (lyrics, images, movement)
and social, cultural and biographical contexts” (Shepherd and Giles-Davis
2000, 218). Textual channels of meaning in the case of music are the
following: sound, words (i.e. the “content” of lyrics), image, and
movement (op. cit., 219); sound itself in the case of a pop song is based on
such features as instrumentation, melody, chord progression, rhythm, or
timbre.
The context involves a perception of the identity of the artist, which, in
its turn, is expressed in performances, album art, interviews in the music
press, as well as fan discourse relating to the artist and their music.
According to Keith Negus, “a performer’s identity cannot simply be
understood by reference to the iconography and sounds of the artist alone,
but through a process in which the intentions of the artist are mediated to
various interpreting audiences” (Negus 1997, 178). The artist “as an
‘author’” actively participates in their own “visual and self-representation”
(179).
This identity, created jointly by the artist, the record industry, the
music press, and fans, relates to the perceived voice that conveys the
music or song in question, and thus to the way the audience interpret the
work itself. This, notably, does not apply in the same way to the poem,
where the artist is usually less “visible.”2 In popular music, especially in
the case of well-known and powerfully represented artists like Björk
herself, the image of the artist themselves is constructed and interpreted in
a complex, multi-channeled way. To this we may add that artists often
provide their own interpretations of their work in interviews, which also
172 Emília Barna
influences the way the audience interprets the music. Moreover, fan and
audience interaction and discourse, along with the discourse of music
journalism, can also function as feedback towards the artist and thus
influence the works of art themselves—the relationship is thus far from
being unidirectional. This multi-way communicational process has been
further enhanced by the appearance of the internet, as now there are
probably more channels of conveying and negotiating meaning, and
probably more widely used, than ever. I proceed to the analyses bearing
these premises in mind.
Björk’s Adaptations of Poems by E. E. Cummings

“Sonnets/ Unrealities XI” (2004) from Björk’s second to latest album
Medúlla is the setting to music of E. E. Cummings’ poem “it may not
always be so;and i say” (Cummings 1994b); the words of the poem and
the song lyrics are identical, except for a minor alteration in word order at
one point (“Then shall I turn my face” in the poem becomes “Then I shall
[…]” in Björk’s lyrics). It is the singer/songwriter’s third adaptation of a
Cummings sonnet, yet probably the most revealing in terms of at once the
representation of the body and bodily experience, and the multiplicity and
variety of means of signification to convey meanings in interrelated works
of art—such as an adaptation and its original.
The album itself is centered around the notion of the human body,
which musically is manifest in the enhanced utilization of the human
voice: the tracks are nearly entirely a capella, the only accompaniment is
provided by piano and programmed electronica. Besides two choirs
(Icelandic and London, respectively), the album features beatbox by
Japanese guest artist Dokaka, inuit throatsinging by guest artist Tagaq and
unique vocal contributions by many more artists, including the Roots’
Rahzel and ex-Faith No More vocalist Mike Patton. Voice is used in a
huge variety of ways: besides traditional “singing,” it is used as an
instrument through whispering, breathing, panting, and moaning; in all,
the album is characterized by raw, clear, corporeal sounds throughout. The
album title itself—medulla or marrow—refers to corporeality, to flesh and
blood human existence; the concept is thought to have been inspired in
part by Björk’s experience of giving birth to a child—a daughter—, of
becoming and being a mother (see extracts from interviews below).
As regards “Sonnets/Unrealities XI,” the track features Björk’s vocal
accompanied by a harmonizing female chorus only. This arrangement has
its specific associations: the use of the female chorus carries religious
connotations—it provides a celestial, angelic sound, while also emphasizes
femininity by comprising female voices only. As regards Björk’s voice,

the use of vocalization as a technique, applied here, is a distinctive feature
of her music, also present on previous albums; Charity Marsh and Melissa
West regard this technique as representing at once “Western society’s idea
of the natural” and betraying Icelandic influences at the same time, as it
resembles the technique of singing or narrating traditional sagas (Marsh
and West 2003, 193). Thus, the singer expresses attachment to her
homeland through the use of this technique, at the same time associating
the homeland with the natural. As Marsh and West point out, this is a
major motif of the album Homogenic (1997), but the associations are also
relevant to Medúlla (2004a) and the song in question. It is also worth
noting, that folk epic (the sagas) is an art form within which music and
literature are conjoined, and here Björk transforms a poem into a musical
piece through a similar form—a form in which the focus is on words and
the voice that articulates them.
Moving on to the words themselves,3 the names of body parts are
prevalent in the poem/lyrics: “lips” are mentioned; “fingers;” “heart”
twice; “face” twice; “hair;” and “hands.” Also frequent are words
connected to the senses such as “touch;” “clutch;” “sweet;” “hear” and
“sing.” It could be stated in general that Cummings’ poetry heavily relies
on an imagery of the body and the senses, whereby a parallel may be
drawn with the role of sensuality in Björk’s music and lyrics. Thus the
vocal technique and arrangement is paralleled by a close-up of the human
body; an intimate, at the same time obviously erotic perspective that the
reader or listener shares with the speaking voice. The prevailing pronouns
of “I” and “you” set the tone as profoundly personal; the “I” of the
poem/lyrics is talking to his/her lover—I reflect on the difference between
the “his”- and the “her”-perspective later—, mentioning a third person
also, but placing him/her in the unspecified future as the protagonist of an
“unreal,” nevertheless anticipated instance of time.
Besides the body and the senses, the reference to words and speaking
is also a focal point, demonstrated by such expressions as “and I say;” “in
such a silence;” “great writhing words;” “uttering overmuch;” “I say;”
“send me a little word;” “take her hands, / saying.” On the one hand, this
concern with speaking draws attention to the voice, which is itself an
interesting issue to be addressed when comparing the poem and the song,
given that the different implied voices—male versus female, American
versus Icelandic—, while articulating the same words, lead to different
associations. On the other hand, the words referring to speaking also point
towards the concept of narration—which, again, reinforces the association
with the tradition of folk epics—, as well as reflecting on the power of
174 Emília Barna
speech in shaping human relationships: the loved one is expected to signal

the end of their relationship through “sending” “a little word,” while the
new relationship of hers/his is acknowledged by the forsaken lover
through uttering a sentence of well-wishing (“if this should to be, i say if
this should be—/ you of my heart, send me a little word; / that i may go
unto him, and take his hands, / saying, Accept all happiness from me.”;
Cummings 1994, 147).
As mentioned before, the verbal emphasis on speaking, on voicing
thoughts, is paralleled by Björk’s use of the human voice instead of
instruments, which is a central feature of the album. As the artist explains
in the following extract from an interview in W magazine:
“I just got really bored with instruments. I started doing everything with
my voice. Then suddenly I didn’t want to work with any musicians, which
is a bit weird. I only wanted to work with vocalists.” She was inspired, she
says, by paganism, and the rather esoteric idea of returning to a universe
that is entirely human—without tools or religion or nationalities. “I wanted
the record to be like muscle, blood, flesh,” she says, pumping her fist. “We
could be in a cave somewhere and one person would start singing, and
another person would sing a beat and then the next person sing a melody,
and you could just kind of be really happy in your cave. It’s quite rootsy,”
she adds, rolling the “r” for emphasis in her native fashion.
(W magazine 2004, quoted on Bjork.com)
Here, Björk—as well as the journalist, following up on her ideas—makes

a connection between the employment of the human voice in place of
instruments (but functioning as instruments) with the notion of the human
body, on the on hand, and with roots, on the other. The following
associations are evident from the extract: the association of the body
(“muscle, bone, flesh”—the connotations of which are, notably, very
different from those of the body parts mentioned in “Sonnets/ Unrealities
XI”), as organic (i.e. as the core, as something deep—echoed by the title
itself4) with society as organic (in the sense that sociologist Émile
Durkheim speaks of organic and mechanic solidarities, c.f. Durkheim
1964), without modern institutions (“a universe that is entirely human—
without tools or religion or nationalities”) and closely tied to nature. The
concept of “paganism” Björk mentions in connection with Medúlla
similarly refers to humans living in a close relationship to nature, as
evident from the following:
Since you have said that your album was inspired by paganistic
qualities, do you believe in that religion or is it a curiosity/strong
interest?
i believe in nature . i truly don’t believe in any organised religion .
(Q&A; Bjork.com)
The culture of organic societies are, furthermore, oral cultures, and the
artist’s mentioning of singing and making music “in a cave somewhere”
reinforces this idea—thus we can draw a parallel between the homeland
“roots” her music represents and the concept of an organic society living
in a close and harmonic relationship with nature.
According to an article in The Observer (Hoggard 2005), quoting the
artist herself, “[a] major influence on Medulla (Latin for ‘marrow’) was
Björk’s pregnancy with Isadora: the album is full of touching, visceral
songs about birth. ‘I became really aware of my muscles and bones. Your
body just takes over and does incredible things.’” Indeed, she is asked and
speaks about questions of motherhood in interviews, of caring and
“feminism”—the question of keeping a balance between her family and
her work, as the following two extracts illustrate:
She’s open about the problems of balancing family and work. ‘It’s
incredible how nature sets females up to take care of people, and yet it is
tricky for them to take care of themselves.’ Slightly to her astonishment
she is becoming interested in women’s rights. Because of her mother's
own militancy—‘she wouldn’t enter the kitchen, I mean come on’ - she
reacted the other way, adoring housework, knitting and sewing.
(Hoggard 2005)
She talks about a new-found need to come to terms with issues concerning
women’s rights at and after the turn of the century, and her ensuing
willingness to speak out on feminist subjects:
But recently, ‘I have been noticing how much harder it is for me and my
girlfriends to juggle things than it is for men. In the 1990s, there was a lot
of optimism: we thought we’d finally sorted out equal rights for men and
women ... and then suddenly it just crashed. I think this is my first time in
all the hundreds of interviews I’ve done, that I’ve actually jumped on the
feminist bandwagon. In the past I always wanted to change the subject.
But I think now it’s time to bring up all these issues. I wish it wasn’t, but
I’ll do it, I’m up for doing the dirty work!’
(Hoggard 2005)
Following up on the same idea, she talks about female roles specifically in
connection with her motherhood: making a comparison with her own
176 Emília Barna
upbringing, she acknowledges the challenge of bringing up a daughter and

trying to provide her with a context of socialization which is critical with
regard to prescribed female roles:
‘It’s interesting for me to bring up a girl. You go to the toy store and the
female characters there—Cinderella, the lady in Beauty and the Beast—
their major task is to find Prince Charming. And I’m like, wait a minute—
it’s 2005! We’ve fought so hard to have a say, and not just live through
our partners, and yet you’re still seeing two-year-old girls with this
message pushed at them that the only important thing is to find this
amazing dress so that the guy will want you. It’s something my mum
pointed out to me when I was little—so much that I almost threw up—but
she’s right.’
(Hoggard 2005)
The question of the female role, as defined against the role of the male,
is relevant to “Sonnets/ Unrealities XI” itself, since, in the song, the voice
speaking is a woman who acquires a role in a romantic/ sexual
relationship. In connection with the question of female and male roles, of
“femininity” and “masculinity,” it is worth quoting Marsh and West
(2003), who discuss the way the artists Madonna and Björk both manage
to transcend the natural versus technological dichotomy. According to the
authors, Madonna transcends the opposition through the articulation of her
motherhood in a dance- (techno-)influenced track; Björk through the
portrayal of her homeland and her relationship to her homeland through
the use of electronica music on the album Homogenic (1997). This natural
against technological dichotomy, as the authors explain, is included within
other “categories of difference,” such as the feminine versus masculine
and the subjective versus objective (Marsh and West 2003, 183). This idea,
notably, echoes Donna Haraway (1991), cited by the authors themselves,
according to whom the deconstruction of these categories of binary
opposition is a primary objective of feminism, and a primary objective
within the body politic and the critical reading of dominance. Haraway’s
oft-quoted concept of the cyborg is a notion that disposes with the
opposition of the natural (organism) and the technological (the cyber-
world).5 According to Marsh and West, this is precisely what Björk’s
music does: “By combining elements of herself and her Icelandic heritage
with the technology of electronic music, Björk has created a unique space
that blurs the line between nature/culture, feminine/masculine, body/mind
and self/other” (Marsh and West 2003,192). As they explain, within
popular music, there is “a general acceptance that some aspects of
technology [are] more natural than others;” for instance, acoustic sound is
generally interpreted as more natural than electronic sound; “warm”
sounds in electronic music—equaling, notably, the feminine—are

understood as more natural than “cold” sounds—associated with the
masculine (183). The “rock” versus “pop” distinction in amateur or
professional discourses of popular music criticism also carries within itself
associations with the masculine and the feminine. Bearing these premises
in mind, the authors conclude that “[t]hrough her refusal to hear electronic
music as cold and soulless, Björk has upset another of the characteristics
that help define electronica as a “masculine” form of music” (185). While
this applies to Homogenic, Medúlla, as we have seen, emphasizes the
“natural” or “organic” side of the dichotomy, lacking an overt
employment of technology; “Sonnets/ Unrealities XI” entirely relies on
the human voice. Also, as opposed to Homogenic, in this song, the central
theme to stand for the “natural” is the body, and not the homeland—
despite the fact that references to the homeland are also present, as I have
shown above.
Another traditional gender-based dichotomy is that of the public and
the private, where the public (the world of work, the world of politics etc.)
is traditionally regarded as the male sphere, while the private world of the
home is represented as the feminine sphere. In the following interview
extract, Björk talks about the significance of using human voices on her
album in connection with the current socio-political context:
Her last album Medulla was certainly her most political—but in a unique
way. She came up with an a capella album featuring only human voices:
yodelling, beatbox, Icelandic choral music. It was, she says, a way to
counter ‘stupid American racism and patriotism’ after 9/11. ‘I was saying,
“What about the human soul? What happened before we got involved in
problematic things like civilisation and religion and nationhood?”’
(Hoggard 2005)
In other words, she makes a statement against the espousal of nationalistic

and religious ideologies through her turning towards, and representing,
what she calls “the human soul;” the private becomes the political, or
rather, the dichotomy is transcended altogether by her denying the
importance of what is generally regarded as political (involvement with
questions of nationhood, religion etc.), and placing the notion of the
human into the centre. Her mentioning of the time “before we got
involved in problematic things like civilisation and religion and
nationhood” echoes her attempt at representing roots and a harmony
between the human world and nature. The close-up perspective of
“Sonnets/ Unrealities XI,” the focusing on a private, personal relationship,
on emotional and erotic subtleties, while common in popular music, in this
178 Emília Barna
context may also be viewed as a statement of opposing the political in the

above-described sense.
Having observed some important notions and values which underlie
the interpretation of the song in the context of the album, we can return to
the world of the song in a stricter sense. The focal point of the song,
pinpointed musically by no chorus, only Björk’s voice present, is the line
“Accept all happiness from me”—the gesture of generosity in the
imagined scene of the forsaken lover talking to the new partner of her
former loved one, followed by the words “Then I shall turn my face,”
which imply her moving away and leaving the new lovers to pursue their
happiness. The line, notably, is written as a separate single line between
two verses in the lyrics transcription on Bjork.com, while it is not
separated from the rest of the verse in the poem. The lack of chorus for
this one line brings the song even closer to a personal, “confessional
mode” (the term used by Keith Negus 1997), as well as to the mode of
conversation, to speech.
The following extract demonstrates Björk’s own interpretation of the
poem:
In Medulla you sing one of E.Cummings [sic] poems, about how he

imagines his partner being intimate with someone else so much so that
it over whelms [sic] him and he leaves her. What was it that made you
choose this poem in particular?
e.e.cummings [sic] calls this selection of poems unrealities and it is all
about the things we all imagine . i think the one i picked is number 9 or 11
. in this poem , even though he and his girlfriend are totally in love and
euphoric , he falls for the temptation of imagining how their relationship
will end . he makes up the most painful horrid end and then goes through
it in his mind how he will react . he decides he would wish both his girl
and her lover well and then walk away . so it is almost like trying to
prepare oneself for the worst . sort of making fun of also how silly we are
sometimes that when everything is perfect , instead of enjoying it to the
full we start spending energy on fearing the worst . before it happens . and
even make it happen that way . i just thought that was an interesting
human failure cummings found there and beautifully precise in it’s
complexities and worth singing about ...
(Q&A; Bjork.com)
In her own interpretation, she stresses the idea that imagining, at the same
time fearing, the worst at a time when everything is perfect, and thus
probably turning events into a self-fulfilling prophecy, is a common
human weakness, and the depiction of this weakness is the main topic of
Cummings’ poem. Her rendition of the poem/song—while, evidently,
presenting the same narrative—by emphasizing the line “Accept all

happiness from me,” places at least as much emphasis on the gesture of
acknowledging the new relationship on the part of the forsaken lover. And
this is a different human gesture and trait—whether weakness or strength,
it is up to the listener to decide.
She refers to “paranoia” in the Q&A section, and also elsewhere (“It’s
kind of him [Cummings] taking the piss of himself, when you make up
things that scare you out of nowhere—you’re just paranoid;” extract from
an interview on XFM 25 August 2004, cited on Bjork.com); yet this
interpretation is probably not obvious—definitely not the only possible
one. However, from the moment this interpretation is made public (on the
official website, on the radio, in the music press), it is likely to influence
the segment of the audience that reads or hears it as a result. Thus the
artist’s own interpretation becomes part of the collective meaning
construction process—the same way as knowledge regarding the artist’s
life course and private experiences is built into the process (the already-
mentioned connection between the “flesh and blood” album concept and
Björk’s giving birth to a child).
A further difference between the poem and the song regards the
difference in gender. The pronouns of the line “that i may go onto him,
and take his hands” are altered in Björk’s lyrics to “her;” the “you” of the
poem/lyrics is, however, only referred to as such, which in fact leaves
room for interpretation as regards the relationship—if, in Cummings’
poem, a male speaking voice is implied (this only applies if the reader is
aware of the fact that the author of the text is male), the relationship may
either be heterosexual or homosexual; and the same applies to the song,
with the difference that the speaking voice is evidently female as we hear
a woman singing.
The album art reinforces the concept of the “self-sufficiency” of the
human body: the cover features Björk’s face and upper body—the naked
skin and her woven hair; the letters of the title, in the form of a necklace
Björk is wearing, appear to be of the same material, as well as being the
same dark color as her hair. The back cover, correspondingly, depicts the
artist’s naked back and the back of her head, with her hair in many colors,
woven into various shapes; the pages of the booklet are dark, with
pictorial motifs echoing the covers. The artist herself makes the
association between the vocal-only concept and the pictorial
representation of the human body in the album art:
first and last i am a musician . so when i am doing music and people come
and collaborate they usually follow my guidance . it is different with my
visuals . i will have specific ideas , like with this one i knew it had to be
180 Emília Barna
made of woven hair only . that the hair stood for the self-sufficiency of the
vocal-only album . that you could only use your body in finishing this
work . i also knew it should be my black album . with purple ( prefer
aubergine ) no techno stuff . goth . ancient . the rest came from others .
m/m suggested the necklace and got their friends to make it .
shoplifter/hrafnhildur did the hair , ( which is amazing !! , but she is , so
there you go !! ) all the other stuff came from inez , vinoodh and m/m .
(Q&A; Bjork.com)
In sum, we may argue that while the representation of the body and the
senses in the poem is connected to sexuality, to the sexual relationship
which forms the basis of the narrative, Björk’s adaptation transforms it
into another art form with its own channels of meaning. With musical
emphasis placed on words which in the poem are not underlined, within
the context of the whole album concept and through Björk’s own
associations—articulated in interviews and on her official website—,
complete with the album artwork, the poem-turned song acquires
additional layers of meaning: the body becomes a representation of
humanity, of human’s closeness to nature, and a statement against
involvement in such ideological constructions as nation and religion.
Before Medúlla (2004a), Björk released two other songs that are
adaptations of poems by E. E. Cummings, both in the same year: “Sun In
My Mouth” (2001b) and “Mother Heroic” (2001a). The album Vespertine
(2001c), as opposed to Medúlla, is regarded as an ambient, introspective,
quiet album; the lyrics, however, are full of references to nature and to the
body, and many focus on love and the romantic relationship.
“Sun In My Mouth” is the adaptation of E. E. Cummings’ “i will wade
out/ till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers”—here, as opposed to
“Sonnets/Unrealities XI,” Björk gave the song a title of her own. Like
“Sonnets …XI,” however, the song’s emphasis is on the vocal;
accompaniment is provided by a string orchestra, a harp, and soft
electronica. The track begins with the vocal and a repetitive xylophone-
sounding pattern; at 0.21, an electronic layer with glitches is introduced.
At 0.48 (at the words “with closed eyes”) the harp is added as a third
layer, covering a wider melodic range, and a soundscape background—
provided by a string orchestra—gradually gains space, but the electronic
layer with the glitches continue. At the words “With chasteness of sea-
girls …,” the orchestra opens up with a large crescendo, highlighting the
lines “With chasteness / of sea-girls / will I complete the mystery / of my
flesh,” where the vocal simultaneously goes up into unexpectedly high
notes; the closure comes at 2.00, when the orchestra becomes quiet again
(at the second “the mystery”), the bass electronic background disappears,
and the song ends with the vocal and the xylophone in the foreground, and
the quiet orchestra in the background.
The vocal technique of Björk gives the listener the impression that she
is singing close to them, with even breaths clearly audible. Keith Negus
(1997) describes what he terms the “confessional mode” in connection
with Sinéad O’Connor’s music; such a mode, according to Negus, is
evoked musically by “the use of a restrained, intimate voice, recorded
softly and close to the microphone and with little echo;” lyrically, “by the
repeated use of the first person ‘I’” (180). The “sparsity of […] song
arrangements—the sense of emptiness and silence which suggests that
only the singer (rather than an ensemble) is present” also signifies an
intimate mode (180). These criteria apply to Björk’s rendering of “Sun In
My Mouth”—in the same way as they apply to “Sonnets/Unrealities XI;”
the intimacy of the “form” (in connection with Sinéad O’Connor, Negus
refers to confession on the level of both form and meaning; Negus 1997,
180) is paralleled by the focus on the “I” and the close perspective on the
body and the senses of the speaking voice.
Similarly to “Sonnets/Unrealities XI,” images evoking the body are
apparent in “Sun In My Mouth”/“i will wade out/ till my thighs are
steeped in burning flowers;” several parts of the body are mentioned, such
as “thighs,” “mouth,” (closed) “eyes,” “curves of the body,” and “flesh”
three times. Perhaps even more obviously than in the case of
“Sonnets…XI,” these references to the body represent not merely
corporeality, but unambiguous sexuality. The poem ends with the lines “I
will rise / After a thousand years lipping flowers / And set my teeth in the
silver of the moon”—which are omitted by Björk; instead, she repeats the
words “will I complete the mystery of my flesh,” in a style that is more
typical of a pop song (lines, typically, but not necessarily, the refrain, are
often repeated at the end). The last lines of the poem contain the words
“lip” and “teeth,” which, along with “mouth,” evoke the image of eating—
of appropriating; the aggressive side of sexuality.6 These images of the
body and sexuality, however, appear besides images of nature: the “sun,”
“air;” yet the images of nature are not realistic—“burning flowers” and
“sea-girls” refer to a mythological world, a symbolic nature merged with
images of the human body. In the case of “Sonnets … XI,” we have seen
that the body stands for the “human” and the “natural” at the same time—
it is precisely the imagery of the body that connects the two notions. In
this case, the natural—human dichotomy is transcended through the
imagery which indistinguishably combines nature with the body and the
senses. The natural—human dichotomy, notably, also involves a gendered
182 Emília Barna
opposition: nature is traditionally represented as female, and human as

male, with the human master of nature; in the poem/song, this opposition
is dissolved.
The album imagery reinforces this idea: the album cover is a perfect
illustration for “Sun In My Mouth,” as it features Björk lying on her back
in the sun, apparently sleeping—eyes closed, as in the poem/lyrics, and
with her mouth open, as if, indeed, she were to take the sun in her mouth.7
The promotional video for the song8 uses landscape imagery, but nature is
represented in an unrealistic way. The first shot implies traveling—which
movement is paralleled with a movement in the lyrics toward completion
(“With chasteness / of sea-girls / Will I complete the mystery / of my
flesh”), but as it is a reverse shot, the effect is that we are looking at the
road which we are leaving behind from the back of a car. This is followed
by a still shot of a landscape with the sun—the shot corresponds with the
lyrics “I will take the sun in my mouth,” until the line “In the sleeping
curves / of my body,” when it is followed by a reverse shot of waterfalls.
However, we should also consider the difference between a male voice
and a female voice making this connection between nature and the human.
The body parts refer to the body of the speaking voice, as the possessive
pronouns indicate (“my thighs;” “my mouth;” “the sleeping curves of my
body;” “I shall enter fingers […];” “my flesh”), and the connection
between the female body and nature is in fact a traditionally existing
association, as shown above. However, Björk uses electronica in the
music—and if we accept the already cited proposition of Marsh and West
(2003), the song transcends the gendered opposition of nature and
technology through its musical framework.
“Sun In My Mouth”/“i will wade out/ till my thighs are steeped in
burning flowers” does not have a clear narrative in the same way as
“Sonnets … XI” does; nevertheless, it is governed by a narrative motif of
movement towards completion: towards the fulfillment of—corporal or
sexual—desire and simultaneous death. The initial words “i will wade
out” already refer to movement, while the image of “dashing” “against
darkness” points towards annihilation; and, as already mentioned, the song
closes with the repetition of the lines “[…] / Will I complete the mystery /
of my flesh;” the closure is reinforced by the closure in music—the
disappearance of the layer of electronica and the decrescendo of the
orchestral background. Again, it is important to consider that when Björk
speaks about completion, she expresses it through her personal—female,
as evident from the voice—experience and through reference to her own
female body. Her own bodily and emotional experience, as mentioned, is a
recurrent lyrical theme not only on Vespertine, but in Björk’s music in
general, which apparently enables her to organically adapt the poem to fit
her own imagery, concepts and aesthetics.
The third Cummings adaptation is the song “Mother Heroic”

(originally released as the B side of the CD single Hidden Place, 2001;
featured also on the compilation album Family Tree 2002), based on the
poem “Belgium” (Cummings 1994a). As well as altering the title, Björk
uses only the third verse of the three-verse poem of Cummings
(employing repetitions of certain lines), which results in a different focus.
The main subject of the poem is mourning: the “thou” is the mother
mourning her “heroic dead.” Images of war and death are prevalent in the
first two verses: “the sudden ruin of glad homes;” “trampled fields;”
“ruin;” “the fruit of death.” Björk’s title, however, already place our
horizon of expectations elsewhere: here the prevailing image is that of the
mother, without any reference to war and the dead sons; the lyrics
communicate a more general image of mourning and sorrow.
As in the case of the other two songs, the vocal is central; melody is
carried by the vocal only, while there is a repetitive celesta background—
one-layered at the beginning, becoming two-layered at 0.40 and staying
unchanged until the end of the song. There is no crescendo here, nor any
sudden variations in the vocal melody; probably the only emphasis is on
the word “tears,” which is kept suspended for longer than any other word.
The vocal technique is very similar to the other two songs: Björk sings
very close to the microphone, with her every single breath clearly audible,
so again the established mode is very intimate.
Religious associations are prevalent in the lyrics, with references to
ecstasy, prayer, glory, and immortality; corporeality, as opposed to the
other two songs, is not emphasized. The reference to the “face” has
religious associations here, being joined with the word “ecstatic:” it
evokes the image of a saint’s ecstasy. However, the face is turned
downwards and not upwards as saints’ faces on depictions of religious
ecstasy—instead, the downward turned face, the bowed head is an
expression of sorrow, the sorrow of mourning (reinforced by the words
“thy perfect sorrows” and “tears”). Within this context of religious
imagery, the female voice speaking to a “mother” of a higher metaphysical
order (suggested by the apostrophe “Mother Heroic / Mother Glorious”)
alludes to a female version of the “great chain of being”9—which concept
functions as a metaphor of a common female experience: sorrow and
mourning—more explicitly, motherhood and the mourning of children,
with the latter is more explicit in the poem. It is perhaps this idea that the
angelic female chorus of “Sonnets/Unrealities XI” echoes. While
184 Emília Barna
Cummings’ poem makes a reference to the shared experience, this layer of

meaning is more powerful if spoken by a strong female voice, associated
with Björk’s strong female identity (see quotations on her views regarding
feminism above); in the song, the “we” of “Wherefore onto thy knee /
come we / with a prayer”10 may imply the female voice’s identification
with other women, as well as functioning as a pronoun expressing general
acknowledgement of the Mother’s or mothers’ sorrows.
Conclusion and Implications

It is evident from the analyses that the focus in Cummings’ poem on
the body and the senses, along with the close, intimate, and very personal,
“I”-centered mode of articulation, relates to Björk’s musical style: the
intimate, close-to-the-microphone vocals, the minimalism of the
background—symbolizing the lack of focus on the outside world, applying
an introspective mode instead. Also, her own lyrics in general are
similarly intimate and introspective (excepting, perhaps, her latest album
Volta), concise and precise, with a close correspondence between the
sound of her words and their meaning; in addition, thematically and
image-wise, they are often centered around the human body and the
senses. To quote Björk on the poetry of Cummings:
It goes so well in the mouth! It’s weird. He’s somebody who was born in
Boston 100 years ago. What would I have in common with him? But yeah,
it’s one of those few times when somebody writes something and you sort
of wish you could have written it. But it’s just, like, 10 times better
because it’s easy to do lyrics. It’s kind of slogans, you know? But E. E.
Cummings’s poetry is all the little bits in between.
(Anderson 2004)
Intertwined with the imagery of the body and the senses, however, the
imagery of nature in Björk’s music is just as prevalent. We have seen that
her work adjoins all these images in a unique way, in the concept of “the
human”—a concept transcending traditional gendered dichotomies,
opposed only to constructed institutions and the ideologies maintaining
those institutions. She also articulates her views on feminism and the
importance of the representation of—and the search for—harmony
between humans and nature. Being placed into this context, Cummings’
poems acquire new meanings: the representation of the body and human
emotions in “Sonnets/Unrealities XI” becomes a statement against the
involvement with nationalism, racism and gender-related ideologies; the
words of “i will wade out/ till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers,”
articulated by Björk’s female voice with an electronic background,

contributes to the deconstruction of the understanding of electronic music
as cold and masculine; and, finally, the last verse of “Belgium,” reborn as
“Mother Heroic,” becomes the expression of a universal female
experience.
References
Anderson, Laurie. 2004. Bjork: With an experimental new vocal album,
one of pop music’s great explorers continues to venture into uncharted
waters. Here, she talks living on the edge with a fellow avatar of the
avant-garde. Interview November 2004.
Björk. 1997. Homogenic. London: One Little Indian.
—. 2001a. Mother Heroic. Hidden place. London: One Little Indian.
—. 2001b. Sun In My Mouth. Vespertine. London: One Little Indian.
—. 2001c. Vespertine. London: One Little Indian.
—. 2002. Family tree. CD2 Roots. London: One Little Indian.
—. 2004a. Medúlla. London: One Little Indian.
—. 2004b. Sonnets/ Unrealities IX. Medúlla. London: One Little Indian.
—. 2007. Volta. London: One Little Indian.
Connell, John and Chris Gibson. 2003. Soundtracks: Popular music,
identity and place. London: Routledge.
Cummings, E. E. 1923. i will wade out/ till my thighs are steeped in
burning flowers. In Tulips and chimneys. New York: Thomas Seltzer.
—. 1994a. Belgium. In Complete poems, 1904-1962, ed. George J.
Firmage. 877. New York: Liveright.
—. 1994b. [it may not always be so; and i say]. In Complete poems, 1904-
1962, ed. George J. Firmage. 147. New York: Liveright.
Durkheim, Émile. 1964. The division of labor in society. Trans. George
Simpson. New York: Free Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention
of nature. London: Free Associations Books.
Hoggard, Liz. 2005. Maybe I’ll be a feminist in my old age. The Observer
13 March 2005.
Kruse, Holly. 1999. Gender. In Key terms in popular music and culture,
ed. Bruce Horner and Thomas Swiss. 85-100. Malden and Oxford:
Blackwell.
Marsh, Charity, and Melissa West. 2003. The nature/technology
opposition dismantled in the music of Madonna and Björk. In Music
and technoculture, ed. René T. A. Lysloff and Leslie C. Gay, Jr. 182-
203. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.
186 Emília Barna
Negus, Keith. 1997. Sinead O’Connor—musical mother. In Sexing the

groove: Popular music and gender, ed. Sheila Whiteley. 178-191.
London: Routledge.
Shepherd, John. 1991. Music as social text. Cambridge: Polity Press.
—. 1999. Text. In Key terms in popular music and culture, ed. Bruce
Horner and Thomas Swiss. 156-177. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell.
Shepherd, John, and Jennifer Giles-Davis. 2000. On the negotiation of
meaning. In Music, culture and society, ed. Derek B. Scott. 218-20.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
W magazine 10 July 2004.
Part V: Identity and Subjectivity
BEYOND THE SCOPE OF THE “I”
IN E. E. CUMMINGS’ LEAF POEM
KURT HARRIS, SOUTHERN UTAH UNIVERSITY
The end of linear writing is indeed the end of the book, even if, even
today, it is within the form of a book that new writings—literary or
theoretical—allow themselves to be, for better or for worse, encased. It is
less a question of confiding new writings to the envelope of a book than of
finally reading what wrote itself between the lines in the volumes. That is
why, beginning to write without the line, one begins also to reread past
writing according to a different organization of space. If today the problem
of reading occupies the forefront of science, it is because of this suspense
between two ages of writing. Because we are beginning to write, to write
differently, we must reread differently. (Derrida [1967] 1997, 86-87)
Jacques Derrida’s injunction, made initially in 1967, that we must

“reread past writing according to a different organization of space” has
been addressed, consciously or not, by many literary scholars, including
those writing about the works of E. E. Cummings. Yet the approach
Derrida suggests—applying psychoanalytic theory to written texts—has
received very little play among Cummings scholars. Moreover, the
specific type of reading Derrida advocates follows the branch of
psychoanalysis conducted by Melanie Klein, who worked mainly with
infants and children as she developed her body of work known as object
relations theory. In an effort to fill the lack noted by Derrida, this paper
performs an analysis, based on object relations theory, of one of
Cummings’s best known poems, “l(a,” or “the leaf poem.”1
One of Derrida’s footnotes on Klein is striking in its evocation of the
few letters comprising “l(a.” Derrida cites a long section from Klein’s
essay “The Role of the School in the Libidinal Development of the Child,”
(1975) which is reprinted in the collection Love, Guilt and Reparation and
Other Works (59-76). In this essay, Klein describes how several children
Beyond the Scope of the “I” in E. E. Cummings’ Leaf Poem 189
tell stories about the alphabetic characters they are writing. The letters she
analyzes include “a,” “e,” “i,” “o,” “l,” and “s,” along with the Roman
numeral “I.” Readers of Cummings’ “l(a” will remark that these few
characters combine with “f” and “n” to create the poem. Furthermore, “i”
and “I,” both of which Klein determines to be phallic and associates with
the father and authority, are iconic figures in the body of Cummings’s
work in general and in the leaf poem in particular. Klein reaches the
conclusion, “I could observe that the inhibition in respect of writing and
reading, that is, the basis for all further school activity, proceeded from the
letter ‘i,’ which, with its simple ‘up and down,’ is indeed the foundation of
all writing. . . . [T]he ‘up and down’ of ‘I’ is identical with that of ‘i’” (66-
67). Klein sees “i” and “I” as phallic signifiers that inhibit her analysands’
reading and writing, and she relates that inhibition to castration anxiety.2
While maintaining the spirit of Klein’s inquiry, I wish to detach her
ideas from their Freudian roots and graft them onto Derrida’s notions
about speech and writing as I “reread” the leaf poem. I seek to use “l(a” to
demonstrate how the paternal, “scientific” language, which we privilege in
our speech and writing, suppresses maternal, “poetic” language and,
moreover, how such suppression reinscribes the boundaries between
subject and object. I will utilize the object relations theories of Klein and
D. W. Winnicott, along with Julia Kristeva’s thoughts about language and
the mother, to develop this argument.
Before offering my analysis, a brief overview of some other readings
of Cummings’s poetry will give the reader a sense of the critical, often
paternalistic eyes through which his texts have been read. Some scholars
have been almost entirely dismissive of Cummings’s work, and many of
the leaf poem in particular. Edward M. Hood ([1959] 1984), for example,
writes, “The nervous glitter of the poem’s surface . . . blinds the infatuated
reader to its emptiness, its drab conventionality . . .” (92). T. R. Martland
(1985) claims that the poem “contributes nothing of itself, certainly no
new insights” (272). In her ([1973] 1984) review of Cummings’s collected
works, Helen Vendler laments of the poem, “I wish there were more of
these exquisite and fragile triumphs. But . . . cummings’ mind was
abysmally short on ideas, however long on gently frivolous games with
letters” (101). Nineteen years later, she somewhat pejoratively calls the
leaf poem “a little piece of conceptual art” (210).3 Those who do find
value in Cummings’s poetry often explicate it in the specialist language of
the linguist or grammarian. Richard Cureton’s 1979 essay on Cummings’s
“deviant morphology,” with its many tables and lists, is a prime example.
More recent scholarship, focusing on the iconicity (the resemblance
between sign and object) of the poet’s work, has led to greater insight into
190 Kurt Harris
the function of Cummings’s poems. Michael Webster’s (2001) notion of

“magic iconism” and Annalisa Baicchi’s (2001) distinction between
phonoiconicity and phonoindexicality offer especially compelling
analyses. Nevertheless, all of these readings are caught within the bounds
of paternal language in that they privilege the syntactic, sound-based,
ordered signification of the texts over their semiotic, graphic, disordered
representation.
The most persuasive reading of “l(a” to date, in my mind, is Martin
Heusser’s in “The Poempicture: Some Thoughts on Space and Time in the
Poetry of E. E. Cummings” (1989). Heusser’s explication of the leaf
poem, an explication I will refer to periodically in this paper, demonstrates
“how Cummings exploits the visual potential of the typeset page in order
to gain a high degree of control over his reader’s spatial and temporal
perception” (45). According to Heusser, the leaf poem in particular reveals
Cummings’s valuation of the “visual experience . . . as less artificial than
linguistic experience” (59). While Heusser’s analysis tends to ascribe
intent to Cummings as it develops its argument, I prefer to focus solely on
the text itself and analyze its unconscious “play” with language. In other
words, this paper seeks to determine, from the perspective of object
relations theory, “what wrote itself,” to borrow Derrida’s phrase, “between
the lines” of Cummings’s leaf poem.
I begin with Klein, who was an analysand of Freudians Sándor
Ferenczi and Karl Abraham; she acquired the language of psychoanalysis
through them and through her reading of Freud. Klein’s psychoanalytic
approach deviated from Freud’s, however, in that she often analyzed
children too young to express their ideas verbally or those without the
vocabulary of an educated adult. Instead of listening to her analysands, she
engaged in play with them and observed their actions and reactions in
given situations. Unlike Jacques Lacan and many other psychoanalytic
theorists who promote the influence of the paternal relations outlined by
Freud in the Oedipus complex, Klein and others in the object relations
school focus to a greater extent on the mother-child relationship.
Winnicott, one of the main proponents of object relations theory, broke
free, more or less, from Freud’s Oedipal theory, and he was able to
theorize convincingly, as few before him were, about the pre-Oedipal
infant. Likewise, Kristeva, who is not traditionally classed among the
object relations theorists, departs from Freud and his disciples in her
writings about the pre-Oedipal, pre-symbolic subject. Winnicott’s notion
of play and of the role of the transitional object within the space of play,
along with Kristeva’s distinction between semiotic language and symbolic
language, will prove especially useful in my investigation into the
maternal principles foregrounded in Cummings’ leaf poem.

I make the distinction between those whose theories are grounded in
the Oedipus complex, however much they modify it, and those whose
theories deal with the pre-Oedipal subject in order to demonstrate how
one’s unacknowledged theoretical stance can influence one’s reading of a
poem such as “l(a.” Understandably, most readings of the poem
reconstruct the words fluttering down the page and see the parenthetical “a
leaf falls” intertwined with “loneliness.” In many analyses, the reader
focuses on the typographical emphasis on the speaker’s feeling of
alienation, rendered as “I,” “one,” and “1.” However valid such readings
are, they operate under the assumption that the poem requires a re-
organization, and that the letters must conform to syntactic rules, before it
can convey meaning. Heusser (1989), for example, states, “The experience
of the individual’s loneliness is projected onto the fall of a leaf. Observing
various stages of the fall, the poet depicts the metaphysical ontogeny of
the human being: the individual, the ‘one,’ is always separated from other
individuals, from other ‘ones,’ whatever their nature” (55).
Such a reading demonstrates the operation of what Lacan calls the
Phallus, that which keeps the subject from reintegrating with other objects.
In Lacan’s reading of Freudian theory, the Phallus signifies an
unattainable locus of desire, a desire both of the Other and for the Other.
The Phallus, explains Lacan (1977), is neither imaginary (a fantasy) nor an
object; rather, it is a paternal metaphor that finds its nearest approximation
in the signifieds created by language: “it is the signifier intended to
designate as a whole the effects of the signified, in that the signifier
conditions them by its presence as a signifier” (285). The Phallus is “the
privileged signifier” that fills that gap when it disappears behind a veil as
signifier, as “ratio of the Other’s desire [for the subject]” (288). That is,
the Phallus is discernible only when it functions to satisfy desire, to fill the
gap between signified and referent, as a signifier. Based as it is on the
penis, and as it is promoted in Lacan’s writings on the nom du père,
translated as both the “Name of the Father” and “Law of the Father,” the
Phallus represents masculine power. This masculine power, exercising
itself in readings of the leaf poem and in symbolic expressions in general,
reins in the free play of signifiers so that meaning can be conveyed from
speaker to listener and from writer to reader.
The paternal regulation of linguistic signifiers is, I would argue, a
function of the primacy we accord to the spoken word over the written
word. As Derrida ([1967] 1997) points out, the spoken word is inherently
sequential, and the sequencing of sounds finds its corollary in the linear
appearance of printed words on a page. Derrida also explains that the
192 Kurt Harris
“linearization of writing” and “linearist concept of speech” are inseparable

from Western metaphysics and our notions of time and presence (72). In
order to function as social beings, we must submit to being captive to such
linearism. If, in this paper, the letters or words failed to conform to a
sequential ordering operating under the standards that readers of English
have come to expect, it would fail to communicate meaning. Likewise, we
would be unable to discern the words “loneliness” and “a leaf falls” on the
printed page. But can letters on a page convey any meaning outside of the
paternal symbolic construct?
The leaf poem suggests that they can. To the degree that the leaf poem
can be “read” in a non-linear manner—that is, without allowing our
habituated eyes to force a paternalized, combinatory semantics upon the
letters—we might discover another meaning, or other meanings, in the
poem. A basic understanding of Kleinian psychoanalysis will prove
helpful to this end. Klein’s main contribution to psychoanalytic theory is
her discovery that the infant subject passes through three stages in the
course of its psychic development: love, guilt, and reparation. It is the
success or failure of the subject’s negotiation of the guilt, which Klein
(1975) names the “depressive position,” that determines the psychic health
of the adult. The depressive position “is ushered in when the infant
recognizes his mother as a whole object. It is a constellation of object
relations and anxieties characterized by the infant’s experience of
attacking an ambivalently loved mother and losing her as an external and
internal object. This experience gives rise to pain, guilt and feelings of
loss” (Segal 1964, 105).4 The infant subject wants to be the mother, to
retain the wholeness of the mother-child bond; however, in the weaning
process, the infant finds this position untenable and becomes frustrated. In
its frustration, the infant wants to tear apart the mother, to create more
fragmentation. Subsequently, the infant’s guilt over its attempted
destruction of the mother, who is the first object recognized by the infant
as an object, leads it to work to restore the whole mother through various
means. Guilt leads to attempts at reparation, and the use of language is one
means to that end.
Cummings’s leaf poem reveals itself to be an attempt at reparation as it
expresses the writer’s negotiation of guilt and feelings of loss. The
fragmentation of recognizable words, inaugurated in the parenthesis’s
break of the “l” from the “a,” falls under the watchful eye of the “I,”
which Heusser (1989) points out serves at one and the same time as a
Roman numeral, the poem’s title, and the first person singular pronoun
(49). This first person singular pronoun “I” is the paternal, linguistic,
bounded subject and represents the position from which a writer derives
his authority. “I,” the author(ity), stands apart from the other letters on the
page and observes their fragmented, non-linear, and nearly incoherent
symbolic meaning. In order for “I” to exist as an autonomous, bounded
entity, the other letters, as representational units, must also become
coherent in order for the “I” to operate with any authority in the linguistic
system. The de-fragmentation of the other is necessary for the “I,” as a
subject acting in the symbolic world, to exist. The “I” feels guilt for
desiring to cause fragmentation, and it attempts to repair what it believes it
has undone. The authoritative writer of “l(a” re-creates the fundamental
subject/object split by “breaking apart” language and attempting to put it
back together again.
In English and in French, “la” represents the sixth note on the diatonic
scale; it is one in a sequence of notes, any of which being excluded would
render inharmonious the “language” of music. Just as significant for this
reading of “l(a,” in French, “la” is also the feminine definite article. When
whole, “la” can be vocalized, whichever of the two meanings it serves to
convey. But the poem does not give us “la” whole, it gives us a split “la.”
The partition of “la” by the “(” gives us two distinct entities: “l” and “a”.
The “l” of “la” is both an alphabetic and a numeric character, and the
destruction of the morpheme reveals this dual nature. At the same time,
this breaking of the whole “la” into two parts makes the morpheme
unpronounceable; with the disruption of its linearity comes the disruption
of its pronunciation. What is written now takes precedence over what can
be spoken. It is significant that this operation is performed upon the
feminine definite article, for the breaking of the feminine makes way for
the existence in the next line of “le,” the French masculine definite
article.5
This masculinization of the reality presented by the poem, which began
in the realm of the feminine, reflects the process by which one acquires
language. Language acquisition radically alters a subject’s reality, so
much so that one can no longer imagine, let alone communicate, the pre-
symbolic realm. Winnicott describes this process as one in which the
infant as “subjective object” becomes an “objective subject”; the mother-
child relationship prior to weaning is one in which the child does not
differentiate between itself and the mother. Subject and object do not yet
exist. Winnicott explains,
the pure female element [within the subject] relates to the breast (or to the
mother) in the sense of the baby becoming the breast (or mother), in the
sense that the object is the subject. . . . The term subjective object has been
used in describing the first object, the object not yet repudiated as a not-
me phenomenon. Here in this relatedness of pure female element to
194 Kurt Harris
“breast” is a practical application of the idea of the subjective object, and

the experience of this paves the way for the objective subject—that is, the
idea of a self, and the feeling of real that springs from the sense of having
an identity. (Winnicott 1971, 79-80)
Prior to its entrance into the world of symbolic language, the infant subject
is still fused with the mother and does not recognize, as those outside the
mother-child matrix do, that the subject (infant) exists as an entity separate
from the object (mother). Because the adult subject experiences the world
as an “objective subject” (as a whole, autonomous self, expressed in
language as “I”), he cannot fully apprehend the position of the “subjective
object” (the “la” of the “pure female element”), which has been broken
apart.
The infant subject negotiates its separation from the mother by
learning to play within “potential space” provided by the mother
(Winnicott 1971, 41). In its transition from being “in” the mother to being
“in” reality, which Winnicott links to Klein’s depressive position and calls
a “gradual disillusionment process,” the child turns to “transitional
objects,” such as a teddy bear or blanket, and to “transitional phenomena,”
such as sucking or making noises (1-25). Eventually, the incoherent
sounds develop into words, and words into sentences; shapeless drawings
develop into recognizable iconic forms, and these forms into letters. All of
these actions are, however removed from the initial process, a form of
weaning. They are part of the movement from dependence on the mother
to dependence on the self. The paternal, symbolic realm of language, with
its rules to be learned and adhered to, aids the subject’s move into the
shared reality of adults while it further separates the subject from the
mother. The Law of the Father interrupts the pre-symbolic rhythms shared
by the mother-child union.
To return to the leaf poem, the “I” that has left the mother fragmented
only to find itself in the world of paternal signification, seeks to restore the
harmony and satisfaction (in the mother) it once enjoyed. In Winnicottian
terms, the objective subject strives to return to its position as subjective
object. Its attempt leads it to find, within the poem, not the mother but a
mirror image: “af” reflecting “fa.”6 One does not find the mother in the
mirror, or at least not the whole mother, the mother-child union. One can
see only “one self,” the bounded subject that says “I” or that will say “I”
when it enters the world of spoken language. The musical tone it
destroyed when it entered the realm of the paternal can be seen in the
mirror as “fa,” a representation of the fourth note on the diatonic scale.
Between “la” and “fa” lies a gap in the sequence, a missing g, or fifth note.
The mirror displays for the “I” how the subject recognizes itself as an
object irreparably separated from other objects. As with Lacan’s mirror

stage, the “af/fa” reflection presents to the “I” the moment at which one
enters the world of the imaginary, the world of objects, the world of
discord. The rhythmic union of the maternal, broken by the paternal
language of the symbolic, cannot be reconstructed; only an image of it can
be perceived, and even that is distorted.
Another attempt to restore the fragmented mother to wholeness
appears at the poem’s midpoint as “ll.” Most readers of the leaf poem see
“ll” as two numeric characters (two “ones”), yet “ll” might also be read as
two alphabetic characters (“LL”) or as an alphabetic coupled with a
numeric character. Or it might simply be “eleven.” Iconically, the “ll”
could represent a species of twins or of two ungendered individuals, those
conforming neither to the feminine constructs represented by “la” nor to
the masculine represented by “le.” Or it might contain an element of both.
One cannot deny the image of sameness represented by “ll” at the
poem’s center, yet its multiple possible meanings point to the
impossibility of fixing meaning. “ll” defies meaning both because of the
situation in which it is placed and because it is unspeakable. In almost any
other context, the isolated figure “ll” is read aloud in English as “eleven.”
In the context of the unvocalized, perhaps unvocalizable poem, “ll” cannot
be read aloud. It is an object without meaning (in the realm of speech), yet
it is not meaningless. At this point, the leaf poem moves the written
character beyond the limitations of spoken language, for “ll” can only be
in a visual form. In speech, the ambiguity that “ll” proposes cannot be
conveyed.
In the context of “l(a,” the “l” next to the “l” reveals to the “I” that the
part of the mother to which the subject no longer has access—that
wholeness, that plenitude—is discernible only through a residual medium.
One cannot return to the whole mother physically, but transitional objects
and phenomena such as “ll” point to the imprint the whole mother has left
on the psyche. Derrida ([1967] 1997) writes that such an imprint, or
“trace,” makes form, and therefore difference, possible, and he argues that
accessibility to the trace requires the elimination of sound-meaning. To get
at an understanding of the trace, writes Derrida, “one must begin from the
possibility of neutralizing the phonic substance.” He continues,
On the one hand, the phonic element, the term, the plenitude that is called
sensible, would not appear as such without the difference or opposition
which gives them form. Such is the most evident significance of the appeal
to difference as the reduction of phonic substance. Here the appearing and
functioning of difference presupposes an originary synthesis not preceded
by any absolute simplicity. Such would be the originary trace. Without a
196 Kurt Harris
retention in the minimal unit of temporal experience, without a trace

retaining the other as other in the same, no difference would do its work
and no meaning would appear. (62)
In other words, difference, and therefore meaning, can exist only because
of an “originary trace,” a footprint, as it were, indicating a presence that is
lost to us. In the language of object relations theory, cut off from the
subjective object mother, the objective subject can perceive only a trace of
the “originary synthesis.” The originary trace cannot be expressed directly
in symbolic language; only glimpses of what is left behind can be
perceived from the borders of language in places like the “ll” of the leaf
poem.7
The poem seems to begin to mark the subject’s recognition of its
failure to restore the whole mother immediately following the “ll.” With
“s),” the subject sighs and enters the world of plurality, tense, linguistic
position, and possession. The “s,” which is added to the ends of most
nouns, French and English, to make them plural, is also added to the root
words of verbs in the third person singular indicative mood in English (as
in the sentence “a leaf falls”) or of verbs in the second person singular
indicative mood in French (as in “tu parles”). An “s” added to a proper
noun can also indicate possession in English. Singular or plural, nominal
or verbal, French or English, the “s” functions in spoken language not
simply as a sound to aid in comprehension of a static word but also as an
indicator of number, tense, and mood. Moreover, in French the terminal
“s” is oftentimes not pronounced. Written language abides by some of the
rules that spoken language does, but it also reveals rules that have been
lost to spoken language over time. That we follow these rules without
consciously applying them is evidence that we are caught within the
bounds of a language originating in speech.
The parenthesis following “s” closes off the poem’s attempts to unify
the plurality of objective reality. All objects will not come together as one
to restore the reality of the subjective object in the mother. And yet “one”
appears here. As Heusser indicates, “one” is the only recognizable word
(in English) in the entire poem. It is the word first perceived by most
readers and the image that determines the meaning of the poem for them.
Nearly everything else is lost in the shade of the “one.” The “I” resigns
itself to symbolic language represented by “one” and then makes a final
attempt to restore the lost whole mother in the “l” (of the “l(a”?) following
“one.” Numerically, the Roman “I” and the cardinal “l” convey the same
meaning, but they are different iconically. “One”—the signifier of unity,
of wholeness, of boundedness in the phonological, alphabetic language—
is a concept offering the closest approximation to union possible for a
subject caught in the symbolic world, and it is that image to which most
readers are drawn. Because “one” is the poem’s sole recognizable,
pronounceable, semantically coherent word, it is not surprising that “one”
is a phallic image in its “l” and “I” forms. And the shape of the poem itself
repeats the phallic image and further underscores that which determines
meaning in the symbolic realm.
Preceding the open parenthesis at the poem’s outset is “l,” and
immediately following the close parenthesis after “s” are “one” and “l.”
What lies between the “l” and the “l” are fragments, bits of sounds and
words. If the reader concedes to the rules of symbolic (paternal) language,
what lies between “l” and “l” are words: “a leaf falls” and “one.” This one
leaf, representative of any leaf viewed objectively in the world, can be a
trace of the subjective object, of the whole mother. Likewise, the words
themselves can serve as such a trace. In either case, despite the impression
of wholeness that the spoken “I” presents, the whole mother represented
by “la” cannot be restored.
In the end, the boundedness of the “I” position is illusory. Admittedly,
it is a position shared by all speakers and serves as an indication of our
common reality. Kristeva (1985) explains that the artist’s (read “poet’s”)
representation expresses a “semiotic disposition,” a shift in the speaking
subject away from symbolic meaning and toward a “pre-meaning and pre-
sign” (127). This semiotic disposition renews the practices of social
systems by transgressing the constraints of “scientific language” and its
apparently fixed meaning, as opposed to “poetic language” and its
multiple meanings. The leaf poem’s introduction at the end of “iness,” an
unscientific, “poetic” word referring to the quality of being “I” (of being
bounded linguistically), harkens back to the time in the developmental
spectrum at which the infant subject was no longer part of the whole
mother and not yet part of shared reality. The “iness” appearing here
points to the infans stage, the stage in the subject’s development between
union with the mother (as subjective object) and occupation of the “I”
position via language. The “iness” is that being still negotiating the split
from the mother, still trying to restore the mother, via language and other
transitional objects and phenomena. It is the position we occupy even
when we present ourselves to others as “I.”
If we are caught within the bounds of the “I” and the paternal,
“scientific” language it operates under, can we hope to comprehend pre-
symbolic meaning outside of these bounds? Probably not, but perhaps we
can get a glimpse of the pre-symbolic in the leaf poem. The use of
language in “l(a” is a form of play that finds its origins in the potential
space of the mother and the pre-symbolic infant (the Winnicottian
198 Kurt Harris
subjective object). Kristeva deals with the paradoxical situation of writing

about a reality outside the symbolic by conceptualizing a realm of feeling
separate from meaning, a realm of the semiotic separate from the
symbolic, of “heart” separate from “brain.” She explores this paradox as it
begins to take shape early in the psyche’s development. The infant, prior
to its separation from the mother, does not know, it only feels; it can make
sounds, but it cannot make meaning. Kristeva (1997) states that
“[g]enetically, the semiotic is found in the first echolalias of infants . . .”;
moreover, the semiotic has “a maternal connotation,” in contrast to the
paternal denotation of the symbolic (216). The infant’s experience as
subjective object resists signification, but that pre-symbolic, maternal
experience can be approached “by frequent syntactical ellipses which
cause the more primordial semiotic, rhythmic and intonational
determination to appear beyond what I call the symbolic function” (219-
20). The semiotic infuses “meaning-ful” discourse with echolalic, pre-
symbolic feeling, an operation one can detect in the “frequent syntactical
ellipses” of the leaf poem.
Although this paper focuses on the poem’s demonstration of the
constraints of the spoken word, I wish to address briefly the possibilities
of reading “l(a” aloud. Cummings (1969) himself wrote, “not all of my
poems are to be read aloud—some . . . are to be seen & not heard” (267-
68). The leaf poem is undoubtedly one of the poems to which he is
referring. Yet tradition and habit incite readers to attempt to read poetry
aloud. As I have indicated already, most readers see the words
“loneliness” and “a leaf falls” in the poem, and enunciating those words
consecutively is the means by which most read it aloud. I wish to propose
two alternatives to such a reading. The first would be a reading that evokes
the analysis I have offered in this paper. One could read the poem so that it
sounds somewhat like the babble of an infant: “la, le, af, fa, llllll, sss, one,
lll, iness.” Obviously, such a verbalization, without the accompanying
graphic representation, would mean little to a listener. Nevertheless, the
repeated sounds of “l,” “f,” and “s,” juxtaposed as they are, have a certain
melodic, lullaby-like quality.
Another reading invites the harmonic union of two voices, a union that
recalls (or psychically repeats) the “ll” at the poem’s center. Notice that
the only vowel missing from the poem is “u.” If the poem were to be read
aloud and retain the spirit of its graphic presence, it might be read
simultaneously by “I” and “U.” While one reader vocalizes “loneliness,”
the other states aloud, “a leaf falls.” In this reading, the two “images” of
the poem—“loneliness” and “a leaf falls”—are not consecutive (or
contiguous) but unified, and a harmony of sorts results from the
alliteration of the overlapping “l’s” spoken by the two individuals. This

spoken representation of the poem emphasizes the central “ll” and recalls
(or psychically repeats) the mother-child union.
Spoken language and written language operate within systems of rules,
certainly; the conveyance of meaning from writer to reader relies upon
rules. Yet, because of our natural tendency to privilege the spoken word
over the written—we learn to speak before we learn to write, after all—we
tend to be blinded by phoneticization, by the sounds of letters. What we
lose is the ability to play unfettered with the images we are habituated to
see as letters and words, images that can and often do, but not necessarily
must, represent sounds. The potential for “l(a” to circumvent linearity
makes it dangerous to paternal modes of discourse. It violates the space
given to the written word by playing within that space, indeed by making
the space maternal, and it invites us to play along with it. Rules might be
necessary for society to function, but they are inhibitive, sometimes
prohibitive. “Watch your tongue,” says the father. “Repress your feelings
and follow the rules.” Play invites creativity, individuality, and the
exercise of the imagination. “Sing a song,” says the mother. “Express your
feelings and follow your heart.” By inviting us to play with the language
of the father, Cummings gives us a glimpse of the lost mother.
References
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—. 1994. Complete poems 1904-1962. Ed. George James Firmage. New
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Webster, Michael. 2001. Magic iconism: Defamiliarization, sympathetic
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NOTES
Reflecting EIMI: The Iconic Meta-Sonnet, Manhood, and

Cultural Crisis in E. E. Cummings’ No Thanks
1
See the discussion of Cummings’ rejection of the strict Petrarchan form
typified by New England genteel culture in Huang-Tiller (2001). The fixity of
the sonnet tradition and its strict rules is largely a 19th-century fiction; there
were no set rules until Capel Lofft’s Laura (1813-4) made a defense of the
form, followed by Leigh Hunt, William Sharp, C. W. Russell, Charles
Tomlinson, Mark Pattison, A. T. Quiller-Couch, Charles Crandall and other
Victorian and modern critics who elaborated those rules in several major
sonnet anthologies and essays on the sonnet. Leigh Hunt’s The book of the
Sonnet (1867) lays down thirteen rules. The first two rules highlight the
perfection of the Petrarchan sonnet: “The sonnet, then in order to be a perfect
work of art, and no compromise with a difficulty, must in the first place be a
Legitimate Sonnet after the proper Italian fashion; that is to say, with but two
rhymes to the octave, and not more than three in the sestet. Secondly, it must
confine itself one leading idea, thought, or feeling” (14). Charles H. Crandall’s
Representative Sonnets by the American Poets (1890) makes a special note
regarding his inclusion of the Shakespearean sonnets and other patterns of the
sonnet as exceptional: “Being convinced of the superiority of the Petrarchan
style of sonnet, the compiler at first determined to admit no other form, at least
from living poets, but the frequent fine poems modeled on the Shakespearean
or other patterns constrained him to make frequent exceptions to the rule”
(Prefatory Notes viii). For a detailed study of the construction of the prestige
of the sonnet, in particular, the Petrarchan form, see Huang-Tiller (2000).
2
For example, Kenner (1971) recounts how Ezra Pound became a modern poet,
“the revolutionary” (81), after Ford Madox Ford’s disapproving roll on the
floor in response to Pound’s book of Canzones: “That roll, and perhaps a
‘Canzone a la Sonata: for E. P.’ which Ford dashed off to show how neutral a
diction the intricate forms might accommodate.
What do you find to boast off in our age
To boast of now, my friendly sonneteer,
And not to blush for later? … (80)
By 1939, William Carlos Williams ([1939] 1954) still denounced the sonnet as
“fascistic”: “To me the sonnet form is thoroughly banal because it is a word in
itself whose meaning is definitely fascistic” (236).
202 Notes
3
Michael Webster commented on this bifurcation between “No” and “Thanks”
during a session on Cummings in 2001.
4
According to Kennedy, “Although Cummings does not strive to duplicate the
complexity of allegorical points in Dante’s poem, he picks up correspondences
wherever he can in order to give a shape and extra dimension to his book.” See
Kennedy (1980, 329).
5
The parenthetical notes are mine.
6
In a letter written to Richard Eberhart, May 23, 1954 (Williams 1957, 325-7).
Or see Cushman (1985) for its discussion of “variable foot.”
7
Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS 1823.7 (39) folder 2 of 19, sheet
33.
8
In Dante’s cosmos, in the fifth circle, the sinners hit each other, but suffer loss
of identity because of their bestial nature.
9
According to Kennedy (1980), “Cummings was fascinated by Gould because
Joe, completely without material possessions, lived the authentic romantic life
and because he exhibited boldly his own personal uniqueness, like one of the
Delectable Mountains of La Ferté-Macé” (269).
10
Cummings’ engagement with Eastern religion and philosophy, largely
unexamined by critics, may be the subject of a future study.
11
Vincent Foster Hopper ([1938] 2001) notes that based on Pythagorean
mathematics, “36 is the first number which is both quadrangular (6x6) and
rectangular (9x4), that is the multiple of the first square numbers, 4 and 9, and
the sum of the first three cubes, 1, 8, 27. It is also a parallelogram (12x3 or
9x4) and is named ‘agreement’ because in it the first four odd numbers unite
with the first four even: 1+3+5+7=16; 2+4+6+8=20; 16+20=36” (45). The
significance attached to its number makes poem 36 an apparent nadir poem.
12
Millie M. Kidd (2002) discusses Cummings’ nongendered use of pronouns:
“Much of Cummings’ poetry undermines the social models of masculine and
feminine and offers instead a more fluid sexual identity, one that goes beyond
gender boundaries of ‘you’ and ‘me’ or ‘he’ and ‘she’ to a genderless ‘us,’ a
territory with no fixed gender roles” (48-49).
13
The final schema is part of the Clifton Waller Barrett Special Collection,
housed in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University
of Virginia, MSS 6246-a.
14
See Valarie Meliotes Arms’s excellent explication of “morsel” and “crumb”
(1979, 192-4).
15
From Sunday, May 10th through Sunday June 14th.
16
The Divine Comedy is textually and architecturally structured by the numbers
3, 9, and 10. There are 9 (3 times 3) circles or spheres in each of the three
realms, with the vestibule of Hell, the Garden of Eden, and the empyrean
Heaven added to each realm transcending toward illumination, making a total
of 10. Dante uses this numerical pattern of 9 as early as his Vita Nuova,
symbolizing the poet’s rebirth or new life. This numerical reference occurs in
No Thanks as well.
17
Cummings went to Europe to produce “a book of poems” with the award of a
Guggenheim Fellowship in April 1933. Richard Kennedy (1994) points out
Words into Pictures: E.E. Cummings’ Art Across Borders 203
“the consciously crafted literary text as Thoreau’s Walden” (86). The design,
as we can see, continued in No Thanks. “The poems gathered in Cummings’
next book of poems, No Thanks (1935), correspond in spirit to EIMI in their
fierceness of rejection and in their final affirmation that has religious or
transcendental overtones. The two books are also similar in that they reach the
apex of linguistic play: there are more successful experiments with technique
in No Thanks than in any previous or subsequent volume of Cummings’
creations” (93).
18
Mme Potiphar, semi-conscious with dropsy or an intense fever, is one of the
liars in the eighth circle of the Inferno.
19
Francis Ferguson (1984) singles out this unique use of narrative voices in
EIMI: “Cummings himself seldom indulges in theory, but he gives many
varieties of Marxian rationalizing in the very words of the rationalizers” (58).
The Posterity of Idiosyncrasies: E. E. Cummings’ Influence on

Post-War American Poetry
1
Pierre-Yves Pétillon (1992) writes : “Dans ce premier recueil, on entend
encore plusieurs voix. On repère des traces de E. E. Cummings (l’ingéniosité
visuelle)” (179).
2
The expression was forged and the concept studied by Richard D. Cureton
(1981).
3
The manifesto of the Noigrandes group dates back to 1958. Reprinted in Solt
(1968).
4
In The Birth-mark (1993), she writes: “My writing has been haunted and
inspired by a series of texts, woven in shrouds and cordage of classic
American nineteenth-century works” (45).
5
“Emily Dickinson is my strength and shelter” (Howe 1993, 2).
From Bad Boy to Curmudgeon: Cummings’ Political Evolution

1
Of course, Cummings would not have considered them “violations” at all, but
rather redefinitions of these elements: “I am fond of that precision which
creates movement,” he declared in the Foreword to is 5 (1991, 221).
2
Cummings’ friend and fellow driver, Slater Brown, was arrested for having
exchanged letters with anti-war socialist Emma Goldman about the hushed-up
French mutiny. Cummings was arrested for good measure and, when
interrogated, refused to separate himself from Brown by telling French
authorities what they wanted to hear, i.e., that he hated the Germans, even
though saying so would have released him. The French imprisoned him at La
Ferté-Macé for several months (Kennedy 1980, 148).
3
Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return (1994) shows that this criticism of America
as materialist and philistine typified the attitudes of Cummings’ generation,
204 Notes
prompting the exodus of intellectuals and artists to Paris.

4
“Today(Nov. 7)all N.Y.’s radicals are throwing up their hats in celebration of
the anniversary of Sovietism: there are big meetings everywhere--and I expect
to enjoy myself hugely . . . .” (EEC to EC, 7 Nov. 1919, in Cummings 1969,
62).
5
This circle included the sculptor Gaston Lachaise, painter Edward Nagel, and
soon-to-be editors of The Dial Scofield Thayer, Sibley Watson, and Stuart
Mitchell. Cummings enjoyed a privileged position at The Dial: Thayer and
Watson not only patronized his art generously, but published many of his
poems, drawings, and essays.
6
The years 1922-23 alone witnessed Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922),
Cummings’ Tulips and Chimneys (1923), Williams’ Spring and All (1923),
and Stevens’ Harmonium (1923).
7
In “Ballad of an Intellectual,” another unpublished slam at critics, the
intellectual in question (could it be Edmund Wilson?), on discovering that he
has nothing further to say, quickly converts to “Karl the Marx.” The speaker,
conversely, is one who “might irretrievably pause / ere believing that Stalin is
Santa Clause.” Following a jab at Mike Gold, editor of the New Masses, the
speaker concludes: “(but a rolling snowball gathers no sparks /—and the same
holds true of Karl the Marks” (Cummings 1991, 899-900).
8
And as with the democracies, so with their “sit /isn’ts” (548): they are
“morons” (899), “120 million goats” (901), “two billion pubic lice” (473), and
“mrsandmr collective foetus” (461).
9
Cf., Rousseau: “Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains” (The Social
Contract, chapter 1). “Shot and hung” might also refer to the lynchings of
blacks in the United States, which increased during the Depression.
Alternatively, the sexual conjunction of “hung” and “twot” may suggest
hedonistic distraction from the grim politics of the day.
10
Compare the greater, more flawed, and ultimately more tragic assumptions
about free speech in wartime of another political modernist, Ezra Pound,
broadcasting over Rome Radio at about the same time.
11
The poem also avoids the political-philosophical issue in Christian thought of
the just war and forgets about the “Olafs” of this war (Robert Lowell, for
example) who did “take [his] choice” as a conscientious objector.
12
In Cummings’ fairly extensive notes from this period, I don’t recall seeing any
addressing this issue.
13
It is revealing that Cummings’ two poems that seem to urge America's military
involvement both aim at Russian invasions.
14
Besides avoiding newspapers, Cummings was physically sheltered from the
world by his partner, Marion Morehouse, who acted as gatekeeper and
intermediary for any who would visit Patchin Place. As Kennedy (1980)
observes: “she so shielded him from whatever irritated him that . . . . she
seemed at times to protect him from life itself, so that he became less able to
bear the stresses of the outside world” (423).
15
The late poems contain delightful and sympathetic portraits of people in
Cummings’ everyday life—Joe Gould, the tailor Goldberger, “old mr ly / man”
for examples (Cummings 1991, 410, 523, 567)—which are as vivid and
individual as his generalizations about “mostpeople” are vapid.
16
E.g., Cummings (1969, 63, 65, 68), “since feeling is first,” “may my heart
always be open to little,” “you shall above all things be glad and young”
(1991, 291, 481, 484), Santa Claus iii (1967, 134-35).
Divine Excess: The Logic of General Economics in The

Enormous Room
1
The Enormous Room claims there are only three Delectable Mountains, but
William Todd Martin and Taimi Olsen see Jean le Nègre as a logical fourth,
because of his detailed treatment in the text.
2
Fighting, one of the primary occupations of the inmates, becomes both a
method of settling disagreements and a very functional tactic for wasting
energy. The most spectacular incidents in The Enormous Room are not simply
fistfights which are quickly resolved and contained, but ones that reach epic
proportions.
3
The final paragraph of The Enormous Room is widely regarded as
representative of C’s spiritual ascension during his time in La Ferté-Macé.
“As usual i did not find him in cafés”: I-space, “i” space, and
Spatial Cognition in E. E. Cummings’ Poetry
1
All poems and poem titles refer to the Complete Poems: 1904-1962.
2
This is in contrast to the 75 prepositions—a closed group—in the English
language which we habitually refer to when identifying spatial cues in a
sentence.
3
Kinesthetic is sensory information from muscles, tendons, joints, and body
movements. Vestibular is related to vestibule or body cavities (for example,
the mouth cavity); metaphorically, it also refers to other entrances like a
passage, hall, and lobby. Auditory is hearing, and haptic is sense of touch.
4
Martin Heusser is one of several critics, including Norman Friedman, to
identify this theme of united lovers in Cummings’ poetry. Heusser notes on
page 54 of I Am My Writing (1997), that the “togetherness of the lovers creates
for each of them a new and different self, the “youme”…. the new self formed
by the two lovers is at the same time a singular as well as a plural (“are is /
one”), and the two are “one” (as indicated by the spelling “youandme”). In this
passage, he is referring to page 84 of Etcetera: The Unpublished Poems of E.
E. Cummings (1983). In “sunlight” the lovers are described in the midst of this
process of “turning into” this other unity.
5
For more general studies of space, particularly literary and social space, see
my previous study Transcending Space: Architectural Places in Works by
Henry David Thoreau, E. E. Cummings, and John Barth (2000), for references
206 Notes
to the work of Lefebvre, Bachelard, Foucault, and Zevi.

6
Cohen notes that the original source of the phrase “seeing around” was Willard
Huntington Wright’s Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning, published
in 1915 (120).
7
As with the previous poem and the one following, I cannot claim to have
identified every term in each group, as the groupings can be seen as somewhat
inexact. My goal is simply to tag the majority of words.
8
Diagram modified from Levinson and Wilkins (2006), 3. Deixis is a “technical
term for pointing with words” (see Levelt 1993, 45).
9
Houghton notes: bMS Am 1823.5 (33), a typed draft of “as usual i did not find
him in cafes,the more dissolute.” Interestingly, the word “imperfectness” was
“unperfectness” in the draft, a word which fits in with Cummings’ schematic
use, as Richard Cureton (1979) describes it, of “’not-X’ to create a poetic
unworld peopled with unthings…un- serves as a subjective marker which
supercedes normal, referential distinctions” (222). Therefore, unperfectness
and imperfectness would have somewhat different meanings.
Sacred-Evil New York: Urban Spatiality in Tulips & Chimneys

1
See, for example “[one winter afternoon]” or “[F is for foetus(a]”
2
See “[anyone lived in a pretty how town]”.
3
The poem mentions only “fourteenth”, but Fourteenth Avenue would be too
far from the rest, and “fifth” being “above” fourteenth can be understood only
this way, as in this configuration the two cross each other at a certain juncture.
4
The poem mentions only “L”, so it could refer to any elevated line. Even more
so if one considers that all of the available elevated lines of the 1920s-30s
crossed the Village. However, out of Second, Third, Sixth and Ninth Avenue
Elevated, Sixth Avenue Elevated is the most likely candidate. The reason is the
text’s reference to “Strunsky’s.” Albert “Papa” Strunsky was a Russian-born
landlord, a supporter of artists, who had—besides others—two apartments on
West Third Street, behind Washington Square (Paul Cummings 1969). The
later reference of the poem “[plato told]” (Cummings 1994, 553) to the
recycled tracks of the Sixth Avenue Elevated might also indirectly support this
reading.
5
In order to make the figure fit to the page, the distances between Bronx Zoo
and Manhattan, as well as between Coney Island and Manhattan are non-
proportional.
6
See above for the specific references.
7
“Gobs” can be both a noun or a verb.
8
See poems like “[since feeling is first]” and “[he does not have to feel because
he thinks]”.
9
Consider Mihály Vörösmarty’s “ElĘszó,” or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s
“The Wreck of the Hesperus” as examples.
Crossing Generic Boundaries: Sculpture, Painting and

Engraving as Compensations for E. E. Cummings’
1
I am translating here an expression used by Barthes (1978): “grouillements des
signes” (65).
2
The painting was created in 1925 and reproduced in The Dial in 1927 and
appears on the Complete Poems’ front cover.
3
My translation of Cocteau’s words quoted by Baltrušaitis, 220;
“With chasteness of sea-girls”: Björk’s Adaptation of E. E.

Cummings’ Poetry
1
For a concise account, see for example: Shepherd, John (1991) Music as Social
Text. Cambridge: Polity Press
2
There may be exceptions to this, especially in the case of contemporary artists
of any art form, including poets and writers, some of whose media presence,
and, as a result, fan basis, may be similar to that of popular music artists.
3
For the full lyrics, see the official website Bjork.com
4
On Bjork.com’s question and answer section, Björk explains the choice of
title:
How did you come up with the name Medulla for your album?
i was having problems with finding a title and the furthest i got was
ink . i wanted it to be like the core of us visceral stile , like the blood in
us but even deeper and darker . then my friend gabríela came up with
medúlla which seemed perfect .
(Q&A; Bjork.com)
5
Binary oppositions “comprise the culturally defined value system used
predominantly in Western society to categorize difference;” the basic
opposition is: nature as feminine, subjective and of the earth versus culture as
masculine, objective and controlling the earth (Marsh and West 2003, 184).
Gender is thus at the centre of these oppositions that underlie science and our
system of dominance (c.f. Haraway 1991).
6
The last line of the poem, omitted from the song, also features the image of the
“silver moon” as a parallel to the sun; both are associated with the image of the
mouth.
7
She is wearing a white swan costume, and a drawing of a white swan on top of
the photo merges into the letters of the title, also written in white. The negative
of the swan appears on the back cover, while stylized images of birds are
scattered as drawings in the booklet.
8
The video is featured on YouTube.com and is cited as official; however, there
is no mention of it on the list of official promotional videos on Bjork.com.
9
The “great chain of being” is a metaphoric concept from medieval Europe of
208 Notes
the hierarchical order of the universe, within which humans are represented by
the male.
10
The lyrics transcript on Bjork.com reads: “Wherefore onto thy knee / come
weep / with a prayer;” however, not only does Cummings’ poem feature “we”
instead of “weep,” Björk also clearly sings the word “we” on the track.
Beyond the Scope of the “I” in E. E. Cummings’ Leaf Poem

1
To clarify at the outset, this paper does not perform a psychological biography
of Cummings in its analysis. Similar work has already been done. See, for
example, Milton A. Cohen’s “Cummings and Freud” (1983).
2
The Klein article to which Derrida refers in Of Grammatology ([1967] 1997)
makes frequent reference to phallic images in writing, much more so than most
of her other work does.
3
Norman Friedman (1957), in perhaps the most insightful and valuable early
essay on Cummings’s work, was the first to address such attacks effectively
when he repudiated R. P. Blackmur’s foundational, disparaging critical
assessment of Cummings’s poetry.
4
The occurrence of what Lacan calls the “the mirror stage” would be
inaugurated at about the same period in the infant subject’s life that Klein sees
the infant acknowledging the mother as a bounded object separate from
himself, a period just prior to the depressive position. Klein (1975) describes
the processes constituting the depressive position in this way: “From the
beginning the ego introjects objects ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ for both of which the
mother’s breast is the prototype—for good objects when the child obtains it,
for bad ones when it fails him. But it is because the baby projects its own
aggression on to these objects that it feels them to be ‘bad’. . .” (262). Over
time, as these idealized introjections become more and more akin to the
external reality from which they are derived, the child will overcome the
depressive position and gain “a greater trust in [its] capacity to love” (288).
5
When I note that the “l(a” and “le” call to mind the feminine and masculine
French definite articles, I also note that the ascription of gender to French
nouns is often unrelated to the noun’s typically feminine or masculine
qualities. For example, “vagina” in French is masculine (le vagin) and “sword”
is feminine (une épée). And yet, language invites us to consider the gendered
construction of objects.
6
One of Winnicott’s (1971) analysands, quoted in a passage in which she
recounts searching for herself in mirrors, states, “I’d like to stop searching and
just BE. Yes, the looking-for is evidence that there is a self” (63). The bounded
“self” seen in a mirror is a reflection of the bounded “I” heard in speech.
7
Derrida’s notion of the trace is similar in some respects to what Lacan implies
in his writing about the Real. The Real is the dimension of the undifferentiated,
pre-linguistic subject, in which the newly born infant (prior to the age of six
months, according to Lacan) does not recognize its body as an entity distinct
from its mother (or other caregiver). The infant has no control of its bodily
functions, and all of its needs are satisfied by the mother. At this point in its
life, the child is “still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence”
(Derrida [1967] 1997, 2). The child is also ignorant of its situation as either
subject or object. Because it is pre-Imaginary and pre-Symbolic, the Real of
this period in a subject’s life can never be described. It is, therefore,
inaccessible to psychoanalysis. It serves, however, as the original site of lack
that motivates all subsequent desire.
Note also that in a footnote to her analysis of the letter “i,” Klein
foreshadows Derrida’s notion of the trace:
[T]he earlier picture-script, which underlies our script too, is still
active in the phantasies of every individual child, so that the various
strokes, dots, etc. of our present script would only be simplifications,
achieved as a result of condensation, displacement and other
mechanisms familiar to us from dreams and neuroses, of earlier
pictures whose traces, however, would be demonstrable in the
individual. (66)
CONTRIBUTORS
Isabelle Alfandary received her Ph.D. from the Université Paris III—
Sorbonne Nouvelle, on the basis of her dissertation entitled Esthétique de
la grammaire dans l’oeuvre d’E. E. Cummings. She has taught at
Université Paris X—Nanterre, and is currently Professor at Université
Lumière—Lyon II. She has published a volume on the poetry of E. E.
Cummings, entitled E. E. Cummings ou la minuscule lyrique (Paris: Belin,
2002), and numerous articles on Cummings, Gertrude Stein and Modern
American poetry in general. She is currently writing an essay on Stein.
Emília Barna received her degree in English Studies and Teaching

English and another degree in Sociology from the University of Szeged,
and is working on her Ph.D. in Popular Music Studies at the University of
Liverpool. She has lectured at conferences and published papers on British
and Hungarian popular music and fan communities.
Richard Bradford received his BA from the University of Wales and his
doctorate from Oxford. He has taught in the universities of Oxford, Wales
and in Trinity College, Dublin and is currently Professor of English at the
University of Ulster. Over the past fifteen years he has published a number
of well-reviewed books on poetry and poetics, including Roman Jakobson:
Life, Language and Art (1994), A Linguistic History of English Poetry
(1993), Stylistics (1997), Silence and Sound: Theories of Poetics from the
18th Century (1991), The Look of It: A Theory of Visual Form in English
Poetry (1993). Aside from these publications, he has produced biographies
of Kingsley Amis (2001) and Philip Larkin (2005) and is presently the
authorised biographer of Alan Sillitoe, and the following volumes:
Introducing Literary Studies (1996); A Complete Critical Guide to John
Milton (2001); Augustan Measures: Restoration and 18th Century
Writings on Prosody and Metre (2002); The State of Theory (1993). He is
currently working on a work entitled Poetry: A Definition which will bring
together a number of theories proposed by himself during the 1990s.
Words into Pictures: E. E. Cummings’ Art Across Borders 211
Milton Cohen received his BA from Michigan State University, his MA

from Indiana University, and his Ph.D. from Syracuse University. He is
Professor in the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Texas
at Dallas. Professor Cohen is the author of PoetandPainter: The Aesthetics
of E. E. Cummings’s Early Works (1987), a work of central importance in
the study of Cummings’ art, and two other book-length studies:
Movement, Manifesto, Melee: The Modernist Group 1910-1914 (2004),
and Hemingway’s Laboratory: The Paris in Our Time (2005). In addition,
he has published numerous articles on E. E. Cummings, Ernest
Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and other Modernists. Presently, he is
writing a book, Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Williams,
Frost, and Cummings in the 1930s, that studies how these poets reacted to
the politics and criticism of the literary left during the Depression.
Claudia Desblaches is Junior Lecturer at Université Rennes 2—Haute

Bretagne. She has published one book-length study on E. E. Cummings,
entitled Tradition et Innovation dans les poèmes de W. Carlos Williams et
de E. E. Cummings, entre articulation et rupture, Essai d’analyse formelle
(1999), and numerous articles on E. E. Cummings, William Carlos
Williams, Patricia Eakins and Flannery O’Connor. She is working on a
study of American short stories, under the title Poetry Under Prose.
JiĜí Flajšar received his MA from Masaryk University and his Ph.D. from
Palacký University. He is Assistant Professor of English and American
Literature at Palacký University. He is the author of the following
volumes: DČjiny americké poezie (2006), Epiphany in American Poetry
(2003). In addition, he has published and lectured widely on American,
British and Czech poetry, literature and culture. His translations of Czech
poems have appeared in the New Orleans Review, while his translations of
American poems have appeared in Host. He is also the Czech translator of
E. E. Cummings. His research and teaching activities include North
American Studies curriculum development, Canadian Studies, jazz, blues,
poetry translation into both Czech and English, and creative writing
methodology and practice.
Kurt Harris received his BA from Indiana-Purdue University at Fort

Wayne, his MA from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and his
Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is Assistant
Professor at Southern Utah University, where he has also served as
Associate Chair of the English Department. His teaching and research
interests include psychoanalytic theory, Victorian and Modernist
212 Contributors
literature, and the Gothic. He has published articles on Beowulf,

Thackeray, Tennyson, and Cummings.
Gillian Huang-Tiller received her BA from Providence College, Taiwan,

her MA from Oklahoma State University and her Ph.D. from the
University of Notre Dame. She is currently Associate Professor at the
University of Virginia’s College at Wise, where she teaches courses on
Modern and Contemporary American Literature, Western Literary
Traditions, Asian American Literature, and Composition. Her doctoral
dissertation was titled The Power of the Meta-Genre: Cultural, Sexual,
and Racial Politics of the American Modernist Sonnet, and she has
published articles on E. E. Cummings in Spring: The Journal of the E. E.
Cummings Society. A contributing editor to Spring, she is currently
working on Cummings’ unpublished notes on poetry and a manuscript
examining the meta-form of the sonnet in Cummings. Her other academic
interests include Elizabeth Bishop, Bertolt Brecht, and Maxine Hong
Kingston.
Taimi Olsen received her AB from Guilford College, and her MA and
Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is
Associate Professor of English, Chair of the English Department, and
Competency Program Director at Tusculum College. Dr. Olsen published
Transcending Space: Architectural Place in Henry David Thoreau, E. E.
Cummings, and John Barth, in 2000 through Bucknell University Press.
She continues to publish on E. E. Cummings, primarily through Spring:
The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society (of which she is a member of
the editorial board). Her other projects include presentations and
workshops for the Appalachian College Association annual conferences
on teaching and technology. She teaches American Modernism,
Linguistics, and African American Literature at Tusculum College.
Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder received his BSE from Slippery Rock

University and his MA from Case Western Reserve University. Since
2005, he has been a Lecturer and SAGES Instructor at Case Western
Reserve University, teaching courses in Rhetoric, Composition and
Working Class Studies. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and
Composition at Purdue University where his academic interests include
Cultural Studies, Authorship, Critical Pedagogy, and Rhetoric.
Zénó Vernyik received his degree in English Studies and Teaching

English from the University of Szeged. He is currently working on his
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Masaryk University, and is Lecturer in
the English Department of the Technical University of Liberec. He has
published articles and lectured at conferences in Hungary, the Czech
Republic, Greece and Spain on E. E. Cummings, Peter Ackroyd, Rolf de
Heer and other issues related to Modern and contemporary British and
American literature, spatial theory, and the representation of cities in
literature. He is teaching courses in Cultural Studies, British and American
Studies and Essay Writing, and is working on a Cultural Studies textbook
(with Michaela Marková) to be published by the Technical University of
Liberec.
INDEX
a capella, 172, 177 Barton, Bruce, 73

Abraham, Karl, 190 Bataille, Georges, 91, 98, 99, 100,
abstraction, 9, 10, 61, 68, 140, 149, 101, 102, 103, 104
162, 164, 165 Baudrillard, Jean, 123
absurd, 92, 93, 95, 96, 100 Baum, S. V., 75, 80
album art, 170, 171, 179, 180 beatbox, 172, 177
Aldington, Richard, 8 Beatrice, 49, 53
Alfandary, Isabelle, 58, 127 Benjamin, Walter, 48, 149
alliteration, 15, 17, 162, 199 Bergson, Henri, 95
allusion, 39, 49, 52, 73, 82, 132, 183 Bierwisch, Manfred, 108, 109, 111
ambiguity, 11, 30, 113, 116, 131, Björk, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175,
135, 195 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181,
analogy, 24, 157, 162 182, 183, 184, 185, 207
Anderson, Laurie, 184 Black Mountain School, 61
anthropomorphism, 127, 129, 130, Blackmur, Richard Palmer, 208
131, 132, 133, 157 Blake, William, 15
Antin, David, 62 blank verse, 3
antisemitism, 40, 53, 81, 86, 87 Bloom, P., 109
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 61, 75 body, 34, 53, 115, 131, 135, 142,
Arcimboldo, Giuseppe, 156, 157 150, 158, 172, 173, 174, 175,
archetype, 29, 37 176, 177, 179, 180, 181, 182,
architectonics, 30, 33, 48 184, 205, 208
Arms, Valarie Meliotes, 135, 202 Bollas, Christopher, 137
asceticism, 40 Boston, 69, 129, 151, 184
Asch, Nathan, 77 Bracelli, Giovanni Battista, 165, 167
assonance, 17 Bradford, Richard, 2, 6
audience, 60, 170, 171, 172, 179 Brown, Al, 44
Auslander, Joseph, 127, 150 Bunyan, John, 90, 91, 102, 103
authoritarianism, 70, 77, 85, 87 Burke, Kenneth, 82
avant-garde, 28, 58, 59, 60, 75, 77, Butler, Christopher, 36
78, 81, 87 caesura, 64
Axelrod, Robert M., 93 Cage, John, 59, 61, 62
Babiü, Gordana, 27 Calverton, V. F., 77
Bachelard, Gaston, 206 Cambridge, MA, 63, 69, 70, 71, 72,
Baicchi, Annalisa, 190 74, 129, 151
Baltrušaitis, Jurgis, 165, 167, 207 Campbell, Neil, 130, 147
Barna, Emília, 170 Canby, Henry Seidel, 77
Barthes, Roland, 157, 158, 207 capitalism, 39, 52, 55
Certeau, Michel de, 91, 92 any man is wonderful, 110

Cézanne, Paul, 163 anyone lived in a pretty how
Clark, David B., 99 town, 58, 63, 133, 206
Clarke, Rebecca Haswell, 29 as if as, 44
cliché, 40, 52 as usual i did not find him in
Cocteau, Jean, 207 cafés,the more dissolute
Cohen, Milton, 68, 109, 114, 115, atmosphere, 108, 110, 117,
206, 208 118, 121, 205, 206
collectivism, 49, 52, 55, 77 at dusk/ just when, 45, 110
concrete poetry, 2, 12, 15, 18, 60, 61 at the ferocious phenomenon of
Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 19 5 o’clock i find myself gently
conformism, 40, 45, 51, 103 decompos-, 110, 133, 136,
Congregationalism, 69 137, 138
Connell, John, 171 at the head of this street a
consumerism, 52, 73 gasping organ is waving
content, 24, 27, 35, 74, 75, 112, 171 moth-eaten, 110
context, 6, 10, 15, 18, 74, 91, 93, 99, Ballad of an Intellectual, 204
131, 170, 171, 176, 177, 178, be of love(a little), 46
180, 183, 184, 195 birds(/here,inven, 46
convention, 12, 16, 17, 18, 21, 24, brIght, 46
28, 32, 35, 48, 68, 87, 103, 168, Buffalo Bill ’s, 64
189 but observe;although, 110
corporeality, 172, 181, 183 by god i want above fourteenth,
cosmology, 47 110, 138, 150
Cowley, Malcolm, 76, 77, 203 candles and, 110
Crandall, Charles, 27, 201 ci-gît 1 Foetus(unborn to not die,
Crane, Hart, 58 40
crescendo, 180, 183 come(all you mischief-, 46
critics, 3, 4, 16, 17, 27, 28, 30, 41, conceive a man,should he have
49, 60, 63, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 82, anything, 32, 35, 36, 37, 43,
83, 86, 87, 90, 102, 103, 108, 48, 51
114, 116, 117, 127, 150, 151, death(having lost)put on his
165, 177, 189, 201, 202, 204, universe, 46
205, 208 Dick Mid’s large bluish face
Cubism, 108, 114, 123, 164 without eyebrows, 144
Cummings, Edward Estlin Do., 46
(b/eLl/s?/bE, 42, 46 does yesterday’s perfection seem
“let’s start a magazine, 40, 78 not quite, 40
5, 147 emptied.hills.listen., 41
a fragrant sag of fruit distinctly exit a kind of unkindness exit, 39
grouped., 110, 138 F is for foetus(a, 206
a kike is the most dangerous, 86 floatfloafloflf, 44
a)glazed mind layes in a, 39 —G O N splashes-sink, 110, 138
a/mong crum/bling people(a, he does not have to feel because
110, 121, 122, 123 he thinks, 40, 206
american critic ad 1935, 80 here’s to opening and upward,to
216 Index
leaf and to sap, 44 most(people, 40

how dark and single,where he mouse)Won, 40
ends,the earth, 34, 41, 51, 54 move, 44
how this uncouth enchanted, 110 much i cannot), 45
how// ses humble., 110 my eyes are fond of the east side,
i am going to utter a 110
tree,Nobody, 136, 137 my father moved through dooms
i think you like”, 110 of love, 81
i was considering how, 7 my lady is an ivory garden, 156,
i was sitting in mcsorley’s. 157
outside it was New York and my sweet old etcetera, 71
beauti-, 138, 140, 144, 150 numb(and, 41
i will wade out/ till my thighs are o pr, 13, 39, 64
steeped in burning flowers, o// sure)but, 40
180, 181, 182, 184 on the Madam’s best april, 166
i// (meet)t(touch), 39 ondumonde”, 44
if night’s mostness(and whom one day a nigger, 87
did merely lay, 46 one nonsufficiently
in Just-, 159 inunderstood, 40
in the rain-, 129, 130 one winter afternoon, 206
IN)/all those who got, 40, 77 only as what(our of a
into a truly, 30, 36, 38, 43 flophouse)floats, 110
it may not always be so;and i out of a supermethamathical
say, 172 subpreincestures, 44
Jehovah buried,Satan dead,, 45, Paris;this April sunset
81, 86 completely utters, 110
kumrads die because they’re plato told, 206
told), 40, 82 reason let others give and
l(a, 21, 58, 60, 115, 166, 188, realness bring—, 34, 46
189, 190, 191, 193, 195, 196, red-rag and pink-flag, 81, 82
197, 198, 199, 208 r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r, 16, 29, 40,
ladies and gentlemen this little 52
girl, 123, 138 sh estiffl, 46
little joe gould has lost his teeth silent unday by silently not
and doesn’t know where, 40 night, 44
little man, 39, 52 since feeling is first, 206
love is a place, 46 SNOW, 44
love’s function is to fabricate snow)says!Says, 41
unknownness, 34, 46 so standing,our eyes filled with
may i feel said he, 40, 162 wind,and the, 110
memory believes, 110 some ask praise of their fellows,
moon over gai, 39 59
mOOn Over tOwns mOOn, 39 sometimes/ in)Spring a someone
morsel miraculous and will lie(glued, 44
meaningless, 33, 36, 46, 47, sonnet entitled how to run the
135 world), 32, 35, 39
Spring(side, 45 when you rang at Dick Mid’s

sunlight was over, 110, 111, 112, Place, 9, 144
119, 121 when/ from a sidewalk/ out
sunset)edges become swiftly, of(blown never quite to, 46
110 who before dying demands not
swi(/across!gold’s, 44, 167 rebirth, 30, 40
Take for example this:, 110 why must itself up every of a
THANKSGIVING (1956), 85 park, 84
that famous fatheads find that why why, 40
each, 40 will out of the kindness of their
that melancholy, 110 hearts a few philosophers tell
that which we who’re alive in me, 110
spite of mirrors, 35, 39 worshipping Same, 45
the boys i mean are not refined, writhe and, 131, 132, 135
44 Cummings, Nancy, 75
the Cambridge ladies live in Cummings, Paul, 206
furnished souls, 63, 69 Cureton, Richard, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33,
the dirty colours of her kiss have 35, 40, 46, 116, 117, 189, 203,
just, 70 206
the first president to be loved by Cushman, Stephen, 202
his, 72 cynicism, 15, 51, 53
the greedy the people, 133 Dadaism, 61
the season ‘tis,my lovely lambs, Dante, 27, 29, 39, 40, 41, 47, 49, 51,
73 202
the surely, 162, 164 Davie, Donald, 3, 19, 20
the young, 144, 145 deconstruction, 18, 19, 171, 176,
the(/Wistfully, 39 185
these children singing in stone a, decrescendo, 182
160, 161 Degas, Edgar, 70
theys sO alive/(who is/?niggers), demi-monde, 37, 44, 69, 147
44 Dendinger, Lloyd N., 76, 77, 78, 81,
this little, 40 82, 83
this mind made war, 45 Derrida, Jacques, 19, 188, 189, 190,
twentyseven bums give a 191, 195, 208, 209
prostitute the once, 148 Desblaches, Claudia, 156
unnoticed woman from whose desire, 19, 38, 72, 74, 82, 86, 98,
kind large flesh, 147 100, 103, 157, 158, 182, 191,
we)under)over,the thing of 193, 209
floating Of, 46 Deutsch, Babette, 76, 79, 80, 82
what a proud dreamhorse dialectics, 171
pulling(smoothloomingly)thr Diamond, David, 59
ough, 45 Dickinson, Emily, 63, 203
what does little Ernest croon, 40 Dickson, Jeff, 39
when god decided to invent, 85 discourse, 17, 53, 149, 171, 172,
when muckers pimps and 177, 198, 199
tratesmen, 40 disillusionment, 29, 32, 49, 51, 53,
218 Index
55, 194 foregrounding, 6, 10, 19, 136, 191

Doel, Marcus A., 99 form, 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16,
dogmatism, 49, 87 17, 18, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33,
Dokaka, 172 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 43, 44, 47, 48,
Donatello, 156, 160, 161, 169 53, 55, 64, 103, 108, 109, 114,
Dormois, Jean-Pierre, 95 115, 118, 119, 121, 163, 164,
Dos Passos, John, 74, 75, 76, 80, 87, 165, 166, 173, 181, 194, 195,
128 201
Drapper, Paul, 44 Forrest, David, 63
dualism, 127, 137 Foucault, Michel, 142, 143, 144,
Duchamp, Marcel, 64 145, 206
Duncan, Robert, 61 fragmentation, 6, 8, 15, 162, 192,
Durkheim, Émile, 174 193, 194, 195
dystopia, 55, 131 France, 49, 70, 71, 91, 92, 93, 94,
earth goddess, 137 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 110, 129,
Easthope, Anthony, 28 203
Eberhart, Richard, 202 free verse, 6, 10, 16, 18, 30, 64
ecstasy, 134, 183 Freud, Sigmund, 84, 90, 189, 190,
Eliade, Mircea, 130, 142, 146 191, 208
Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 204 Friedman, Norman, 120, 126, 127,
Eltis, Walter, 96 144, 208
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 44 Frost, Robert, 80
enjambment, 33, 36, 159, 161 Futurism, 61
eroticism, 24, 173, 177 Garrett, M. F., 109
esoteric, 2, 174 genre, 2, 27, 28, 30, 32, 38, 48
euphemism, 144 Gibson, Chris, 171
experiment, 2, 13, 16, 18, 28, 29, Giles-Davis, Jennifer, 171
30, 59, 61, 76, 77, 134, 185, 203 go(perpe)go, 40
expressionism, 61, 131, 133, 165 Gold, Mike, 204
Fairley, Irene, 116 Goldman, Emma, 203
faith, 82, 130 Gomringer, Eugen, 12
Farley, David, 52 Gould, Joe, 40, 53, 118, 202, 204
fascism, 84, 201 grammar, 3, 14, 16, 17, 62, 64, 72,
feminism, 175, 176, 184 109, 113, 114, 116, 117, 140,
Fenollosa, Ernest, 6 164, 165, 166, 167, 189
Ferenczi, Sándor, 190 Graves, Robert, 76
Ferguson, Francis, 203 great chain of being, 183, 208
fetishism, 20, 32 Gregory, Horace, 76, 80, 81, 83
Finch, Annie, 35 Gross, Harvey, 16
Finland, 82, 85 hallucination, 144
Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 12 Hamilton, Alexander, 131
Firmage, George James, 128 Haraway, Donna, 176, 207
flâneur, 149, 150 Harding, Warren G., 72
Flint, Frank Stuart, 6 Hardy, Stephen Paul, 150
folk epic, 173 Harris, Kurt, 188
Ford, Ford Madox, 201 Harvard, 60, 69, 70, 75, 86, 129
Hemingway, Ernest, 40, 74, 80 impressionism, 4, 8

Herbert, George, 14 independence, 78, 87, 92, 149, 150
hermeneutics, 156, 158, 168 innovation, 9, 16, 18, 58, 59, 60, 61,
Herrick, Robert, 14 68, 117, 119
heteroglossia, 92 instrumentation, 171
Heusser, Martin, 115, 129, 190, 191, interpretation, 3, 14, 15, 21, 48, 93,
192, 205 102, 103, 117, 141, 156, 158,
hexameter, 34, 40 165, 170, 171, 178, 179
hierarchy, 22, 99, 100, 101, 208 irony, 59, 62, 70, 143, 151
Hinduism, 41 Islam, 130
Hitler, Adolf, 82 isomorphism, 35, 36, 38, 43
Hoggard, Liz, 175, 176, 177 Jacobs, Keith, 149, 150
Holbein, Hans The Younger, 165 Jakobson, Roman, 19
Hollander, John, 3, 4, 5 James, William, 130
Hood, Edward M., 189 Jerusalem, 129, 130
Hoover, Paul, 60 Jesus, 27, 135, 137
Hoppál, Mihály, 145 John of the Cross, 43
Hopper, Vincent Foster, 37, 47, 202 Johnson, Samuel, 3
Horace, 3 joke, 24, 93
Housiaux, Kate M. L., 99 Joyce, James, 61, 127
Howe, Susan, 63, 64, 203 Judaism, 130
Huang-Tiller, Gillian, 27, 201 Jung, Carl Gustav, 69
Hulme, Thomas Ernest, 6, 8 juxtaposition, 3, 11, 12, 20, 29, 33,
Humphries, Rolfe, 82 36, 37, 109, 113, 119, 143, 157,
Hungary, 85 166, 198
1956 Revolution, 85 Kean, Alasdair, 130, 147
Hunt, Leigh, 27, 201 Kennedy, Richard S., 29, 59, 60, 70,
hyperbole, 14 71, 85, 86, 87, 90, 102, 114, 128,
Chagall, Marc, 162 131, 132, 133, 140, 144, 202,
channel, 126, 170, 171, 172, 180 203, 204
chauvinism, 71 Kenner, Hugh, 201
chord progression, 171 Kidd, Millie M., 46, 202
chorus, 172, 178, 183 Kidder, Rushworth M., 114, 127,
Christianity, 43, 84, 103, 130, 132, 134, 140, 144
204 Kiev, 49
iconic status, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, Klein, Melanie, 188, 189, 190, 192,
34, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 55 194, 208, 209
iconoclasm, 19, 28, 75, 78, 83, 87 Kostelanetz, Richard, 114
iconography, 162, 171 Kristeva, Julia, 189, 190, 197, 198
identity, 3, 5, 12, 14, 41, 52, 55, Kruse, Holly, 171
171, 184, 187, 194, 202 Lacan, Jacques, 190, 191, 195, 208
ideology, 40, 52, 53, 74, 94, 95, 96, Lachaise, Gaston, 204
177, 180, 184 Langan, Robert, 142, 143
idiosyncrasy, 2, 19, 58, 59, 62, 76, layer, 29, 32, 41, 49, 52, 118, 149,
81, 203 161, 180, 182, 183, 184
Imagism, 6, 8, 168 Lefebvre, Henri, 128, 149, 206
220 Index
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 51, 53 103, 111, 113, 115, 116, 123,
Lesemann, Maurice, 127 137, 140, 158, 159, 160, 161,
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 3, 5, 6, 162, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170,
24 171, 172, 179, 180, 181, 184,
Levelt, W. J. M., 206 191, 192, 193, 195, 196, 197,
Levinson, Stephen, 108, 112, 116, 198, 199, 201, 206
120, 124, 206 medium, 8, 18, 170, 195
Lincoln, Abraham, 140 melody, 3, 171, 174, 183
lineation code, 35 Melville, Herman, 63
Lofft, Capel, 201 Mencken, Henry Louis, 75
London, Jack, 53 metaphor, 8, 12, 13, 21, 34, 44, 53,
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 206 91, 108, 109, 111, 114, 115, 116,
The Wreck of the Hesperus, 206 142, 157, 158, 159, 165, 166,
love, 27, 34, 35, 37, 40, 43, 45, 46, 183, 191, 205, 208
48, 59, 68, 75, 81, 84, 112, 113, metaphysics, 90, 119, 183, 191, 192
126, 129, 130, 147, 157, 158, metre, 6, 17, 27
173, 174, 178, 179, 180, 192, metrical code, 35
205, 208 militarism, 70, 87
Lowell, Amy, 6, 8 Miller, J. Hillis, 108
Lowell, Robert, 204 Milton, John, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 19,
lyrics, 170, 171, 172, 173, 178, 179, 20, 21, 24
180, 182, 183, 184, 207, 208 mimesis, 21, 32, 33, 34, 40, 43, 44,
Mac Low, Jackson, 63 48, 156, 159, 162
Madonna, 176 mirror, 35, 104, 165, 194, 195, 208
mainstream, 2, 60, 68, 74 Mitchell, Joseph, 144
Malamuth, Joan, 53 Mitchell, Stuart, 204
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 61 Modernism, 6, 18, 28, 58, 61, 62,
Malthus, Thomas R., 96 64, 69, 75, 77, 80, 113, 151, 201,
manhood, 27, 32, 37, 45, 48, 49, 204
201 monotony, 141, 142
Manicheanism, 83, 86 Moore, Marianne, 33, 58
Marks, Barry A., 133 morality, 84, 85, 99, 100
Marsh, Charity, 173, 176, 182, 207 Morehouse, Marion, 204
Martin, William Todd, 90, 91, 101, Morgan, Edwin, 12
102, 205 Moscow, 49, 51, 52, 54, 151
Martland, T. R., 189 MukaĜovský, Jan, 19
Marx, Karl, 51, 77, 78, 82, 203, 204 Mullett, Michael, 103
Mary, Virgin, 27 Munson, Gorham, 75, 76
materialism, 39, 40, 52, 55, 73, 83, Mussolini, Benito, 82
87, 203 mysticism, 36, 41, 43, 47
Mauldin, Bill, 85 mythology, 27, 181
Mauss, Marcel, 97, 99 Nadel, L., 109
McCann, Eugene J., 128, 148, 149 Nagel, Edward, 204
McCarthy, Joseph, 86 Name of the Father, 191
meaning, 7, 12, 16, 17, 22, 24, 27, narration, 29, 30, 32, 36, 37, 38, 41,
32, 35, 36, 37, 48, 62, 63, 64, 90, 44, 46, 48, 49, 55, 91, 92, 97, 98,
100, 101, 102, 104, 112, 117, paganism, 174, 175

118, 120, 121, 123, 134, 144, Pál, József, 130, 137, 145
145, 157, 173, 179, 180, 182, pallindrome, 35
203 Paris, 49, 69, 74, 110, 127, 129,
nationalism, 95, 177, 184 151, 204
naturalism, 37, 68 parody, 14, 79, 81
Nazism, 82, 85 pastiche, 14
Negus, Keith, 171, 178, 181 patriotism, 71, 72, 83, 177
network, 100, 114, 137, 169 pattern, 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13,
New York City, 75, 103, 108, 110, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 22, 24, 29, 30,
117, 126, 127, 129, 134, 138, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 43, 44,
139, 140, 144, 145, 146, 149, 47, 48, 49, 51, 55, 61, 72, 114,
150, 151 115, 117, 180, 201, 202
Broadway, 138 acoustic pattern, 16
Bronx, 140 audible pattern, 6
Bronx Zoo, 138, 147 discursive pattern, 29, 38
Coney Island, 127, 138, 140, 147 double pattern, 17
East and West Fourteenth Street, formal pattern, 9, 10
138 chiasmic pattern, 33, 34, 35, 36,
East Eighth Street, 138 38, 47
Fifth Avenue, 138 line pattern, 32, 33, 34, 35
Grand Central Terminal, 138 linguistic pattern, 8
Greenwich Village, 138 metrical pattern, 9, 13
Manhattan, 138, 140 narrative pattern, 29, 32, 36, 38
McSorley’s, 138, 140, 142, 143, numerical pattern, 30, 34, 35, 48,
144, 145, 146 49, 55, 202
Second Avenue, 138 oral pattern, 8, 12
Singer Tower, 138, 147 rhetorical pattern, 34
Sixth Avenue Elevated, 138 rhyme pattern, 10
Wall Street, 138 rhythmic pattern, 61
Washington Square, 138 secondary pattern, 11
Woolworth Building, 118, 133, sound pattern, 15
134, 138, 147 spatial pattern, 115
Niceron, J. F., 167 speech pattern, 8, 10
Niehbor, Rheinhold, 85 spoken pattern, 12
Norman, Charles, 138, 140 stanzaic pattern, 32, 35
nostalgia, 24, 150 structured pattern, 12, 33
O’Connor, Sinéad, 181 visual pattern, 38
object relations theory, 188, 189, pattern poem, 2, 16
190, 192, 196 Pattison, Mark, 201
Odessa, 49 Patton, Mike, 172
Oedipus complex, 190, 191 pentameter, 13
Olsen, Taimi, 102, 104, 108, 205 perception, 6, 8, 12, 13, 17, 108,
onomatopoeia, 140 111, 114, 116, 118, 119, 120,
Orr Thayer, Elaine, 75, 156 133, 168, 171, 190
pacifism, 83, 85 performance, 8, 13, 30, 32, 33, 35,
222 Index
38, 41, 46, 48, 60, 62, 158, 159, 34, 41, 44, 201
160, 171 rhythm, 6, 19, 37, 43, 44, 46, 61, 75,
Peterson, M. A., 109 116, 171, 194, 195, 198
Pétillon, Pierre-Yves, 58, 60, 203 Ricardo, David, 96
Petrarca, Francesco, 33, 201 Ricks, Christopher, 3
Pflugfelder, Ehren Helmut, 90 Riding, Laura, 76
Phallus, 189, 191, 197, 208 ritual, 102, 135, 147
Picasso, Pablo, 163 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 39, 52
Pickering, Samuel, 91 Rotella, Guy, 126, 127
Pinker, Steven, 111 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 19, 204
Plato, 90, 134 Russell, C. W., 201
Plutarch, 6 Russia, 27, 29, 32, 49, 51, 52, 53,
Pope-Hennessy, John, 161 55, 74, 76, 77, 82, 85, 204
popular music, 170, 171, 176, 177, sacrifice, 51, 71, 91, 99, 100, 101,
207 102, 103, 128, 131, 135
populism, 40, 53 satire, 14, 40, 51, 53, 68, 72, 74, 76,
Postmodern, 2, 62, 64 77, 78, 81, 82, 120
Potiphar, Mme, 51 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 61
Pound, Ezra, 6, 11, 28, 58, 61, 64, Seaver, Edwin, 82
86, 201, 204 Segal, Hanna, 192
Prohibition, 73, 147 Seltzer, Thomas, 128
propaganda, 39, 40, 49, 51, 52, 53, semiotics, 190, 197, 198
55, 82 sexuality, 37, 46, 70, 113, 114, 158,
prosody, 13, 28, 59 176, 179, 180, 181, 182, 202
prostitution, 69, 144, 145, 147, 148, homosexuality, 80, 179
150, 151 Shakespeare, William, 13, 33
Protas, Allison, 141 Sharp, William, 27, 201
psychoanalysis, 17, 188, 190, 192, Shelly, Percy Bysshe, 90
209 Shepherd, John, 171, 207
puritanism, 63, 73 Sheridan, Thomas, 3, 4, 5
Pythagoreanism, 47, 134, 202 Shiva, 43
Quesnay, Francois, 96 sign, 2, 4, 28, 30, 51, 61, 83, 93, 99,
Quiller-Couch, Arthur Thomas, 201 101, 102, 115, 156, 158, 167,
racism, 83, 87, 177, 184 168, 189, 197, 207
Rahzel, 172 icon, 7, 12, 14, 21, 60, 162, 163,
rebellion, 68, 70, 74, 75, 85, 93, 94 168, 189, 190, 194, 195, 196
rebirth, 30, 32, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, index, 190
43, 44, 48, 51, 54, 137, 185, 202 signification, 8, 12, 13, 15, 16,
record industry, 171 19, 21, 35, 46, 141, 171, 172,
religion, 27, 97, 129, 130, 132, 172, 181, 190, 191, 194, 198
174, 175, 177, 180, 183, 202, signified, 18, 157, 165, 166, 167,
203 191
Renaissance, 2 signifier, 7, 15, 18, 142, 156,
renewal, 44, 55, 64 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 165,
retaliation, 93 167, 169, 170, 189, 191, 196
rhyme, 3, 9, 10, 13, 15, 17, 27, 33, symbol, 7
Silliman, Ron, 63 conceptual space, 150

Sim, Stuart, 103 configurations of space, 119
Simonides of Ceos, 6 consumption space, 149
skepticism, 51 counter-space, 149
Slater Brown, William, 76, 91, 203 fictional space, 147
Sloan, John, 144 haptic space, 109
slogan, 40, 51, 52, 73, 184 heterotopia, 128, 140, 142, 143,
Smith, Adam, 96 144, 145, 146, 147
Smith, David E., 91 homogeneous space, 142, 143,
Socrates, 90 148
Soja, Edward W., 128 i space, 109, 120
Solt, M. E., 203 I space, 109
sonnet, 9, 10, 13, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, imaginative space, 120
33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, inner space, 142, 143
43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 55, 75, intrinsic space, 121
84, 144, 172, 174, 176, 177, 180, landscape spaces, 114
181, 182, 183, 184, 201 liminal space, 92, 96, 97, 100,
Alexandrian sonnet, 40 104
counter-sonnet, 32 motor space, 109
experimental sonnet, 28, 29 non-homogeneous space, 146
chiasmic sonnet, 36 organic space, 136
meta-sonnet, 27, 28, 32, 33, 34, poetic space, 63, 64, 91
45, 47, 48, 55, 201 potential space, 194, 197
Petrarchan sonnet, 27, 33, 48, profane space, 142
201 real space, 108
Shakespearean sonnet, 13, 33, relative space, 121
201 representation of space, 109,
traditional sonnet, 36, 48 114, 149, 150
soundscape, 180 representational space, 149, 150
space, 3, 7, 19, 20, 36, 61, 63, 64, rural space, 136
91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 100, sacred fictional space, 128, 145,
102, 104, 108, 109, 110, 111, 146, 147, 149
112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, sacred space, 142
118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, socio-spatial dialectic, 128, 147
126, 127, 129, 130, 136, 137, space of play, 190
138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, spatial cognition, 109, 124
146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, spatial dynamics, 151
158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, spatial frames of reference, 111
176, 180, 188, 190, 194, 197, spatial horizon, 61
199, 205 spatial image, 7
abstract space, 146, 148 spatial information, 108, 109,
architectural space, 143 112, 116, 118, 121
auditory space, 109 spatial juxtaposition, 20
cartographic fictional space, 128, spatial markers, 113
137, 138, 146, 149 spatial pattern, 115
complex space, 118 spatial perception, 190
224 Index
spatial plane, 115 line structure, 33, 34

spatial practices, 148, 149, 150 logical structure, 12
spatial regulations, 92 mental structure, 111
spatial relationships, 110 musical structure, 171
spatial representation, 108, 109, narrative structure, 32
111, 112, 116 non-referential structure, 16
spatial sense, 111 numerical structure, 33
spatial structure, 116, 163 poetic structure, 123
spatial thinking, 108 rhetorical structure, 36
spatial typology, 116 spatial structure, 116, 163
subversive spaces, 92 stanzaic structure, 30, 34
tactical use of space, 91, 94, 98 structural axis, 17
time-space fluidity, 36 structural design, 28
topological space, 113 structural device, 32
typographical space, 127 structural division, 27
urban space, 127, 128, 129, 136, structural identity, 30
137, 140, 151 structural interaction, 30
verbal space, 163 structural parallel, 35
visual space, 109, 163 structural play, 32, 48
Speed, Richard B., 97 structuring locality, 137
spirituality, 43, 51, 55, 91, 97, 98, textual structure, 202
100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 205 thematic structure, 38
Spring, 43, 44, 45, 46, 68, 118, 159 visual structure, 13, 27
Stalin, Joseph, 29, 32, 49, 51, 204 Strunsky, Albert “Papa”, 206
Stein, Gertrude, 28, 58, 62 style, 24, 181, 184, 201
Steiner, Wendy, 61 symbolism, 27, 33, 36, 47, 48, 51,
Stevens, Wallace, 80, 204 90, 91, 115, 135, 137, 147, 181,
structure, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 184
16, 17, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, symmetry, 14, 145
35, 36, 37, 38, 48, 49, 50, 92, 95, synaesthesia, 15, 16, 134, 164
108, 109, 111, 116, 118, 122, syntax, 3, 4, 12, 16, 17, 30, 35, 59,
123, 136, 137, 145, 146, 147, 60, 61, 64, 109, 112, 116, 117,
148, 149, 157, 163, 166, 171, 118, 124, 161, 167, 190, 191,
202 198
acoustic structure, 16 T. S. Eliot, 28
architectural structure, 202 Tagaq, 172
bi-partite structure, 36 textuality, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 23,
broken structure, 8 24, 25, 62, 141, 151, 156, 160,
bust structure, 157 162, 164, 165, 171, 179, 188,
cognitive structuring, 108 189, 190, 202, 203
conceptual structure, 111 intertextuality, 171
economic structure, 95 metatextuality, 17
figurative structure, 9 Thayer, Scofield, 204
formal structure, 6, 13 this(that, 40
graphic structure, 15 Thoreau, Henry David, 203
ideogrammatic structure, 12 Thrift, Nigel, 114
throatsinging, 172 24, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 36, 37, 38,
timbre, 171 40, 46, 47, 48, 51, 55, 60, 61, 62,
time, 3, 7, 14, 15, 17, 18, 21, 24, 34, 75, 108, 109, 111, 114, 115, 133,
36, 92, 93, 98, 104, 119, 136, 140, 141, 142, 151, 156, 159,
143, 144, 145, 162, 173, 190, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 171,
192, 196 179, 190, 195
Tobey, Mark, 61 vocalization, 8, 13, 15, 17, 173, 193,
Tomlinson, Charles, 2, 23, 24, 27, 195, 198
201 Vörösmarty, Mihály, 206
totalitarianism, 32, 49, 81, 82, 85 ElĘszó, 206
trace, 18, 195, 196, 197, 203, 208, Vree, Paul de, 12
209 Walker, David, 103
tradition, 13, 16, 30, 32, 36, 38, 48, Walker, John, 131, 132, 133
90, 95, 98, 101, 108, 116, 117, Warburton, William, 19
130, 131, 137, 144, 145, 157, Watson, Hildegarde, 87
172, 173, 177, 182, 184, 190, Watson, James Sibley, 204
198, 201 Webster, Michael, 29, 30, 37, 44,
transitional object, 190, 194, 195, 46, 190, 202
197 Wegner, Robert E., 129
transubstantiation, 133, 135 Weinberger, Eliot, 58, 63
Triem, Eve, 59 Weiner, Hannah, 61
Tuchman, Barbara W., 95 West, Melissa, 173, 176, 182, 207
typography, 17, 28, 29, 32, 41, 60, Whitman, Walt, 62, 130, 131
61, 62, 63, 64, 75, 76, 111, 127, Wilbur, Richard, 58
159, 191 Wilkins, David, 116, 124, 206
typology, 116, 120, 121 Williams, Emmett, 61
Újvári, Edit, 130, 137, 145 Williams, Hugo, 24
unconscious, 190 Williams, William Carlos, 6, 7, 10,
Unitarianism, 63 12, 19, 21, 22, 24, 34, 58, 62, 80,
ut pictura poesis, 3 201, 202, 204
vaudeville, 147 Wilson, Edmund, 204
Veblen, Thorstein, 97, 98, 99 Wimsatt, William Kurtz Jr., 17
Vendler, Helen, 189 Winnicott, Donald Woods, 189,
verbality, 18, 36, 37, 77, 116, 118, 190, 194, 197, 208
162, 163, 165, 174, 190, 198 Wordsworth, William, 2, 4, 5, 6, 12,
Vernyik, Zénó, 126 19, 20, 21, 24
Vinci, Leonardo Da, 6 Wright, Willard Huntington, 206
Virgil, 49, 53 Yale, 72
visual poetry, 2, 60, 62, 114 Zevi, Bruno, 206
visuality, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, Zukin, Sharon, 147, 148, 149
12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, Zukofsky, Louis, 58

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Words into Pictures

Words into Pictures

JiĜí Flajšar and Zénó Vernyik

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

This book first published 2007 by

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright © 2007 by JiĜí Flajšar and Zénó Vernyik and contributors

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii

Part I: New Contexts

Cummings and the Brotherhood of Visual Poetics...................................... 2

Reflecting EIMI: The Iconic Meta-Sonnet, Manhood, and Cultural

The Posterity of Idiosyncrasies: E. E. Cummings’ Influence

Part II: Political Cummings

From Bad Boy to Curmudgeon: Cummings’ Political Evolution.............. 68

Divine Excess: The Logic of General Economics

Part III: Cummings in Space

Part IV: Amongst Arts

Crossing Generic Boundaries: Sculpture, Painting and Engraving

“With chasteness of sea-girls”: Björk’s Adaptation

Part V: Identity and Subjectivity

1-1 Final Schema of No Thanks (Small Special Collections Library,

The reader holds a new volume of essays on E. E. Cummings in her

Hidden in this prescriptive separation of the two types of art by Lessing,

another classical charge against Cummings, namely that he is simply

(99). As Milton Cohen proved in his seminal study on E. E. Cummings’

Cummings is just as much of a master of the representation of space as

connection is made by the editors of this collection only, on the basis of

analyzes The Enormous Room and Gillian Huang-Tiller’s paper that

The chronology below is based on previously published chronologies

Therefore, the reader is kindly asked to consider this more as a general

EVENTS IN THE LIFE AND WORK RELEVANT EVENTS IN HISTORY

1894 October 14, Edward Estlin Cummings

1900 Sigmund Freud publishes

1905 Albert Einstein comes

1909 Ezra Pound, Personae

1911 Enters Harvard. Specializes in Greek and other

1912 His first published poems appear in Harvard

1913 March 4, Woodrow

1914 Gertrude Stein publishes

1914 June 28, Gavrilo Prinzip

1916 Receives A.M. Begins painting in Cubist style.

1917 Moves to New York, works for a short time at

1917 April 7, volunteers for Norton-Harjes

1917 April 28, sails to France on board of the ship

1917 September 23, arrested with Slater Brown on

1917 Eight Harvard Poets is published,

1917 November 7, the October

1917 December 19, released from the Depôt de

1919 Exhibits paintings at The Penguin Gallery

1920 Begins publishing his poems in periodicals,

1921 Exhibits at Wanamaker’s in New York. 1921 March 4, Warren G.

1922 October 29, Benito

1924 Publishes an essay in Vanity Fair, the first of

1924 December 4, divorces Elaine in Paris.

1925 Publishes & (February 14) and XLI Poems

1926 His father, Edward Cummings, dies in a car

1927 May 1, marries Anne Barton.

1927 Him, a play, published. His last publications

1928 April 18, Him is produced at the Provincetown

1929 March 4, Herbert Hoover

1929 October 29, Black