Coda
3 Coda rossetti and e. e. cummings In focusing on only a few poets, this study has excluded many portrait poems that deserve attention. Before ending, I turn here briefly to one such group of portraits that point both forward to the rest of the twentieth century, and backward to the nineteenth. The name E. E. Cummings has been synonymous with Modernist formal experimentation since the publication of his first book, Tulips and Chimneys, in 1923. Unlike Pound and Eliot, whose work seems weighted by the past and by tradition, Cummings addressed contemporary topics in a fresh style that assimilated “high” Modernist fragmentation with down-to-earth language and frank treatments of ordinary life and the human body. Despite his significant differences in theme and style from Eliot and Pound, the portrait was also a central genre for him. In the original 1922 manuscript of Tulips and Chimneys, a group of twenty-nine “Portraits” assembled under this heading is the largest single category in the collection. Written between 1916 and 1919, the poems in this manuscript were published in three volumes: the much-abridged collection called Tulips and Chimneys (1923), a second book entitled & (1925), and Poems (also 1925). Cummings distributed the original group of portraits over these three volumes, in each case retaining the heading “Portraits.” They include some of his most famous poems, such as “Buffalo Bill’s” and “5,” a group portrait of men in a restaurant. In each of Cummings’s first three volumes, a section headed “Portraits” proclaims the importance of this category, surpassed in length only by Cummings’s other favorite kind, the sonnet. Exhibiting Cummings’s characteristic formal play with typography, these portraits also experiment with a wide range of new topics, preferring outdoor urban scenes with prostitutes and indigents to Eliot’s and Pound’s indoor encounters with older literary figures. 214 The Modern Portrait Poem In these works, Cummings struck out in a new direction that was nevertheless predicated on Rossetti, one of his main influences. In 1913, when T. S. Eliot was finishing up his Ph.D. at Harvard under the direction of Josiah Royce, the philosopher also played an important role in Cummings’s life when he introduced Rossetti’s House of Life to the 19-year-old aspiring poet who was his neighbor in Cambridge. As Cummings said of this encounter with Rossetti, “And very possibly (although I don’t, as usual, know) that is the reason—or more likely the unreason— I’ve been writing sonnets ever since.”1 Rossetti’s influence explains not only Cummings’s preference for the sonnet form, but also for the theme of erotic love and focus on the body of the beloved. Because Cummings addressed these subjects with a graphic explicitness that was unprecedented even among the avant-garde, his affinities with Rossetti have not received critical attention. In gravitating toward the portrait and the sonnet as his favored genre and form, respectively, Cummings was taking a page from Rossetti. Indeed, these two categories often overlap, as in Rossetti’s sonnet “The Portrait” and in Cummings’s “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls,” “goodbye Betty, don’t remember me,” “‘kitty’, sixteen, 51, white, prostitute.” Cummings’s sonnets exemplify his direct relationship to Rossetti, for they explicitly remain in the tradition of the House of Life both in terms of form and content. Like Rossetti, Cummings takes the theme of erotic love, only updated to reflect the changed sexual mores of the 1920s. Cummings’s frank representation of prostitutes is one of his distinctive topics in this manuscript , and here again the impact of Rossetti may be felt. Rossetti’s “Jenny” shocked contemporary readers not so much for his treatment of prostitution but for the complicity of the male speaker, apparently one of her customers, and for the poet’s nonjudgmental sympathy toward both figures . Cummings similarly places himself or the reader in this complicit role, variously celebrating the prostitute and her customers (Portrait XVI, “Between the breasts”) or accusing himself of being responsible for her condition (as in Portrait XIV, “the young/man sitting/in Dick Mid’s Place”). The portraits of prostitutes share Rossetti’s mix of objectification and sympathy, inviting the reader to acknowledge his own complicity in the commodification that takes place in the poem. Like Rossetti, Cummings was a painter, and his knowledge and practice of visual art informed his poetic portraiture just as Rossetti’s did. The major influences on Cummings’s painting were...
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