Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s

3. E. E. Cummings: Prolonged Adolescent or Premature Curmudgeon?

3 E. E. Cummings Prolonged Adolescent or Premature Curmudgeon? Of the four poets under consideration, E. E. Cummings would seem the least complex in his explicit and complete rejection of leftist criticism,politics , and aesthetics. But how he arrived at this position is less obvious and requires some review.In the late 1910s and through much of the 1920s,he had been the quintessential bad boy of poetry,the nose-thumbing,gleeful rebel against the most cherished beliefs and sacred taboos of the American middle and upper classes: next to of course god america i love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth1 a tear within his stern blue eye, upon his firm white lips a smile, one thought alone:to do or die for God for country and forYale. . . . the son of man goes forth to war with trumpets clap and syphilis (CP 272) o the sweet&aged people who rule this world(and me and you if we’re not very careful) (CP 248) Cummings consistently embraced whatever was new,original,and shocking as poet, painter, bohemian, and in his social and political attitudes. He vigorously opposed his father’s pressure to turn his talents in writing and art to a self-supporting career, stubbornly defining himself then and ever after as “poet and painter.”2 Identifying himself with the European and E.E.Cummings 83 American avant-garde, he rejected naturalistic representation for abstraction in his early oils, which he titled Sound or Noise and numbered sequentially . In his poetry, Cummings’s controversial revisioning of virtually all poetic conventions—from lowly punctuation marks and capitals to the way his poems moved across the page—established his lifelong reputation as the maverick rule-breaker and innovator.3 “It is a supreme pleasure to have done something FIRST,” he wrote his father in 1920.4 It comes as no surprise, then, that Cummings’s political and social views in the twenties were equally rebellious,equally guaranteed to flabbergast the Rotarians—and in particular, his father.What the young artist was rebelling against was not merely nebulous concepts of mainstream America but his personal experience of them in his comfortable,bourgeois upbringing in placid,prewar Cambridge,Massachusetts,and particularly in the strongwilled views of his father,the Reverend Edward Cummings.Cambridge, then, represented the epitome of middle-class respectability and accepted beliefs— the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls . . . believe in Christ and Longfellow,both dead (CP 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 . Achieving his own identity meant not simply challenging this or that belief but repudiating the entire package and open-mindedly exploring the worlds that Cambridge shunned, for example, the prostitutes and dives of Boston and Somerville. As Cummings recalled in his Harvard Nonlectures 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.”5 His years at Harvard only strengthened this repudiation of the genteel life and provided him good friends with whom to explore Boston’s demimonde and modernism in all the arts—both realms disturbing to proper Cantabridgeans . These friends were to prove even more helpful later on. In a memorable letter to his sister from Paris in 1922, Cummings summarized his belief that “find[ing] out for yourself” meant rejecting what you’ve been taught. Here are some excerpts: Of this i am sure:nothing “occurs”to anyoneas an individual ...except: the person or mind in question has FIRST OF ALL,FEARLESSLY 84 Chapter 3 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.(Selected Letters 85– 86, Cummings’s emphasis) Many of Cummings’s early “Sonnets-Realities” practice what this...