conventional cummings

“What do all these typographical high jinks signify?” asks Paul Muldoon about e. e. cummings’s poem about Buffalo Bill in a New Yorker review of Susan Cheever’s E. E. Cummings: A Life.

Muldoon suggests several answers: “Perhaps the disregard for punctuation allows the reader a more active role in the process of reading, providing the opportunity to entertain multiple interpretations. The conceit may even play, in an egalitarian spirit, on the idea of capitalization in the economic sense, as if there might be a relationship between upper and lower cases and upper and lower classes.”

Muldoon discerns the influence of Joyce and Eliot: “It also happens that Cummings’s first collection, ‘Tulips & Chimneys,’ in which the Buffalo Bill poem appears, was published in 1922, the year of Joyce’s ‘Ulysses; and Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land.’ Cummings had been reading both writers for years, and their influence on his work is plain to see. From Joyce, he had learned how to present a verbal equivalent of the mind’s wanderings between past and present, and so a fleeting triumph over linear time. From Eliot, who had written that ‘the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality,’ he learned to distrust the hierarchical in every aspect of life, beginning with his own being. In his poetry, ‘I’ becomes ‘i.’”

But Muldoon also sees a more “conventional” cummings than his experimental forms might suggest: “many of Cummings’s most effective poems are sonnets, or, anyway, sonnet-like, implying that he’s less iconoclastic than has often been supposed—including by himself. . . . Certainly, the core of his belief system was much more staid than his explosions of font. The poems gravitate toward the time-honored themes set down by Yeats: ‘sex and the dead.’ With regard to form, my sense is that there’s been very little new in the field of the visual pun or typographical jeu d’esprit since 1759, the year of the publication of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, in which Laurence Sterne marked the death of one character with a black page and mimicked the twirling of a stick by another with a squiggle. Indeed, one may come to feel that Cummings’s visual effects are largely an affectation.”

Which may indicate that the debt to Eliot and Joyce goes very deep.