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without lips,' a prayer lacking any knees
and again
...
a hand's impression in an empty glove
a soon forgotten tune, a house for lease.
61
This mingling of the trivial and serious, and the general confusion
of values throughout Cummings' work, is by no means accidental.
It
is
a result of his deliberate rejection of knowledge, whether of himself or
of life at large.
that you should ever think, may god forbid .
for that way knowledge lies, the foetal grave
called progress and negation's dead undoom.
This from the last poem in the volume. The consequences of Cummings'
anti-intellectualism have been so carefully analyzed by R. P. Blackmur
in his
Double Agent
that there is little else to be said of it. The
Collected
Poems
merely confirms Blackmur's remarks. In the Introduction, for
instance, Cummings writes: "Life, for eternal us, is now; and now is
much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything,
catastrophic included." This is a typical Cummings statement, for while
appearing to embrace and affirm, it actually reduces to negation and
rejection. Likewise, the more he tries in the later poems to define his
beliefs, the more he resorts to negatives. He likes to describe the philistine
norms by the negative prefix: "unselves," "unlives," "unhearts," "un–
minds," etc.; but the trick merely shows up his own impoverished and
fuzzy affirmations. He praises the "whyless-soul," the "general looseness of
doom," the "mystery of growing," and life-"the one undiscoverable
guess." But he him:;elf does not grow
in
his poetry. Having rejected
knowledge, the chiefest instrument of evaluation and the essential means
to maturity, he can hardly be expected to offer more than the scattered
impulses of an immature personality. The most revealing of his negative
statements, which strikes one with the impact and illumination of an
absolute truth, are the lines in poem 214:
so that my life (which liked the sun and moon)
resembles something that has not occurred
Substituting "poetry" for "life," the statement would have had even
greater pertinency. As Mr. Blackmur has pointed out, his poetry offers
notes and materials for poems rather than actually achieved poems.
To give Cummings his due, he has written a handful of really good love
sonnets and poems, which still deserve publication in a modest volume of
their own. Excepting them, nothing much
in
the way of poetry has
occurred.
PHILIP
HORTON
II
To the predictable exasperation of all right-thinking entlcs, the
special miracle of Cummings, even under the severe strain of a collected
edition, blithely persists, viable, inextinguishable, a fact. The indigna–
tion of our literary theologians is comprehensible enough: Cummings's
faults stand right out-indeed, what Eliotellus in eight years has not,
