62
PARTISAN REVIEW
for his graduation piece, permanently annihilated him? Yet his poetry
lives easily through such attack; for his faults are inseparably the faults
of his virtues, and in those virtues-gusto, abundance, magniloquence–
he is nearly unique.
Of course much of the critical animus against Cummings derives
from American critics' ignorance of or dislike for the restless development
of French poetry. Although Rene Taupin has perhaps oversharp eyes
in seeing so much influence of Gourmont and Rimbaud in Cummings's
work (Apollinaire's
Calligrammes
are admittedly more evident), it is
nevertheless true that Cummings is more in the French than in the
English stream. By and large, our poetry stems from French, our criti–
cism from English influences; and since before Poe, there has been this
exasperation of the Anglophile cataloguers that French poetry would
neither stay put itself nor refrain from stimulating the poetry of other
languages.
But apart from this, what essentially is the case 'usually brought
against Cummings? Failure in exact communication, pretentiousness,
execrable taste, and limitation of subject.
The poet whose primary interest is to communicate either fails
entirely or, if he succeeds, does so on a abysmal level, for which prose
would have served. The poet whose primary interest is, within the fair
limits of language (private and secret Humpty-Dumpty use of words
strictly barred), to express with the maximal accuracy, depth, and vivid–
ness his experience, by succeeding in that expression, succeeds in com–
munication, i.e. the perfect recreation of that experience in the reader.
It
is simply this paradox which Luis Cardoza y Arag6n crystallizes in his
brilliant dictum: "where there is no miracle, there is no poetry."
Now the miracle of Cummings is indubitably heretical, conceivably
satanic. His words do not, by limiting one another, construct an exact
and unmistakable impression; each word, on the contrary, explosively
releases in the reader as much of its total content of meanings and
emotivity as the reader is capable of supporting. Hence the poem ill
Cummings's mind and in the reader's mind are two quite different
variants of the poem, not in any wise identical but both of great potency.
It is principally for this reason that his poems practically defy para–
phrase into prose. The glaring non-sequitur of our theologians is to
argue that, since the miracle is heretical, there is no miracle. To attempt
to argue out of existence the notorious fact of Cummings's poetic power
merely by (quite correctly) alleging that it is not canonical, is a petulant
absurdity.
Similarly self-deceptive is the contention that Cummings is dis–
credited by his pretentiousness. That timidity of opinion of which
New–
Torkerism
is the perfect flower may chidingly deprecate as bumptious
the classic poetic quality of iactantia; but, whether one likes it or not,
"exegi monumentum" happens to have proved itself a historically correct
statement. It would not wholly amaze, though it might equally dis–
please,
if
