358
PARTISAN REVIEW
It is, however, a judgment which not only shows a lamentable ignorance
of current poetry but is a calumny on Mr. Hayes. Mr. Hayes may have
his limitations; I think he has; but they consist rather in his inability
to get beyond a part of the attitude which Mr. Eliot-that modern
esthete-established with "Prufrock" and "Portrait of a Lady"; this is
the Eliot who dealt ill the irony and pathos of urban vulgarity and
confident uncertainty, the Eliot of
You will sec me any morning in the park
Reading the comics and the sporting page, etc.
All this, to be sure, is rather watered down in Mr. Hayes, and the em–
phasis is on the pathos, the nostalgia, and the violence, rather than on
the evaluating irony and the dramatic placing of action. But he has
the manner:
We must all make our, readjustments to the world,
We all must compromise, he said.
I was quiet. There was nothing I could answer.
This may not be anything particularly exciting as poetry goes, but it is
certainly better than anything you would guess at from hearing Mr.
Hayes called "a warm-hearted dramatist."
Mr. Cummings is not, like these, an heir of the twenties and thirties
so much as one of the founders of their fortunes. He remains, in
1 X 1,
his familiar self, still unconvinced .that the unique ex·quisiteness of liv–
ing in general and of loving in particular can be conveyed without resort
to verbal displacement. This is a device which forces careful reading,
and when it is used merely to point up a poem, it probably does more
good than harm. Even when it is used pretty extensively, you can some–
times feel the fine structure and the sensitivity of diction and cadence
on which it is imposed (e.g., poem XL) ; for Mr. Cummings is, back
of all his habit-forming recourse to
deeper is life than lose: higher than have
-but beauty is more each than living's all,
a genuine poet and a considerable craftsman. This makes all the more
puzzling the question of what he thinks he gains by continually trans–
posing the parts of speech:
the green whereless truth
of an eternal now welcomes each was
of whom among not numerable ams
..
may
i
achieve another steepest thing.
If
anything is gained by these substitutions for the ordinary nouns and
adjectives of finiteness and infinity, time and eternity, it is gained at
a cost so inordinate as to cancel the profit. The device of accumulating
modifiers before noun or verb is more effective, but Mr. Cummings
frequently uses with it a trick of meaningless syntactical displacement
which appears to have the same disadvantages as does the transposi–
tion of the parts of speech:
