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PARTISAN REVIEW
During the early '20's E. E. Cummings's reputation was at its highest
I
r
point: at one moment, a sort of false dawn, he was more imitated, better
regarded, than Eliot himself. But as people came to demand that poets,
and the very chairs they sat in, be socially conscious, Mr. Cummings
slowly came to seem an irrelevant and unaccountable anachronism;
when poets read his verse, as it pushed on into the heart of that last
undiscovered continent, e. e. cummings, they thought of this moral im–
possibility, this living fossil, with a sort of awed revulsion. Later, as the
fortunes of unengaged art improved, as novels by E. M. Forster replaced
novels about strikes, as Mr. Cummings approached a certain age-that
age at which literary survivors come to the king's row, and are accepted
as Fathers of the Tribe-most of his reputation returned, and he now
seems one more dean of American poets. He had a sort of underground
popularity even during the darkest '30's-many a good party-member
had a guilty taste for Cummings or Sherlock Holmes; I think that he
will remain popuiar for a long time, for several reasons. He is one of
the most individual poets who ever lived-and, though it sometimes seems
so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities,
that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings's poems
are loved because they are full of sentimentality, of sex, of more or less
improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence-they are the popular
songs of American intellectuals. (I hope the reader won't think this a
joke, but will seriously consider the similarities between the two.) That
the poems are extravagantly, professedly modernist, experimental,
avant–
garde,
is an additional attraction: the reader of modern poetry-espe–
cially the inexperienced or unwilling reader-feels toward them the same
gratitude that the gallery-goer feels when, his eyes blurred with corridors
of analytical cubism, he comes into a little room full of the Pink and
Blue periods of Picasso. Even the poems' difficulties are of an undemand–
ing, unaccusing sort-that of puzzles: a poem that looks like the ruins of
a type-casting establishment will not elicit from the editors of the
Saturday Review of Literature
a fraction of the indignation with
which they see, in Eliot, some random quotation from Pausanias.
Rilke, in his wonderful "Archaic Statue of Apollo," ends his descrip–
tion of the statue, the poem itself, by saying without transition or ex–
planation :
You must change your life.
He needs no explanation. We
know from many experiences that this is what the work of art does:
its life-in which we have shared the alien existences both of this world
and of that different world to which the work of art alone gives us
access-unwillingly accuses our lives. But Mr. Cummings's poems say
to us something very different: that we and the poet are so superior to
