730
PARTISAN REVIEW
acteristic patches, colors that are a pleasure in themselves, but who has
never once managed to paint a good picture. For I can't think of a
single poem of his that can be called, in the most serious meaning of
the phrase, a good poem. When one asks people to name one they seem
oddly at a loss, and finally mention poems like
My father moved through
dooms of shall
or
Anyone lived in a pretty how town-attractive
poems
which are spoiled both by filling-in, the automatic repetition of tech–
nical novelties (as
if
you wrote a poem by discovering a novel formula
and repeating it a dozen times), and by the willing shallowness of the
attitude which produces them, that Renascence of Wonder of our own
day. (And something as wonderfully promising as
The Enormous Room
is
the most distressing disappointment of all-as though one could read
The
House of the Dead
only in an adaptation by Paul Goodman and Kenneth
Patchen.) Even Mr. Cummings's delectable freshness and innocence have
come to seem professionally surprising in the way that, say, Mistinguette's
legs are: how much care and avoidance, what cloistral resolution, have
been necessary to preserve intact this stock in trade!
Yet how wonderfully individual, characteristic, original, all his poems
are. (Thinking how extraordinarily true to himself he has been, how false
to every other man, one is forced to remember how far from "self–
expression" great poems are-what a strange compromise between the
demands of the self, the world, and Poetry they actually represent.) And
Mr. Cummings's poems are full of perceptions pure as those in dreams,
effects of wonderful delicacy and exactness; many a flower of rank
sentiment twinkles at one such dewy petals that one gobbles it up like
a cow. In. fact, as soon as the reader lowers the demands he makes on
art-pretends that it is, at best, no more than a delightful or ecstatic
or ingenious diversion-the best poems become a thorough pleasure. For
Mr. Cummings is a fine poet in the sense in which Swinburne is one; but
in the sense in which we call Hardy and Yeats and Proust and Chekhov
poets, great poets, he is hardly a poet at all. Marshal Zhdanov said,
delighting me:
There is a great big hole in the foundations of Soviet
music;
well, there is a great big moral vacuum at the heart of E.
E.
Cummings's poetry. As Louise Bogan has written, with summary truth:
"It is this deletion of the tragic that makes Cummings's joy childish
and his anger petulant." What delights and amuses and disgusts us he
has represented; but all that is heart-breaking in the world, the pity
and helplessness and love that were called, once, the tears of things,
the heart of heartlessness-these hardly exist for
him.
It seems many years too late to review the poetry of Isaac Rosenberg
or Wilfred Owen; but I should like to express my surprise at the common
