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might have used these respectively for Mr. Cummings and Mr. Stevens.
It
would be fairer to describe Mr. Cummings's use of language as
sen–
sationalist
(and therefore occasionally sentimental, occasionally brutal) ;
and Mr. Stevens's use of language as
aesthetic
(and therefore occasionally
precious, occasionally vacuous). Thus, these are two very good and
important poets, but judging them by the very highest standards (Chau–
cer, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Blake, Yeats, say)
one is forced to point out that some element of human experience or
range within it traditionally thought of as central, is left out. Mr. Cum–
mings and Mr. Stevens do not fulfill Matthew Arnold's function for
the poet of strengthening and uplifting the heart; the very genuine stim–
ulation they offer us is mixed with temptations to evasiveness and relax–
ing, to various kinds of self-flattery. And that comes out in the off–
center language.
What does Mr. Cummings leave out? For one thing (and this may
appear a rash statement, for Mr. Cummings, in his more lyrical poems,
might be thought to write about almost nothing else), the complex per–
sonal relationships of men and women. What Mr. Cummings seems to
me to substitute for this fine traditional theme is, firstly, a celebration
of the sexual appetites and achievements of the hearty male animal;
and, secondly, the celebration of a kind of mystical attitude toward life
in general that may indeed spring from a happy and stable relationship
between a man and woman, but need not always do so, and is something
quite different as a theme. Mr. Cummings's love poetry is, in a bad
sense,
impersonal;
and I would connect this impersonality of the love
poetry with a general characteristic of the poetry as a whole, its steadily
sustained youthful strident energy, of which the dark shadow is its al–
most complete failure to mature. Mr. Cummings wrote in 1923 as well
as he does now, and not very differently. The marks of permanent adol–
escence in his work are many. Let me list some: (1) an almost entirely
uncritical devotion to parents, lovers, and a few chosen friends com–
bined with an attitude of suspicion and dislike toward "outsiders": (2)
a general tendency to think of
all
political and economic activities as in
the main a sinister conspiracy against the young: (3) a whole-hearted
universalistic pacifism, deeply emotional, not argued out, combined with
a natural violent irascibility: (4) the instinctive generosity of youth
(always side emotionally with the rioters against the police) combined
with an equally deeply rooted provincial intolerance (unless I am obtuse
in finding this intolerance in the dialect parodies and in some of the
references to people with Jewish or German names): (5) the violent
capacity of the young for disgust (recurrent references to drunkenness,
