ENG 351 Lecture 17 1 EE Cummings. Born October 14th, 1893. Mr. Culver has already made a ...

29 Pages·2004·0.07 MB·English

by  Chuck Busby

ENG 351 Lecture 17 1

E. E. Cummings. Born October 14th, 1893. Mr. Culver has already made a
disparaging remark about him, so I’m going to try to defend him as much as I can. I
believe the quote was, “This is the worst we’ve come across so far this semester.”
No, E. E. Cummings is truly great in his own way, I believe.
He’s dismissed sometimes for a couple of reasons. One, because it looks like
he’s just playing tricks with all that typography — you know, he’s not writing poetry; he’s
typing funny, or something like that. Also I think he’s dismissed by some academics
perhaps because he’s easy. He’s accessible. When you read E. E. Cummings, you
know what you’re reading. You don’t have to consult Frazier’s The Golden Bow and
you don’t have to deconstruct it, or anything. It’s just there. It says what it means.
Two, it is innovative. It’s not totally — a lot of hard work went into creating the
strange forms that he made. Our selections do not have some of the more radical ones,
some of the really, really strange, almost incomprehensible ones, I will admit. His
theme is twofold: love, mainly. Lots of love in E. E. Cummings and one of our greatest
love poets. And also anti-authority, the individual against society or against the dictates
of the state. He was always for the underdog, he was always for the individual against
the state. He paid for that when he was a very young man when he volunteered to be
an ambulance driver in World War I and got locked up by the French because of some
disparaging remarks that he had made. He wrote a good book about it called The
Enormous Room in 1922. I want to say something else about it. When we talk about
E. E. Cummings and love, E. E. Cummings was also a romantic and that’s a capital R
Romantic. Romantic in the tradition of English Romantics, of Wordsworth and Keats.
ENG 351 Lecture 17 2

Try to make that point.
And interesting life. I think an enviable life in many ways because he wanted to
be an artist and that is what he did all his life. He was not only a poet and writer. He
was also a painter. And some of his paintings are quite good, I think. They’re not —
you know, he wasn’t a great painter but he painted nearly every day. His family is
interesting, I think. The way he was reared is interesting. He loved his parents and his
parents loved him, and they supported him in what he was up to. He said, “I want to be
an artist,” and they said, “Okay.” Sent him to Harvard and gave him an allowance which
allowed him to write the rest of his life. He also, of course, made some money from his
books and lectures later. He traveled the college circuit. It sounds like a happier life
than many of the things that we come across.
He was married three times but his third marriage lasted 35 years, so I think he
just had to keep going until he got it right. Born in Cambridge. His dad was a — on the
faculty at Harvard and also a Congregationalist minister. There’s a famous story about
the cops coming to his dad’s house and saying, “We found your car parked in front of a
brothel in Boston,” and E. E. had left it there all night. But they forgave him.
An educated man, a Master’s from Harvard. He went back there, I believe, in the
‘60s, to deliver what’s called six non-lectures. We have that on tape — or video. It’s fun
to watch, if you ever want to do that. He, like many of the poets from this period, like
Frost and Carlos Williams, used American speech and American idioms. And some of
it’s a little bit dated when you read all those commercial slogans in the poems, you
know, that we don’t recognize now. But I think they’re still entertaining.
ENG 351 Lecture 17 3

Look at “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond” on page 1630.
Cummings usually didn’t title his poems and so they’re generally known by their first
line. Let me read this one to you. I think this is one of the most beautiful love poems
ever. And I think it’s more accessible when you can hear it.
Somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which I cannot touch because they are too near
* * *
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(Touching skilfully, mysteriously)her first rose
* * *
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
* * *
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
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rendering death and forever with each breathing
* * *
(I do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
Now, tell me, wouldn’t you have liked to have written that? That’s always a good test.
One of my sons read that at my wedding a couple of years ago. I thought it was perfect,
a perfect piece.
Spring, roses, flowers. If you look down and you see a flower in line, ten to one
it’s E. E. Cummings.
Thy fingers make early flowers of
all things.
Thy hair mostly the hours love:
a smoothness which
sings,saying
(Though love be a day)
do not fear,we will go amaying.
We will go amaying. Carpe Diem. He sounds like a 17th century poet like Harrick. But
he’s so playful.
I can remember — I believe it was the 5th or 6th grade teacher who read us this
next poem as a Spring poem. Oh, there’s a poem about Spring, you know. I think she’s
ENG 351 Lecture 17 5

the same one who thought “Stopping by Woods” was about Santa Claus. But look at
this:
In Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
* * *
whistles far and wee
* * *
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring
* * *
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
* * *
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it’s
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spring
and
the
goat-footed
* * *
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
Stay away from the balloonman, kids. He’s a goat-footed balloonman. He’s a
queer old balloonman. He’s Pan. He’s whistling but he’s playing the panpipes. This is
a different kind of Spring than maybe Eddie and Bill have in mind, or Betty and Isbel. I
don’t know. Is that just too corny, too cute? The world is mud-luscious and puddle-
wonderful. Is that too close to puppy dogs for you? When you juxtapose that with this
lame balloonman — kind of like Joyce Carol Oates’ character and where are you going
and where have you been — you know, whose boots don’t quite fit and you finally
suspect maybe it’s because he doesn’t have feet; he has hooves.
E. E. Cummings has been accused of being an anti-intellectual and I think he’d
probably accept that. As I said, he’s a Romantic. The heart over the head, the
emotions over the intellect. And “O sweet spontaneous” earth illustrates that quite a bit.
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
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the doting
* * *
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
* * *
thee
Obviously I have fun reading it and I hope you try to read it out loud. And so when the
purient philosophers pinch and poke the earth, what does she do?
Thou answerest
the only with
spring
And that’s the only answer Earth has to have.
To illustrate this as well as it can be illustrated, I think, is one of the poems I gave
you on the pink piece of paper, “since feeling is first.” Look at this and think about all
you ever learned about romanticism, about the idea that the heart is more important
than the head. The emotions are greater sources of truth, more likely to be true than
the intellect. You don’t have to agree with it, but it’s an interesting point of view to have
in the 20th century which he was.
Since feeling is first
who pays any attention to the
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syntax of things will never
wholly kiss you.
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood prove and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom.
Lady, I swear by all flowers.
Don’t cry. The best gesture of my brain
is less than your eyelids flutter
which says we are for each other.
And laugh, leaning back in my arms
the life is not a paragraph
and death, I think, is no parenthesis.
“Lady, I swear” — and of course by flowers. Now, if Cummings is going to swear
by something that’s very important to him, he won’t swear by his divinity and he won’t
swear by his mother. He’ll swear by flowers and Spring. Notice he capitalizes Spring
which, of course, is a mistake. You’re not to capitalize seasons but he does.
“The best gesture of my brain.” Now, what is the gesture of your brain? What
does your brain produce? Thought. The best gesture of my brain, the best thought I
can come up with, is less, isn’t worth your eyelids flutter. If that’s not the physical and
the emotional over the intellectual, I don’t know what might be. The best thought I could
come up with isn’t half as important as your eyelids flutter. And what does he read in
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her eyelids flutter? That they’re for each other. So what should she do? This is like a
lot of those love poems from back then during the carpe diem period I was talking
about, you know. To his coy mistress Andrew Marvel.” This is all — you know, the
point of the whole thing is let’s be together. So lean back in my arms. Why? ‘Cause
life’s not a paragraph and death’s not a parenthesis. What does he mean by that?
What are the characteristics of a paragraph? It’s square. Well, it is kind of
square. I hadn’t thought about that. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Supposedly it has one main idea. Remember having that beat into your heads? They
used to call it the topic sentence. I guess they still do call it the topic sentence. But a
paragraph is, you know, one complete unit of thought, one complete — you know. Well,
life’s not like that. As far as that goes, death is no parenthesis. Now, you can take this
several different ways. Death, I think, is no parenthesis. What does a parenthesis do?
It encloses. Is there anything on the other side of the parenthesis? Well, I think almost
always, isn’t there? You know, a parenthetical thing is you going along in your
paragraph — “Oh, by the way — thump, thump” — and you have your parenthesis in
there and there’s something on either side. So that could be saying death is no
parenthesis, that life continues on after death perhaps. Or maybe death is no
parenthesis meaning it’s all enclosed right there. There is nothing after.
Cummings — I think you could kind of characterize him as a pagan in some of
his early, early poems. He later became a Christian, by the way, later in his life. Oh, I
would’ve loved to have known him. When he had guests over one time after dinner he
wanted them all to get up on the roof and have their after dinner drinks up there
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because he’d seen a flying saucer up there the night before and he was hoping it would
come back. I think the world needs more E. E. Cummings, but he’s rare.
Oh, indulge me. I’m not gonna read all of these to you. Just a couple more.
This one’s so much fun to read. “Buffalo Bill.”
Buffalo Bill ‘s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlike that
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death.
You can put any famous dead person’s name in here and it’ll work. “John F.
Kennedy’s defunct who used to ride a watersmooth-silver” or “Elvis Presley’s defunct
who used to ride” — you know. To this end we all must come.
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death
All of those talents don’t carry on into the afterworld.
And he was a poet. He could use metaphors. Like the metaphor in the first line