For many people, E E Cummings holds a strange place in the literary canon. His work is frequently defined by his characteristically playful and unconventional approach to the rules of grammar, syntax, and indeed all of the major components that constitute the written word. Despite this frequently difficult approach, his work, particularly his love poems are surprisingly popular, both in his own life time and our own. These two seemingly contradictory elements of the Cummings legacy have resulted in a reputation of a quaint and eccentric romantic; the linguistic play often being overlooked as a mere oddity. In short, as Richard Cureton points out, the technical aspects of his work are frequently not given the full analytical approach it deserves.
There are small circle of critics who have focused specifically on Cummings' word play; Norman Friedman et al, and more recently Jiri Flaj and Zeno Vernyik. This dissertation follows in their direction and draws heavily upon their influence. I am seeking in my own investigation of Cummings' to provide a deeper, more analytical approach to the effects that Cummings' morphological or syntactical play provides, something that I feel has been so far overlooked.
In order to be concise, I shall be using the term linguistic manipulation as an umbrella phrase to include the various aspects of Cummings' approach to words. This term may be defined loosely as the jumbling of words. This jumbling refers either to words broken up by space or line break, syntactical displacement (whereby words are shuffled or cut short of making a whole sentence) and also includes the use of seemingly incorrect punctuation.
Something that I feel has so far been largely overlooked is the way in which linguistic manipulation creates a sense of visuality in Cummings' poems. That is to say it either creates a visual sense of how to read the poem or else it seeks to enhance the poem's subject matter through creating what Cummings himself referred to as "poempictures" [1]
In turn, this helps to objectify language by giving a clearer more precise sense of Cummings' message then words alone could otherwise allow.
This objectification works in two distinct ways. Firstly it works on an interpersonal level, that is to say it gives the reader a greater understanding of what is being told to them directly, as in the love poems where the reader takes the place of the you. Secondly, it works on a more universal scale, as it allows Cummings to cut the cord that has traditionally tied language to civility, and thus allows him to show his dissatisfaction with society. This is most evident in the war poems where Cummings uses linguistic manipulation to reflect that which is actually uncivil.
In this dissertation I shall be seeking to further elaborate and explore upon this claim.
Bridging the Reader-Writer Gap.
"Language traps the subject into a system of infinite
referrals and deferrals, which destroys the capacity
for immediate experience" [2]
Roland Barthes
Before we begin to explore the exact ways in which Cummings uses and manipulates language, it is imperative to consider, albeit briefly, how exactly language, or the written word specifically works, and the specific problems that the written word presents. One of the main problems is what I shall refer to as the reader-writer gap. The foundation of this gap is the belief that "words signify... mental images impressed upon us by the experience of objects" [3] . When we read, we visualise the description the words offer in our mind's eye. Thus, in working in medium such as words, where the reader has to re-imagine what the writer is saying, there is a potential for the message the writer intends to send differing from that of the reader's own experience of the message.
One of the most important critics whose ideas surrounding language I shall frequently be referring to is Roland Barthes. Throughout his career, from his earliest essays to his Inaugural Lecture for the College de France, Barthes provided us with some of the most fundamental and influential ideas concerning language. Barthes describes the "poetic word" [4] (ie. words that seek to communicate experience) as a "Pandora's box", [5] which in its endless possibilities of meanings renders "poetic speech terrible and inhuman...[as it is] full of gaps" [6] Cummings himself was very aware of this subjectivity that Barthes would later describe, his poems strive to bridge the gap between the original experience (the subject matter) and the (written) experience that translates in the poem. The struggle comes form the same potential subjectivity that Barthes describes; The Pandora's Box. This term on the one hand, describes, the way in which each individual interprets words differently because not only is the signifier itself is different but because the signified is different for each individual. [7] That is to say each word is endowed with differences that are unique to the reader or listener, either through personal attachment or else simply a different sense of what the word essentially is. This potentially creates a discrepancy between the signified and the referent, or to put it another way what exactly the writer means and what the reader interprets the writer to mean. What Cummings strives for in his poetry is what Barthes describes as "dream language" [8] whereby the words themselves coerce with the experience of that which they seek to describe. [9] For Barthes, the closing of this gap is impossible, [10] in Cummings it is this impossibility that creates tension; as the more Cummings relies upon the visual or spatial aspects in his poems, the alien the text becomes to the reader.
Nietzsche's Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense, also touches upon this potential subjectivity of words:
the various languages side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression... The "thinginitself" (… pure truth...) is something incomprehensible to the creator of language [11]
For Nietzsche words are concepts or metaphors that fail to correlate with that what they represent in reality. To put express something through words is, for Nietzsche, "a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue" [12] The focus of Nietzsche's argument is that language has become useless as a means of communication. [13] However, if, as he argues, language is a failing expression of truth, then it is by its very nature, subjective; "a reminder of the unique and entirely individual experience to which it owes its origins" [14] and is thus, open to the discrepancy that subjectivity entails. Barthes would later say something simular when he describes "the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little; excessive and impoverished". [15]
This discrepancy is one of the problems language presents that Cummings tries to overcome through various means. To achieve this, the emphasis is placed not on subjectively selected and interpreted words but on the manner in which words are arranged, creating, visually, a guide to reading and understanding the text. The ultimate result of this is that it the experience of the reader is closer to the experience that Cummings had intended to convey. This allows him to "control the reading of the poem as much as he can, so that to the reader, as to the poet, there will be the smallest possible gap between the experience and its expression." [16] . Nevertheless, this reliance on visuality (particularly in the literal sense; punctuation, spatial arrangement etc) creates a text that appears more alien to the reader. As Cummings himself said, his poems are "poempictures" as opposed to poems in the traditional sense. [17]
Hieroglyphic Punctuation.
A frequent tactic of Cummings, that most potentially exemplifies this turn towards visuality is what Edward A. Leverston refers to as iconic punctuation. [18] According to Leverston, punctuation's ultimate function is to "provide additional information not directly available from the flow of speech". [19] However, some poets, Cummings being one of them, uses punctuation as a graphic icon, a hieroglyph of sorts; something that conveys to the reader meaning through a single image by exploiting either the visual nature of the icon itself or what the icon traditionally stands for. [20]
The effect of this ultimately is it allows a stronger, more immediate and accurate response from the reader. If we return once more to the notion that language cannot accurately convey subjective experience, then it becomes clear that in using an image as opposed to a word, it offers the reader a closer response to Cummings' original intention upon writing. Thus, it helps to close the historically wide reader-writer gap, and create a more immediate and accurate experience for the reader.
For example if we consider the final stanza (for want of a better word) of its jolly/ odd we notice the effect this hieroglyphic punctuation ultimately allows:
then nearerandnearerandNEARER
and before you can
!
& we're
NOT
(oh-
I say
The subject matter of this poem, as we shall explore later, is one that means it cannot be successfully described verbally. In order to overcome this Cummings' resorts to punctuation to give a sense of this experience. The conjunctive repetition of the word nearer, gives the impression that this is the only thought going through the speakers mind at this time, thus it conveys the all-consuming anxiety experienced when under attack. The final capitalised nearer and the exclamation mark seek to show that the bomb has dropped. The capitalisation of not gives the impression that someone has died; by placing importance on the word it allows us to understand it is the ultimate of nots; the not being. The parenthesis that follows conveys to the reader a bullet-hole. [21]
In light of this, and to elaborate on something previously touched upon, the visuality created by Cummings' word-play, frequently and purposefully, seeks to create an emotional reaction in the reader. It aims to draw an alliance between the writer and reader, as we experience the poems as a purer more accurate version of Cummings' message, as the reader is not told but shown what Cummings is referring to.
Another poem that makes use of the parenthesis bullet-hole, is look at this). Although, as with its jolly/odd we are not literally shown a bullet-hole, the effect is that Cummings seeks to make us imagine that it is. Notably, the speaker from the first line demands that we give it our full attention; "look at this)/ a 75 done/ this" (269) In actively engaging the reader in such a way, Cummings forces us to become emotionally involved from the start. This preparation means that by the time we encounter the final image (the boy's body being shipped back to his mother) that we give a fuller, more emotional reaction. On some level, we saw this boy after he was killed, then we are given the image of him in a coffin, his weeping mother. [ELABORATE]
Alternatively, the use of parenthesis in the particular poem may be a device that inspires or seeks to prompt the reader to reflect the emotions of that of the speaker. It becomes clear fairly early in the poem that the speaker is a friend of the deceased and his blasé manner is due either to shock or experience:
this was my particular
pal
funny ain't
it we was
buddies (269)
The seemingly odd line breaks give further evidence to this claim. For example, after funny we get a line break on ain't. The following line break is on was. Thus, it would seem that Cummings uses line breaks to convey the truth that underlies the speaker's seemingly inappropriate manner; the ain't dispels any notion that it was funny (in whatever sense of the word) whilst was works as a confirmation of the speaker's relationship to the deceased. Regardless of this the speaker does not convey the emotion one might expect considering he had lost a friend, given that this is in the context of war, it may simply be from experience. If this is the case then the reader the absorbs so to speak, this experience reflected by the speaker, as we ourselves our as accustomed to parenthesis as the speaker is to bullets; we see the parenthesis but this is nothing new to us. This shocks us, as no doubt it shocks the speaker, but we cannot feel an emotional reaction. It may seem paradoxical to state that the reader may experience no reaction, but fundamentally numbness is an emotion in itself; one that reflects the the shock that the speaker himself exhibits. If this interpretation holds true then it means Cummings has managed to instigate in us the same emotion that the speaker himself is feeling; we are shown the bullet-hole but for us, as for the speaker, it is simply a shape.
Another common use of parenthesis by Cummings is to convey a moon [22] . For example in windows go orange slowly, the last parenthesis occupies an entire line to itself, and thus becomes "visually foregrounded" [23] :
(ta-te-ta
in a parenthesis! Said the moon
) (103)
In dominating such an otherwise empty space we are pushed towards seeing the shape of the parenthesis itself, rather than what it is doing to the text which it would traditionally hold. At other times the single parenthesis becomes a literal replacement for the moon itself, [24] as in a-/ float on some where the speaker asks "who/ is/ the// )" (571). Elsewhere in this particular poem, Cummings makes use of the connotation of a question mark by using its icon, as opposed to its word; "float on some/ ?" (571). The idea of the question propels the poem.
By contrast the poem mOOn Over tOwns mOOn, uses a capital O to convey the full moon. The poem describes the image of a moon floating through the sky. It does not digress from this subject, thus the icon works to add a further visual image to a imagiste poem. The moon starts of capitalised, before inverting itself:
oNLY THE MooN o
VER ToWNS
SloWLY SPRoATING SPIR
IT (383)
In light of this it would seem that the poem progresses in accordance with time. [25] It follows the brightness of the moon over the course of a night, and we literally watch (as opposed to read) the moonlight fade within the poem.
At other times Cummings uses the visuality of the parenthesis to convey protection. [26] Cummings builds a house, so to speak, to separate that which is sacred from that which he considers a source of potential corruption. For example, in my sweet old etcetera, the parenthesis at the end serves to separate and thus protect dreams and sex or sexuality from the reality of war:
mother hoped that
I would die etcetera
bravely of course my father used
to become hoarse talking about how it was
a privilege...
meanwhile my
self etcetera lay quietly
in the mud et
cetera
(dreaming,
et
cetera, of
Your smile
eyes knees and of your Etcetera
(275)
Notice, in particular, the difference in the use of punctuation inside and outside the parenthesis. Outside the brackets there is no capitalisation even for proper nouns; "aunt lucy... isabel...i" remain visually and metaphorically insignificant. The final etcetera, however, is capitalised as is the you. Via this grammatical trick, Cummings places great emphasis on the beloved and the dream or idea of sex that their memory holds. It is given a capital in the same manner usually designated to that which we consider holy, whereby a common noun is capitalised to convey its greater significance. Thus, the capitalisation offers transience, the Etcetera becomes more than itself here, in the same manner that the word he does when it is capitalised. In having the idea of sex and love capitalised Cummings conveys that not only are these things sacred in that they are the antithesis of war but also because they hold the potential to tap into something sublime or transcendental, in the Platonic or Blakean sense.
On Language and Civilisation.
"Our business is to see what we can do with the
old English language as it is. How can we combine
the old words in a new order so that they survive,
so that they create beauty, so that they tell
the truth? That is the question. [27] "
Virginia Woolf
In further analysis of Cummings' poems, particularly in the more political war poems I shall be making use of Mikhail Bakhtin's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. According to Bakhtin, language is tied to the society that uses it; it is "modified and transformed in meaning by the variable social tones, valuations and connotations it condensed itself within" [28] . In short, words reflect the heterogeneous society in which they find themselves and in turn becomes not a fixed, objective sign, but the "very material medium of ideology, since without them no values or ideas could exist" [29]
If words are the material of society's values and ideas, then they reveal, by their very nature, social hierarchies and social values of various forms. As the linguist Monica Heller points out:
Language is essential to institutional processes of symbolic dominion, since conventional language processes serve to establish the normality, the everydayness of institutional practices. Language norms are a key aspect of institutional norms and reveal ideologies which legitimate (or contest) constitutional power [30]
In light of this, language is tied to what we consider civilisation. As Charles Olsen points out "language is one of his [man's] proudest acts" [31] as it distinguishes men from animals, whilst simultaneously, the written word is how we define, however erroneously, civilised men from that of their primitive counterparts. Consider for example, the implications of the term pre-historic and the stereotyped differences we place upon the Greeks and Romans and that of earlier humans. This use of language as a means to draw a line between the civilised and uncivilised is still used today, only it takes the guise of the developed world and the third world. Alternatively, on a smaller scale, it is found within modern day social stratification; the educated and non-educated.
For Cummings, as for many other modernist writers (and as we shall explore later, as in Dada), the notion of civility was one that was rapidly becoming defunct. The zeitgeist that the modernist were presented with, particularly in its most brutal moments, is often taken to be the driving force behind modernism. According to Gelpi, "Modernism represents an extension and reconstitution of the salient issues that Romanticism set out to deal with... In the face of intellectual, psychological, moral and political turmoil which propelled the last two centuries into more and more violent crisis." [32] Whilst Eliot seeks to tell us about this turmoil and crisis in The Waste Land, Cummings seeks to present it directly to us, by offering us poetry whereby the rules of convention with regard to language are dispelled and we are offered instead a visual presentation of contemporary civilisation.
The general dissatisfaction with language, both in what it stands for as a cultural concept and in its fallibility, is not only inherent in Modernism but also in Dada. It may be argued that it is easier to align Cummings with Dada as what he lacks in serious self-consciousness, as demonstrated by Pound and Elliot, he makes up for in a Dada-esque self-effacing humour. In terms of language, Modernism, if we are to judge it by its aforementioned figure heads, is at once dissatisfied with language but simultaneously attempts to retain the civility which it measures. This is evident in the use of archaic languages that punctuate Elliot and Pound, that serve to make their poetry difficult to all but a highly educated elite. No such difficulty is evident in Cummings. His poetry, difficult in its own way, refrains from all but the most simple foreign phrases and, as in lets start a magazine, he mocks the attempts to create "serious... authentic" [33] literature.
On a similar note, it may seem odd to align Cummings with what is frequently considered a visual movement as opposed to the literary one in which he is usually placed. It is important to remember in consideration of this that for Cummings, a visual artist himself, the divide between the visual and the written was one that he felt needed to be overcome in order for art of any kind to be as successfully potent in its communication as possible. For Rushworth M. Kidder this was revolutionary:
Cummings was not doing what literary history leads us to expect that a poet will do: He was not fashioning his poetry simply in the context of literary tradition. He was bringing into poetry the many advances made which, through... developments in art, had radically altered visual taste in the first decade of the century [34]
Cummings' interest in the potential cross-fertilisation of the visual and the written forms began early. In examination of his undergraduate paper entitled The Poetry of a New Era (1916) Cummings begins not by talking about poetry, as one may expect, but by examining the arena of visual art, building an argument for a newly dawning cultural taste. [35] In this essay Cummings states the following, exemplifying the importance he placed on inter-disciplinary cross-fertilisation:
… there can be no greater blunder then to isolate... a particular specimen or type or new art without first illustrating, however imperfectly, the expression in kindred fields of that animating spirit which to be appreciated fully must be grasped in its entirety [36]
Cummings' use of linguistic manipulation has its roots in the Dada movement. As stated previously, language is one such way to measure that which we consider civil. However, both during the time of Cummings and of the Dadaists, it was used to defend acts of animalistic atrocity. For Hugo Ball, the pioneer of the Dada movement, this debased language:
how ugly and worn the human countenance has become, and how all objects of our environment have become repulsive to us. The next step for poetry is to do away with language all together. [37]
The main reason that Ball had insisted that language was done away with, and indeed how the Dada movement itself got started was the First World War, where not only did civilisation reveal itself to be distinctively uncivilised but language was used for "patriotic declarations for war and moral sustenance for soldiers at the front." [38] In reaction to this, and true to his claim, Ball wrote poetry that did not include a language; poetry that was suitably jibberish. Take for example his infamous Karawane which includes the following lines:
hollaka hollala
analogo bung
blago bung...
schampa wulla wussa olabo [39]
We may view Karawane as the first attempt to re-appropriate language to the society in which it inhabits; if men act like animals then their language should reflect this. Thus, simultaneously, and with no shortage of irony, Ball actually elevates language to a new level, as the non-language of Karawane manages to dissolve the discrepancy between what words mean on a page and what they reflect in reality.
The poetry of Cummings does not go to the same extremes observed in Karawane; his poems generally still retain potential comprehensibility. Regardless of this the sentiment is the same. Both Cummings' war poetry and the poetry of Ball are reactions to the perceived lack of civility they encountered in a world at war which, in turn, due to the link between civility and language, conveyed a need for modification of language, so that it conveyed humanity in a more truthful manner. The difference is that Cummings wishes to create a new accuracy of words as a means of cfeating a clearer message to his reader, whereas Ball has no message in the words themselves, and this in itself is the message. As Martin Heusser points out unlike the Dadaist, Cummings "does not attempt to replace traditional linguistic utterance but to enhance it (italics mine)" [40]
One poem that exemplifies the Dada sentiment towards language is let it go- the. Although not so linguistically manipulated as some of Cummings' other poems and thus, not as aesthetically akin to Dada, the poem might be seen to display a similar attitude conveyed by Ball when he proclaimed that language should be disposed of entirely. In the poem the speaker calls for words to be "let go" (569) of, before preceding to describe the use of language as potentially dishonest:
the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise- let it go it
was sworn to
go (569)
This poem articulates upon the same concerns as Ball. Note that the vows are broken, whilst the line break on "length" conveys the notion that the broken oath hinders progress; if an oath is broken then it is meaningless, static. In light of this, words must be "sworn to// go" as the illusions of civility and progression they offer are false. The poem then continues into the following stanza to describe words as "truthful liars" and "false fair friends" (569) implying that with honesty "comes love"(569), and with love a better world.
Aside from the politics of Dada, the visual influence of this particular art movement is clear. One of the most frequently used aesthetics was collage. Due to the fragmentary manner of this particular medium; the way in which it is composed, the visual effects it consequently produces, it is within itself politically engaged. Cummings, in his fragmentary and idiosyncratic approach to line breaks, seeks to etch into his poetry the same Dada-esque politics and aesthetics and in doing so offers us a similar take upon the world and its contemporary political climate. In particular, if we consider the work of the later Berlin Dadaists, we find that Ball's chance effects (whereby he would arrange his work according to chance) had become decidedly more calculated and politically motivated than the work of its predecessor. Hannah Hoch's photomontages, for example the infamous Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife (to give its shorter title), demonstrates the capacity of cutting and replacement as a means for a political commentary and critique. The visual aesthetics Cummings employs in fragmenting his words, sentences etc works to displace culture in the same manner as Hoch's wheels and women against the backdrop of Weimar Germany.
Probably one of the most famous examples of this is Next to of course god america I. The poem is itself, a satiric collage made patriotic pieces of popular culture, undermined by the fact that the sentences are cut short:
next to of course god america I
love you land of pilgrims and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawns early my
country... (267)
In the above sentence of observe how the sentences within the speaker's thirteen lines do not fully reach their conclusion, for example the word light is absent from the third line and is replaced with the opening word to (what would have been) the following sentence. The reader cannot help but be aware of this as it is the opening lines of The Star Spangled Banner. In turn, this gives the feeling that the speaker is hurrying through every piece of patriotic culture possible (as further exemplified by the distinctively advertising feel of "by jingo by gee by gosh by gum" 267) in order to try to prove his point.
Furthermore, in cutting a sentence short of its expected conclusion pulls against the meaning we come to expect, and thus, renders the sentence as gibberish. Thus, in cutting the relationship that ties one word to the next, Cummings undermines the argument of his speaker.
In order to add further incitement to the poem Cummings' squeezes words together; "deafanddumb" (267) for example. Simultaneously, as well as adding speed, this allows Cummings to convey a generalised metaphorical ignorance. Elsewhere Cummings cuts a word in two:
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut
iful than these heroic happy dead (267)
In slicing a word thus, Cummings demands a blurring of one word to the next, so that each individual point merges into the next, creating a greater sense of satire. At the same time, although this is a poem that does not require attention to line breaks (in the traditional sense where they dictate a pause) it does create and interesting line break visually. The word beaut means an outstanding example, [41] thus in breaking the word at its prefix, Cummings manages to undermine the notion of the "heroic happy dead/ who... did not stop to think they died instead" (267) by provoking the question as to if this is a brilliant example of beauty, or of anything, other then perhaps the ignorant jingoism of the speaker Cummings is mocking.
Another poem that is in a similar vein to this is the previously mentioned its jolly/ odd. In this poem the word jolly punctuates the entire poem from the very first line where the line break works to emphasise this line. As with the previous poem it explores war, and the jolly is used superficially to convey a sense of being blasé about the war that surrounds the speaker:
its jolly
odd what pops into
your jolly tête when the
jolly shells begin dropping (268)
As we progress however, the word jolly acquires an emotional attachment as the experience of war is described in better detail:
… you
hear the rrmph and
then nearerandnearerandNEARER
and before you can
!
& we're
NOT
(oh-
I say
that's jolly odd... (268)
The word jolly it seems comes to gloss over the horror that surrounds the speaker. As explored previously this horror is one that cannot be described verbally, that simply cannot be spoken of. Thus, "jolly" comes to describe the effect that war has on those who experience it. It demonstrates the way in which the individual insists on a blasé attitude as a means of emotional self-protection.
