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E. E.
Cummings and the Aesthetic Sense
I recently encountered a small exhibit of paintings
by the famous poet E. E. Cummings. I found my self captivated
by these paintings, not because they were good, but because of
their remarkable mediocrity.
Every artist, no matter how primitive or how
sophisticated, has some basic sense of what is beautiful.
One is strongly tempted to assume that if an artist has an
aesthetic sense that breaks new ground in one field, he can
likewise apply that aesthetic break through to other fields as
well, but the paintings of E. E. Cummings seem to belie this
reasonable assumption.
Most artists copy the aesthetic that already exists,
the one they grew up with or admire. It’s just as true of poets
as it is of painters in the main. Some few diverge from the
norm without impacting the mainstream of the culture, but some,
a tiny few, discover an aesthetic sense for themselves that
leads a whole culture off in a new direction. To do this,
they need a very strong personality and an absolutely unshakable
awareness of where they are going. In fact, they have to have
this sense of beauty so implacably fixed in their minds and
hands that all the obstacles any artistic oligarchy can throw in
their way can easily be swept aside by the simple power of their
enduring vision. Though no one really agrees with it,
everyone comes to see that they were right all along. Exactly
how this happens is a mystery.
E. E. Cummings is surely an artist who fits this
description. He was born in Cambridge, Mass. in 1894. His
father was a Harvard Professor of Sociology and Unitarian
minister. The future poet attended Harvard for a BA and an MA
where he acted in a play with T.S. Eliot before volunteering as
an ambulance driver in France during the First World War. He
was jailed under mysterious circumstances. He was probably
mouthing off about the stupidity of war and very nearly died in
a French prison before being rescued and brought home. When he
recovered, he resolved to become a radical poet. He wanted to
confront the social strictures of Cambridge and reflect the new
attitude toward life that came out of the Great War.
His verse broke all the accepted rules of form that
Victorian America had embraced. Simultaneously, he began a
lifelong avocation as a painter. What he offered in exchange for
breaking all the accepted rules of poetry was a vibrant sense of
fun and originality which invigorated a whole new generation of
poetry lovers. He wanted to explore new sexual mores. He
wanted to expose Boston’s hypocrisy. He once got in trouble
with his father when a Boston Madame thought she was being
polite by telephoning his father to explain why the Boston
Police Department towed his car away from the front of her
bordello. The Unitarian minister was not amused.
Randall Jarrell has said
of Cumming’s poetic methods, "Cummings is a very great expert in
all these, so to speak, illegal syntactical devices: his misuse
of parts of speech, his use of negative prefixes, his
word-coining, his systematic relation of words that grammar and
syntax don't permit us to relate--all this makes him a magical
bootlegger or moonshiner of language, one who intoxicates us on
a clear liquor no government has legalized with its stamp."
Strangely enough, while he insisted on breaking all
the rules of poetry, he appears to have followed the modernist
rules of painting with amazing fidelity. He did pen and ink
sketches which have a vivid sense of line and action but are
clearly copies of the style of other works he has seen. His
portraits and self-portraits are contemporary but not
avant-garde. His water color landscapes are modest, even
mundane. His efforts at abstractionism are derivative. His
paintings always followed 10-20 years behind the cutting
edge. He understood what the elite painters of his day were
doing, he just couldn’t get out in front of their aesthetic.
Yet while he is following every modernist trend in
painting as if he had no independent vision of art, no
independent aesthetic judgment to rely upon, he is writing
poetry at the very cutting edge of modernism. In poetry, he has
clarity and purpose. In painting he appears to have no keel.
In poetry, the more he is reviled, the more he becomes
belligerent and holds fast to his aesthetic sense of rebellious
beauty. In painting, he seems to be swayed by every trend and
direction. It is uncanny that the same mind can be so
differently positioned in two adjacent artistic disciplines.
In this respect, Cummings is not unlike Winston
Churchill, who was an absolutely brilliant politician but a very
traditional artist. If politics is an art form, Churchill
brought the aesthetic taste of a Rembrandt to the field of
public debate and public policy making. He may have been the
man who brilliantly led Great Britain to victory on the home
front by understanding the essence of the times, but not because
of his acumen at water color technique.
Then -- why is it that one who achieves the highest
level of leadership in one art form can not transfer the
aesthetic judgments that drove those changes into another,
closely related, artistic medium?
The answer may be that the capacity to influence a
whole art form is not due to aesthetic judgment alone. Perhaps
the ability to change a whole artistic culture only occurs when
there is a confluence of a large number of circumstances, only
one of which is the aesthetic sense. E. E. Cummings’ career was
funded and guided to some extent by his lifelong friends, J.
Sibley Watson and Scofield Thayer, co-founders of the
influential Dial magazine, edited by the influential
poet, Marianne Moore. Cumming’ Harvard connections opened
doors which led to people willing to experiment with his brand
of literary innovations.
Of course, we want to say that our literary heroes
were recognized for their brilliance and not for their
connections, but in the real world, careers are built on both.
In hindsight, when we try to assess what makes some artists
natural born leaders, we end up pointing to their unique
aesthetic sense. We contrast it with that of their
predecessors. But, in reality, there may be a whole lot more
complex factors involved in the making of a radical poet. It
is all rather a mystery.
Perhaps because of his patrician upbringing, and
perhaps because of his close brush with death in French prisons,
Cummings after the war had an unshakable sense of what poetry
should be doing. He understood the failure of the pre-war poem
to break away from the traditional modes and to express the
flapper age in all its outrageousness. Cummings understood
that “the war to end all wars” ended forever any romantic
illusions and set up a new world based on cold rationality that
made us infinitely more pragmatic, even ruthless in our social
engineering. He was, after all the son of a sociologist. He
desired to express this new world, and in words at least, he had
the friends, benefactors, timing, and connections that made this
possible.
In poetry, Cummings found a way to express this new
gruesome and yet wonderful world. With humor and wit, his words
invoked the modern sensibility and made people understand how
the new century would develop different from the old. In
painting, he appears to have had little insight into the ways
images shape and frame new ideas. He appears to have understood
the power of new images when someone
else introduced
them, but he could not find images of his own without guidance
from his betters. Thus he painted modernist caricatures and
colorful abstractions and vivid new portraits, but he could not
break through with a clean visual vocabulary that was all his
own.
For some reason, in poetry these restrictions did
not apply. The words came to him, and, though people claimed
they did not understand them, they knew in their hearts that he
had his finger on the pulse of the new age. They understood
that strange as his poetry might appear, it was completely right
in ways they absolutely needed to understand. All the poetry
that had been written before E. E. Cummings was wrong and
irrelevant, because it did not encompass what he now knew.
Through some magic alchemy, he became our spokesman for
modernity.
When that sort of new vision bursts upon any scene,
it is transformational and E. E. Cummings took the American
poetry world by surprise and turned it up side down for a very
long time.