E. E. Cummings' Modernism and the Classics: Each Imperishable Stanza (Classical Presences) [Illustrated] 9780198767152, 0198767153

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors LORNA HARDWICK

JAMES I. PORTER

CLASSICAL PRESENCES Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics Each Imperishable Stanza

J. A LIS O N R O S EN BLIT T

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © J. Alison Rosenblitt 2016 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2016 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2015959819 ISBN 978–0–19–876715–2 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

FOR Em & the whole garden will bow) E.E. Cummings 26 September 2013

Acknowledgements I could not have written this book without the opportunity to undertake archival research at the Houghton Library (Harvard University) and the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas at Austin), and I would like to thank the amazingly kind and helpful staff at both libraries for their assistance and for the fabulous research environments fostered by both institutions. I am very grateful for the assistance provided by the award of a Joan Nordell Fellowship (Houghton Library) and a Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship in the Humanities, supported by the Frederic D. Weinstein Memorial Fellowship. I am also immensely grateful for the financial support of the Jowett Copyright Trust (Balliol College), which funded the purchase of images and the payment of copyright fees for the book. W.W. Norton and the Cummings Trust have been incredibly supportive and generous in their copyright arrangements, and I would like to thank them, and in particular, Jill Bialosky, Elizabeth Clementson, Mary Kate Skehan, and Robert Shatzkin for sorting out copyright for this book and for my other publications on Cummings. I also thank, again, the staff at the Houghton Library and the Harry Ransom Center for their very efficient and straightforward processes for image acquisition and copyright clearance. Chapter 6 is a reprint with permission of ‘“a twilight smelling of Vergil”: E.E. Cummings, Classics, and the Great War.’ Greece & Rome 61 (2014): 242–60, © Cambridge University Press. The chapter is only very slightly modified from the original article, mostly for continuity with previous chapters. I thank the readers and editors at Greece & Rome for the helpful suggestions which they made at the time of original publication. I am grateful to Elizabeth Pender and Ed Richardson for the opportunity to give an early draft of a portion of Chapter 8 as a paper at their conference, ‘Classics and Classicists in the First World War’, 8–10 April 2014, University of Leeds. I was much spurred on by the feedback and comments of other conference participants, and I thank especially Miranda Hickman for prompting me to think more about the relationship between Cummings and Eliot. I also appreciate having had the

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opportunity to present aspects of my work on Cummings at ‘The Poetics of War: Remembering Conflict from Ancient Greece to the Great War’, 17–19 June 2015, UCL and at Joanna Paul’s colloquium, ‘Antiquity and Photography’, 10 September 2015, Open University (London). Michael Webster made me feel welcome from the outset in the community of Cummings scholars. He has been the very model of scholarly generosity. I thank him for sharing some of his own work in advance of publication, for reading portions of my work, and for continually sharing his time and expertise. He has offered many helpful tips and saved me from several errors. I also thank him for putting me in touch with James Dempsey for information on the poem, ‘A GIRL’S RING’, and I thank James Dempsey for permission to cite his own archival research at Yale which sheds light on the composition of that poem. I owe a different kind of debt, in common with everyone who works on Cummings today, to the work of the late George J. Firmage and the late Richard S. Kennedy. I owe a scholarly debt, especially for their work on Etcetera, but also a personal debt, in that Kennedy’s Selected Poems was given to me when I was a teenager and I do not know if I ever would have wandered into this project otherwise. Among classicists, I thank in particular Tim Rood, who read the entire book in draft. I am also very grateful to Fiona Macintosh for her support and for the welcome she has extended to me from within the world of classical reception. For fielding queries, chatting to me about my work, and offering support of various kinds, I thank Georgina Capel, Adrian Kelly, Ben Cartlidge, Rosalind Thomas, Deborah Blake, Georgy Kantor, Daniel Matore, Julia Griffin, Robin Lane Fox, Mathura Umachandran, and Linda S. Siegel. I also thank Al Moreno for an incredibly kind and generous office-share arrangement during the year when I was finishing this book, and Salmaan Mirza for the equally kind and generous loan of a free room during some archival work at Harvard. I have strayed from my training in ancient Roman history. Notwithstanding the change of field, my doctoral supervisor, Miriam Griffin, shapes this book simply because she has shaped my intellectual life, and one of the greatest debts I owe is to her. My very greatest debt is to my husband, Jonathan Thorpe, for everything. I gratefully thank, also, my parents, Daphne and Donald Rosenblitt for their support, and especially my mother for proofreading the entire

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manuscript. I thank Emily Rosenblitt, Chris Fryar, and Fleur de Wit for their support and enthusiasm, and I dedicate this book to Em with love and gratitude. Finally, I thank everyone at OUP who has made it possible to see the book through to print existence: Hilary O’Shea, Lorna Hardwick, James I. Porter, Vicki Sunter, Georgina Leighton, Emma Slaughter, Heather Watson, and, most of all, OUP’s commissioning editor for Classics, Charlotte Loveridge, who never stints on her availability in spite of the vast Classics list which she oversees. I also thank OUP’s anonymous peer readers, who have helped me to make this book so much better than the first submitted draft. Cummings copyright as follows: ‘a politician is an arse upon’. Copyright 1944, © 1972, 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. ‘a like a’. Copyright 1950, © 1978, 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1979 by George James Firmage. ‘A GIRL’S RING’. Copyright © 1973, 1983, 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1973, 1983 by George James Firmage. ‘of evident invisibles’. Copyright 1923, 1951, © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976 by George James Firmage. ‘in Just-’. Copyright 1923, 1951, © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976 by George James Firmage. ‘Tumbling-hair / picker of buttercups / violets’. Copyright 1925, 1953, © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976 by George James Firmage. ‘annie died the other day’. Copyright © 1961, 1989, 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. ‘HELEN’. Copyright © 1973, 1983, 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1973, 1983 by George James Firmage. ‘earth like a tipsy’. Copyright 1923, 1951, © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976 by George James Firmage. ‘first she like a piece of ill-oiled’. Copyright © 1973, 1983, 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1973, 1983 by George James Firmage. ‘through the tasteless minute efficient room’. Copyright ©1973, 1983, 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1973, 1983 by George James Firmage. ‘O sweet spontaneous’. Copyright 1923, 1951, © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976 by George James Firmage. ‘(thee will i praise between those rivers whose’. Copyright 1923, 1951 © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976 by George James Firmage. ‘Doll’s boy’s asleep’. Copyright 1923,

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1951, © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976 by George James Firmage. ‘them which despair’. Copyright © 1973, 1983, 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1973, 1983 by George James Firmage. ‘inthe,exquisite’. Copyright 1923, 1951, © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976 by George James Firmage. ‘the mind is its own beautiful prisoner.’ Copyright 1923, 1925, 1951, 1953, © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976 by George James Firmage. ‘when any mortal(even the most odd)’. Copyright © 1958, 1986, 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. ‘in heavenly realms of hellas dwelt’. Copyright © 1961, 1989, 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. ‘one April dusk the’. Copyright 1923, 1951, © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976 by George James Firmage. ‘when life is quite through with’. Copyright © 1925, 1953, © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976 by George James Firmage. ‘NOCTURNE’. Copyright © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. ‘BOOK I, ODE 4’. Copyright © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. ‘BOOK I, ODES 24’. Copyright © by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. ‘BOOK II, ODE 14’. Copyright © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. ‘BOOK IV, ODE 6 (An Invocation to Apollo)’. Copyright © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. ‘BOOK IV, ODE 7’. Copyright © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust, from COMPLETE POEMS: 1904–1962 by E.E. Cummings, edited by George James Firmage. Copyright 1923, 1925, 1926, 1931, 1935, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, © 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1973, 1976, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1983, 1985, 1991 by George James Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Quotes from THE ENORMOUS ROOM, A Typescript Edition with Line Drawings by the Author, by E.E. Cummings, ed. by George James Firmage. Copyright © 1978 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1978 by George James Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Quotes from EIMI by E.E. Cummings. Copyright 1933, © 1961 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust.

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Quotes from CUMMINGS COLLECTION AT HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY by E.E. Cummings. Copyright by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. SKETCHES by E.E. Cummings. Copyright © by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Quotes from ADVENTURES IN VALUE by E.E. Cummings. Copyright © 1962, 1990 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. J.A. Rosenblitt 1 October 2015

Contents List of Illustrations Abbreviations and Manuscript Collections Foreword

xvii xix xxi

E.E. CUMMINGS AS A CLASSICAL POET 1. Preface

3

2. Cummings and the Classics 1. Cummings at Harvard 2. Reading Cummings as a Classical Poet 3. 1910s Modernism and Classical Continuities 4. Language and Syntax

18 20 23 27 32

3. ‘smoking centuries of hecatombs’: Cummings and Translation 1. Latin Seasonality and Greek Eternity 2. Metre and Form

40 41 54

CHILDHOOD, HARVARD, AND PAGANISM 4. The Pagan World of Goat-footed Pan 1. Fauns 2. ‘the goat-footed balloonMan’ 5. Classics and Childhood: Protectors and Transgressors 1. Classics and Classicists in Adventures in Value 2. ‘saints and satyrs’

63 69 77 90 93 101

THE GREAT WAR AND BEYOND 6. ‘a twilight smelling of Vergil’: Cummings, Classics, and the Great War 1. War as an Idea 2. ‘dusty heroisms’ 3. ‘Ça Pue’ 4. Looking Back

113 114 118 124 129

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7. ‘let not thy lust one threaded moment lose’: Death in the Meadow 1. Exquisite Annihilation 2. Pastoral Death 3. Nine Songs of Death 4. Cummings’ ‘Songs’ and H.D.’s Sea Garden

133 134 139 146 160

8. ‘cast like Euridyce one brief look behind’: The Post-War World 1. Moving on 2. Carpe Diem in a Post-War World 3. ‘Fields slowly Elysian’ 4. Suicide

166 168 176 183 187

CUMMINGS, CLASSICS, AND MODERNISM 9. Modernity and Antiquity: ‘smite the sounding bollox’ 1. From Plato to Cézanne: Movement and Bulge 2. White Marble and Busted Statues 3. Tears Eliot

197 198 206 215

10. A Homeric Affair: Reflections on the Ambitions of Modernism 1. The Romantic Poet-lover 2. Epic Ambitions 3. Homer, Milton, Blake 4. Callimachean Defiance 5. Major Poetry

223 224 227 231 235 242

Afterword

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TRANSLATIONS, FURTHER VERSE, AND PROSE BY E.E. CUMMINGS Translations from Horace’s Odes Translations from Sophocles Translations from Euripides Translation from Aeschylus Translations from the Odyssey Translation exercise from Euripides’ Hecuba

253 267 277 283 287 291

Contents

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Further Verse ‘Invocation (Alcaics)’ Untitled Parody of The Waste Land

297 298 299

Prose ‘The Greek Spirit’ ‘The Young Faun’

303 304 305

Editing the Unpublished Work 1. Principles of Selection 2. Presentation of the Translations 3. Editing the Parody of The Waste Land 4. About the Visual Art

315 319 320 322 323

Appendix: Cummings’ Classical Education and Personal Library Works Cited Index of Poems by Cummings Index

327 339 359 363

List of Illustrations 1. Pen and ink by E.E. Cummings, from The Dial, January 1922

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2. Pen and ink by E.E. Cummings, from The Dial, January 1921

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3. ‘ΕΛΕΦΑΣ’. Photograph by Marion Morehouse, from Adventures in Value (1962)

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4. ‘John Finley’. Photograph by Marion Morehouse, from Adventures in Value (1962)

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5. Pencil sketch of crucifixion, by E.E. Cummings

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6. Pencil sketch, Garden of Eden, by E.E. Cummings

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7. Doodling of fauns or satyrs. Pen and ink, by E.E. Cummings

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8. Perseus rescuing Andromeda. Pen and ink, by E.E. Cummings

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9. Pencil sketch, male nude, by E.E. Cummings

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10. Pencil sketch, two male nudes, by E.E. Cummings

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11. Pencil sketch, ‘THE SWAN AND LEDA’, by E.E. Cummings

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12. Page from one of Cummings’ notebook

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13. Page of draft composition

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Abbreviations CP

Complete Poems 1904–1962: Revised, Corrected, and Expanded Edition Containing all the Published Poetry, ed. George J. Firmage. New York: Liveright. Houghton The Houghton Library, Harvard University. HRC Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Spring Spring: The Journal of the E.E. Cummings Society.

Manuscript Collections Houghton: manuscripts with call numbers beginning 1823 are from E.E. Cummings papers, 1870–1969 (MS Am 1823–1823.10). Manuscripts with call numbers beginning 1892 are from E.E. Cummings Additional Papers, 1870–1969 (MS Am 1892–1892.11). Other subcollections from the Cummings papers are given long-form references in the footnotes. HRC: call numbers, unless otherwise specified, refer to ‘Cummings, E.E. (Edward Estlin) (1894–1962). Collection, 1902–1968.’

Foreword A few brief notes. I capitalize ‘E.E. Cummings’, as does almost everyone who works on Cummings’ poetry today. Cummings never himself intended to use ‘e.e. cummings’ as an authorial moniker.1 As a general rule, I use the first-line system of reference for Cummings’ poems; this is the usual practice in scholarship on Cummings. However, at points when this system would be cumbersome, I adopt other approaches. In particular, in Chapter 7—where I discuss the nine poems which together make up the ‘Songs’ section of Tulips & Chimneys—I refer to the poems as ‘Songs I’, ‘Songs II’, etc. This is mostly for the sake of the reader, who I suspect would much prefer to digest a claim like ‘“Songs III” builds on the imagery of “Songs I” . . . ’ than a claim of the form ‘“Always before your voice my soul” builds on the imagery of “(thee will i praise between those rivers whose” . . . ’. But I don’t regard this as a problematic concession to the reader. On the contrary, it is consistent with the argument presented in Chapter 7 that ‘Songs’ needs to be re-evaluated holistically, and the poems considered in order and in context. The usual convention of referring to Cummings’ poems by their opening lines arises because Cummings so seldom titled his poems. Cummings adopted the habit of first-line reference in his working papers, but even these papers show that the first-line reference is not a matter of principle, but of convenience. For example, the 1916 index (HRC 8.11) which Cummings drew up of poems-to-date uses titles for titled poems and first lines for untitled poems. Moreover, some of Cummings’ personal lists of poems are made for the express purpose of working through decisions about selection and arrangement within a volume. In that context, naturally the reference system is first-line reference rather than section title or number, because there is (for example) no ‘Songs I’ until the ‘Songs’ have been chosen and ordered. Once published, however, ‘Songs I’ (‘Songs II’, etc.) becomes a part of the authorial text, and ‘Songs I’ is not necessarily a less valid way of

1

Friedman 1992 and 1996; Moe 2014: 83–4 n.1.

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referring to the published text than ‘(thee will i praise between those rivers whose’. Next: I suspect that Cummings’ mind worked in a way which we would now describe as dyslexic.2 I base this on the kind of spelling errors made frequently in his papers (especially letter reversals and trouble with doubled consonants). I also note his indecipherable handwriting and the skewed relationship of his writing to lines on lined paper; his mirror-image drawings; his obliviousness to the orientation of pages (sheets of paper are used and reused on multiple conflicting orientations); his readiness to write over and under drawings; and his reputation for brilliant conversation based on endless streams of lateral connections. Out of respect for the constructive role that dyslexia might have played in Cummings’ approach to language, I have made minimal corrections to Cummings’ spelling. At the very least, I have endeavoured not to make any corrections silently, either in quoting his notes or in editing the newly published poetry and prose. And finally, all quotations from classical authors are translated. Such quotations normally arise in the course of arguments about relationships between Cummings’ texts and classical texts. Since poetic relationships are constructed in part through verbal echoes, there is an obvious potential for translation to become tendentious in order to suit such arguments. I wished above all to avoid this. When quoting a brief phrase, I have endeavoured to give the fairest and most direct crib that I could give. When quoting anything more than a phrase, I have thought it more fair to turn to a standard, mainstream translation in order to give the reader a version of the ancient text which was in no way shaped for the sake of my own argument. All translations borrowed from others are credited ad loc.

2 For discussions of specific learning disabilities in other authors, see Siegel 1988 (Agatha Christie); Miner and Siegel 1992 (Yeats); Siegel 2013. I have discussed my views about Cummings with Linda Siegel and we hope to say something about this together in the future.

E.E. Cummings as a Classical Poet

1 Preface In June of 1957, in Boston, Mass., E.E. Cummings read from his own poetry at the Boston Arts Festival at the Boston Public Garden. According to Harper’s Magazine, he pulled an audience of seven thousand. That is one and a half thousand more than the capacity of the Royal Albert Hall.1 I am not the first to observe that Cummings’ popularity has been a bar to his academic reputation. But the same has been true of others— Charles Dickens, for example. And the example of Dickens shows too that attitudes can change.2 E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics explores relationships between Cummings’ poetry and the classical tradition. Cummings studied the Classics as an undergraduate at Harvard University (1911–15) and always himself emphasized the influence of classical 1 Harper’s Magazine, ‘After Hours’, 1 Sept. 1957. According to its website, the Royal Albert Hall has a capacity of 5,272. 2 Popularity limiting academic reputation commented on by Fallon 2002. Cummings’ most influential detractor in the academy is probably Helen Vendler, see Vendler 1973: 412–19 (kinder on the earlier poetry, 418–19). Dickens: see Leavis 1948 compared to Leavis and Leavis 1973; i.e. Dickens as the ‘great entertainer’; ‘I can think of only one of his books in which his distinctive creative genius is controlled throughout to a unifying and organizing significance’ (1948: 19; cf. 18–21) versus the position that Dickens ‘demands a critical attention he has not had . . . We should like to make it impossible . . . for any intellectual—academic, journalist or both—to tell us with the famil[i]ar easy assurance that Dickens of course was a genius, but that his line was entertainment, so that an account of his art that implies marked intellectual powers . . . is obviously absurd’ (1973: ix). One of the consequences of Cummings’ low reputation in the academy is that the quality of scholarship on Cummings is extremely uneven. I have taken the view that when giving references for previous scholarly discussion of Cummings’ work, it would be churlish to go out of my way to point out shortcomings just for the sake of it. Any readers who are serious enough about Cummings to follow up references must be prepared to decide for themselves what scholarly views are, or aren’t, worth serious consideration.

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authors on his poetic development. However, today’s casual reader of Cummings’ poetry would be very unlikely to realize that Cummings’ own generation of fellow poets and literary critics perceived him as a poet steeped in the classical tradition. This book argues that, by restoring and examining a forgotten classical context, we can fundamentally refocus our current sense of Cummings’ work. Cummings’ relationship to the Classics must be situated within his modernist context. Cummings’ particular admiration for Sappho, for example, and his experimentation while at Harvard with Alcaic and Sapphic metres, shows him to be in step with his 1910s contemporaries, especially H.D. and Amy Lowell, who turned to Sappho for a poetic voice which they saw as both hard and pure. Also at Harvard, Cummings came under the influence of Pound’s early poetry and followed the latest in developments in Imagism and Futurism. He read Des Imagistes and owned a copy of Blast. As we will see in Chapter 5, Pound’s Imagism, as well as Debussy’s music and the classicism of Freud, fed into Cummings’ unique take on pagan revival. Many of Cummings’ theories of art (see Chapter 9) are articulated with Greek art on the one hand and Cézanne on the other as the two anchoring points of reference. Cummings’ selffashioning as a modernist lyric poet, and his perspectives on Joyce, Eliot, and Pound (see especially Chapters 9 and 10), find expression through a dialogue with classical forms and themes. Cummings is a modernist. He has been relegated out of the mainstream study of modernism simply because he is not considered to be a serious poet in many scholarly circles. But modernism was his literary world.3 A decisive factor in his early literary success was the support of The Dial, the New York literary magazine which stood at the forefront of American modernism and also served as a major point of contact with European modernism. (It was The Dial that first

3 Webster 2014, in a general companion to modernism, may represent the beginnings of promotion into more mainstream work on modernism; Chaney 2011 in the Journal of Modern Literature is also a step towards the mainstream. On Cummings and modernism (including Cummings’ relationship to Imagism, Dadaism, Cubism, Futurism): Friedman 1962a; Friedman 1964; Kennedy 1977: esp. 281–2; Kennedy 1979; Cohen 1987; Cohen 1992; Webster 1995a: 111–40; Olsen 1996; Fallon 2002; Raker 2003; McGuigan 2005/2006; Webster 2005/2006a; Wasserman 2007; Flajšar and Vernyik (eds) 2007; Chaney 2011; Webster 2011; Webster 2014. Cummings’ anticipation of postmodernism: Peterson 1995; Huang-Tiller 2005/2006.

Preface

5

published The Waste Land in America.)4 In Paris, where Cummings lived for two and half years in the early 1920s, his place was likewise among the modernists. In 1924, the Parisian literary magazine, The Transatlantic Review, published four of Cummings’ poems in its first number; it also (during its one year of existence) published excerpts from Pound’s Cantos and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (then, Work in Progress).5 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, in their Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), devoted a whole chapter to ‘William Shakespeare and E.E. Cummings: A Study in Original Punctuation and Spelling’.6 For them, Cummings is the primary example of the misunderstood modernist, and to defend him is to defend the modernist movement. ‘The objections that are raised against the “freakishness” of modernist poetry are usually supported by quotations from poems by E.E. Cummings and others which are not only difficult in construction and reference but are printed queerly on the page.’7 Any case that is to be made for Cummings as a poet has to be made for Cummings as a modernist. It is not a case of trying to force scholarship to take Cummings seriously by labelling him as a modernist. It is simply that he was a modernist, and so his poetry either stands or falls within that literary context. Some Cummings specialists have sought to place him as partmodernist and part-Romantic, but as not fully either. The principle early champion of this reading of Cummings, Norman Friedman, meant it as a wider challenge to the strict scholarly division between modernism and Romanticism: ‘many critics have been unable to grasp the meaning of Cummings’ art because Cummings is a modern Romantic and they have been unable to understand the significance of Romanticism and the import of its relationship to the Modernist

4

Rainey 1998: 77–106 for The Dial’s publication of The Waste Land. Cummings was in fact present at one of the crucial meetings between James Sibley Watson and Pound concerning publication of The Waste Land in The Dial: see Rainey 1998: 88. On Scofield Thayer and The Dial, see Dempsey 2014: esp. 47–72, 87–93, 105–48, 165– 78. (Thayer and Watson owned The Dial from the January 1920 issue until its demise in May 1929.) On Cummings and The Dial, see Dempsey 2014, passim; Tucker 1975; Reutlinger 1975; Kidder 1976b; Cohen 1992. 5 Cummings 1972: no. 77, p. 104. Wickes 1969: 177–8. 6 Riding and Graves 1929 [1927]: 59–82. 7 Riding and Graves 1929 [1927]: 59. Riding and Graves criticize Cummings for excessive simplicity of thought behind the difficult typography (75), but the point remains that they construe him as a poet at the heart of the modernist movement.

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tradition’.8 However, because Friedman did not seriously pursue a wider rereading of modernism, he unintentionally inaugurated a tendency among Cummings experts to remove Cummings from full participation in the modernist scene by insisting that he is only part-modernist because he is part-Romantic, and perhaps partTranscendentalist, part-individual, part-uncategorizable, and more. At times, Cummings scholars have even rejected Cummings’ own characterization of his work as modernist: ‘A third style [in Cummings’ poetry] which had been emerging has been called “modernist,” even by Cummings himself. This term is unsatisfactory . . .’.9 Modernism is not a straightjacket, and to divide Cummings in this way from his contemporaries does not do him, or his texts, any favours. Moreover, students of modernism have by now been looking for half a century, and are still looking with increasing interest, at modernism’s connections with Romantic and Decadent writing. With looser constructions of the strands feeding into early modernism, it is easier to talk about Cummings’ place in the modernist world.10 One thing which does, however, distinguish Cummings from some modernist voices (including Pound, Eliot, and Joyce) is his personal participation in the Great War. Cummings served in France in 1917 as a volunteer ambulance driver. He and his friend, William Slater Brown, aroused suspicion because of their preference for socializing with the French rather than with their fellow Americans, and because of Brown’s frank and hot-headed letters home, which attracted the notice of the French censors. The pair were arrested and imprisoned for three months by the French authorities on the grounds that they

8 Friedman 1964: 114; see also Friedman 1962a. To give Friedman his due, he saw the need for re-evaluations of modernism and Romanticism even if he was not himself able to trigger them. But he also, at times, treated modernism as a charge against which Cummings needed to be defended, e.g. Friedman 1957: 1037, defending Cummings against the charge of modernist obscurism. 9 Kennedy 1979: 197. 10 There is by now a large body of scholarship on modernist poets and their relationship to the Victorians, the Romantics, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the Decadents. For the present purposes of this book (and esp. for Chapter 7), I am particularly indebted to Laity’s work on H.D. and Swinburne (Laity 1989, 1996, and 2004, this last on Eliot as well as H.D.). Laity’s research—focusing on H.D.’s construction of a female voice out of Decadent models of the body and sexual desire—comes from an explicitly feminist perspective. I hope that my debt to Laity’s work in the context of this book about a male poet does not seem like an appropriation.

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were ‘undesirable in the war zone’ and ‘a suspected threat to national security’.11 Cummings’ novelized account of his imprisonment, The Enormous Room, was his first major published work. With more loyalty than perspicacity, Cummings’ first biographer confidently asserts that ‘my readers as well as I may be hard put to it to name a book published in 1922 which has lasted at all or lasted as well’.12 Such a claim merits a smile. Cummings himself—as we will see— grasped the status of Ulysses and The Waste Land as well as anyone, and recognized it earlier than most. But it is true enough that 1922 was a significant year for him, being not only the year in which The Enormous Room was published but also the year in which he assembled the manuscript for his first solo volume of poems, Tulips & Chimneys. Cummings and modernism is a tangled topic, but not a new one. On the subject of Cummings and modernism, therefore, I tap into an ongoing discussion. But I also take the more unusual step of considering Cummings as a poet of the Great War. In spite of his numerous war poems—and in spite of the role of The Enormous Room in launching Cummings as a writer—Cummings is seldom thought of as a war poet.13 The side of Cummings’ poetry that most readers remember is the poetry of the small ‘i’, the scattering of letters to create an image on the page, the interest in childhood, play, and spring. However, a study of Cummings and the Classics leads us towards the more ambivalent and unsettled war poems in which the status of the classical world is threatened by war, and a darker, more violent underbelly to the classical inheritance is exposed (Chapter 6). In Gregory’s comprehensive reassessment of H.D., H.D. and Hellenism, she argues that: ‘Hellenism seems for her always contextualized by war. This is not merely a matter of H.D.’s own biography, in which her shared hellenic aspirations were shattered by her experience of World War I. Rather, hellenism itself seems intrinsically linked to and brought into definition by wars, and the classic as a

11 Cummings 1978 [1922]; ‘undesirable’/‘suspected threat’: official documents reproduced in Norman 1972 [1958]: 83; Vernier 1979: 347–8. 12 Norman 1972 [1958]: 101. 13 There is only a small amount of scholarship focusing on the war poetry (Osborne 1965; Dayton 2010) and these articles consist of studies of one or two individual war poems. None of the scholarship makes the case for treating Cummings as a war poet.

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concept is bound to the notion of recurrent cultural catastrophe.’14 The Hellenism described here by Gregory is not exactly what Hellenism meant for Cummings, but it is comparably true that Cummings’ Hellenism was linked to war. In Chapter 7, a comparison of the subsection ‘Songs’ from Cummings’ Tulips & Chimneys with H.D.’s Sea Garden brings out both shared and divergent aspects of their respective Hellenisms. Both poets use classical spaces and classical time to create the erotic charge which attends the yearning for death and dissolution. Continuing these themes, Chapter 8 looks at Cummings’ carpe diem poetry of seduction in a post-war context against a backdrop of death. E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics also includes an edition of poetry and prose by Cummings which relates to his engagement with the classical world. Although I refer to this material throughout my discussion of Cummings and the Classics, I have placed Cummings’ own work in a separate section at the end, so that readers can more easily flip to it, or read it separately. The main part of the poetry consists of seventeen translations from the Classics, written while Cummings was a student at Harvard. Of these seventeen translations, ten have never before appeared in print and a further two have only appeared within a previous scholarly article (by the late R.S. Kennedy), and are not included in any volume of Cummings’ work. Also published here for the first time is a short poem written in Alcaics, which can be added to the published ‘Sapphics’ for a fuller sense of Cummings’ interest in classical form and metre. The final poem included among this previously unpublished work is a parody of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. This is a poem in five sections, two of which were excerpted and published in Etcetera: The Unpublished Poems (1983). The editors of Etcetera either did not realize or did not indicate to the reader that the two texts which they published were not composed to stand alone, but rather served as parts I and III of the parody. The existence of this parody of The Waste Land by Cummings has not, to my knowledge, been previously noted. It was written in the 1920s and so stands among the earliest of such parodies. It is a thrilling text—a chance to investigate Cummings’ perspective on Eliot (and Pound, Joyce, and others), and—for the

14

Gregory 1997: 3.

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purposes of this book—a chance to see, through the poem’s many classical allusions, a very different side to Cummings’ ideas about modernism and the Classics. In addition to the poetry, there are three short pieces of previously unpublished prose. The first of these is a preface to Cummings’ translation from Sophocles’ Electra, which offers a direct statement of his method and aims as a translator. The second is an essay on ‘The Greek Spirit’ written for one of his classes at Harvard. The essay articulates Cummings’ ideas about the reception of the Classics by new generations of readers and comments on the relationship between classical literature and ‘Futurism’ (a term which Cummings there uses loosely). Finally, a short story, ‘The Young Faun’, which was also written at Harvard, provides a new insight into Cummings’ Harvard-era paganism and its relationship to the sexuality explored in his early poetry. All of the unpublished material dates to Cummings’ time at Harvard, with the exception of the parody of The Waste Land, which is nevertheless still early (probably late 1922/1923). The opportunity to work with this new material has naturally pulled the focus of this book towards the earlier portion of Cummings’ poetic corpus. I have tried to give this previously unpublished work the frame that it deserves, by examining the classical themes which emerged from Cummings’ Harvard years, the use in Cummings’ early poems of phrases and ideas first worked out in his classical translations, and the influence of specific classical authors read at Harvard on Cummings’ developing voice. In the 1950s, in the last decade of his life, Cummings returned to many of the themes which had preoccupied him during his earliest productive years, including a refashioned version of the paganism of his youth. His relationship with Homer resurfaced in his late poetry, and some of the Anglophone authors whose influence affected his early reading of the Classics—Milton, Blake, Pound—also resurfaced. This full-circle return to his earlier literary interests makes it useful to draw in discussion of Cummings’ late work (especially in Chapters 5 and 10). Cummings’ middle period, on the other hand, takes different directions. I have referred at various points to work from throughout Cummings’ life, but I have not provided a sustained discussion specifically focused on the classical dimensions of Him (1927), Anthropos (1930), EIMI (1933), or other mid-period works. I say a little more about this in the Afterword.

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics

This book’s emphasis on Cummings’ early work means that many of the published poems which I discuss in depth are either from Cummings’ first published solo volume of poetry, Tulips & Chimneys, or they are poems of early date from Etcetera: The Unpublished Poems (1983)—a posthumous volume of poems selected from Cummings’ papers by George J. Firmage and R.S. Kennedy. I wish to clarify here at the outset a key point about Tulips & Chimneys. Tulips & Chimneys has a complicated history. It was completed by Cummings in 1922, when he finalized the selection of poems and the order and groupings in which they were to appear. The volume was then published by Thomas Seltzer in 1923 as Tulips and Chimneys. Suffering at the hands of an unsympathetic publisher, it contained only sixty-six of the one hundred and fifty-two poems which Cummings had wished to include. The publisher refused those poems which he found too shocking in subject matter, language, or style. Most of these were later published in Cummings’ second and third volumes of poetry, XLI Poems (1925) and & (1925). (The latter title alludes to the ampersand which was also rejected by the publisher, when Tulips & Chimneys became Tulips and Chimneys.) The authoritative version of Tulips & Chimneys, which returned to the 1922 manuscripts for Cummings’ preferred selection and arrangement, was published later (Cummings 1976, edited by Firmage and Kennedy) and is reproduced in the Complete Poems (1991).15 Seltzer’s high-handed removal of Cummings’ ampersand has, at least, the unintended advantage of making it easy to be clear in discussion. Whenever I mean the original manuscript assembled by Cummings and published later as the authoritative version, I refer to Tulips & Chimneys. When I mean the volume as published in 1923, I refer to Tulips and Chimneys. Both are relevant to questions about publication context, although the context provided by Tulips & Chimneys is usually more interesting. The poems of Tulips & Chimneys are divided—as per the volume title—into a first section, Tulips, and a second section, Chimneys. With three individual exceptions, the poems are further grouped

15

Publication history of Tulips & Chimneys: see the introduction by Kennedy and the afterword by Firmage in Cummings 1976. There was a flawed 1937 edition of Tulips & Chimneys, which attempted to return to authorial intentions but contained errors: see Ordeman and Firmage 2000: 161.

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into subsections. Cummings took elaborate pains over selection and arrangement. Indeed, when accepting the heavily cut Tulips and Chimneys, Cummings insisted as his final line of defence that the arrangement of the poems which survived the cut must not be altered.16 Admittedly, what Cummings produced does not straightforwardly maximize market appeal for the twenty-first-century reader. The opening poem, ‘EPITHALAMION’, is long (by Cummings’ standards), heavy with classical references, and somewhat unapproachable. However, the collection quickly eases up into the poetry whose style is so recognizable today.17 Seltzer, on the other hand, had the opposite reaction: he had no objection to the heaviest of the poems but refused to include much of the most cutting-edge work. Thus Cummings has had the worst of both worlds. Tulips and Chimneys (1923) misrepresents him as a poet, engendering distortions which have continued to affect the reception of his earliest poetry—while the authorial opening strategy for Tulips & Chimneys (1922 ms) opens with those poems which are least to contemporary taste, further discouraging today’s reader from a return to the intended publication context. This mutilation of Cummings’ first volume of poetry has had a serious and lasting effect. The poems published in Tulips and Chimneys had already lost much of their intended frame, and this has only encouraged further extremes, in terms of a tendency to read individual poems entirely divorced from their initial publication context.18 Some of Cummings’ most famous and most-discussed poems are affected, such as ‘All in green went my love riding’ (CP 15), ‘in Just- / spring’

16

Ordeman and Firmage 2000: 161. For Cummings’ strong feelings about the ordering of poems, note also a letter to William Slater Brown, 12 August 1923 (Cummings 1972: no. 74, pp. 100–1): ‘Sent Broom,via you(if agreeable)some sonnets which I beg on genoux will be either (1) printed as typed,in order,etc. (2) rejected entirely.’ Cf. letter to Francis Steegmuller, 5 March 1959 (Cummings 1972: no. 252, p. 261). For Cummings’ care in ordering poems, see also Friedman 1979: 313–15; Webster 2002; Huang-Tiller 2005/2006. 17 Compare Kennedy’s remarks at 1994a: 233–5. 18 Some attempts at correction: Huang-Tiller 2001; Buck 2011; and by implication, work which emphasizes the importance of Cummings’ structuring principles in his other collections, e.g. Webster 2002; Huang-Tiller 2005/2006; Huang-Tiller 2007.

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics

(CP 27), and ‘Buffalo Bill ’s / defunct’ (CP 90).19 In this book, I have tried to foreground publication context where that affects the text— as, I think, it often does profoundly—and I pay particular attention to subgroupings including ‘Songs’, ‘Chansons Innocentes’, and ‘La Guerre’. Much of this book will be concerned with Cummings’ presentation of sex, male sexuality, female sexuality, and seduction. Cummings was raised in an atmosphere of repressive attitudes to sex and sexuality, which he associated most especially with his authoritarian father. The Reverend Edward Cummings was a progressive thinker, who spoke out frequently on the diverse concerns of Boston, Mass., both from the pulpit and at many town hall debates. His opinions ranged over issues including the liberalization of sporting events on Sunday, dealing with drunks, and world peace.20 One of these town hall meetings saw the Reverend discussing with two medical doctors the advisability of sex education. The debate (preceded by a piano and cello concert) was dutifully reported by the Boston Daily Globe of 16 February 1914. A good approach, thought Dr Cabot, would be ‘to enlighten children at a young age on the reproduction of plant life’ as a careful preparation for fuller knowledge. Dr Wilcox addressed the medical aspects: ‘if the truth was revealed, the world would be appalled’. Finally, Rev Edward Cummings, speaking on ‘The Responsibilities of Parenthood,’ told of the work which the Massachusetts Society for Sex Education . . . was doing and the books and pamphlets which the society distributes freely, or which may be purchased. He said that he had been in London, living in the East End of that city as a sociological student during the period of terror caused by the murders of ‘Jack the Ripper.’ He was one of the citizens’ committee to watch the streets at night for the ‘Ripper.’ They found out then that a lamppost was worth several policemen in the East End because crimes were committed only in the dark places. ‘It 19 On ‘All in green went my love riding’, see Chapter 7.3. On ‘in Just-’, see Chapter 4.2. On ‘Buffalo Bill ’s’: Budd 1953; Ray 1962a and 1962b; Friedman 1962b; Kidder 1976a; Funkhouser 1979; Cohen 1987: 216–17, 232–33; Labriola 1992; Dilworth 1995; Olsen 2002. 20 From the archives of the Boston Globe, which was then the Boston Daily Globe. ‘Advocate of Sunday Play’, 27 March 1911; ‘Dealing with Drunks’, 26 Feb 1900; ‘Peace for the World’, 17 June 1907.

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is so with this subject,’ he added. ‘What is needed is more light on it and put an end to the “conspiracy” of silence from which the race has suffered such terrible harm.’21

The Reverend was a socially liberal and sincerely civic-minded individual, who—in one sense—believed in lamp posts to illuminate humanity’s darker places. At the same time, the private atmosphere of the Cummings family home was far from an atmosphere of personal sexual liberation. In late life, in the private records which he kept of his thoughts and feelings, Cummings wrote about a letter just received from his own daughter, Nancy, and addressed to him as ‘My dearest father’. The letter prompts him to realize how the idea of ‘father’ fills him with a profound sexual guilt triggered by the association with his own father, Edward Cummings, ‘E.C.’: ‘why did the 1st 2 words of N’s letter so strangle my heart in guilt-fear?’ ask myself over & over. And not till tonight do I recall a little story E.C. told me(as a masturbating secretly body)about the danger of lying down under a tree with a girl & waking up with her pregnant!22

This is Cummings’ formative world: respectable Cambridge and serious-minded Boston, where citizens duly attended discussions of sex education and venereal disease preceded by cello concerts. At home: an adoring mother and an upright, authoritarian, and sexually repressing father—a dynamic which Cummings later conceptualized as the root of a deep Oedipal complex.23 The struggle to overcome his sexually repressive upbringing was central to Cummings’ development as a poet. The classical world played a key role. He found a sexual openness to which he responded instinctively—for example, in a note which he scrawled during his Harvard days about the Venus de Milo: ‘The woman nude; the goddess unashamed.’24 Cummings found an emotional and poetic liberation through his engagement with the Classics—and occasionally a practical liberation as well. It was easier to get past the censors with a line written: ‘if 21 From the archives of the Boston Globe, ‘Guarding the Race’, 16 February 1914; ‘and put an end’: sic. 22 Houghton MS Am 1892.7 (196). Folder 1. 23 Oedipal complex: see below, Chapter 5.2. 24 Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (760), Folder 18; see also below, Chapter 9.2.

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics

Hate’s a game and Love’s a çυκ’.25 Throughout this book, we will see many classical authors, motifs, and ideas engaged in Cummings’ poetic sexualities. The classical material includes (to list only a few of the major themes) satyrs, fauns, and nymphs, Helen and other ideas of iconic classical beauty, classicized maleness, and carpe diem seductions. Before delving into this multifaceted classical engagement, I want to say a few things up front about the politics of it. Cummings’ gender attitudes have come in for criticism.26 Some of these criticisms I believe to be more valid than others, but I want here to point in the direction of a positive case for Cummings’ voice. That case starts with Cummings as a war poet. The most unusual aspect of Cummings’ war poetry is that at every stage he links the war with the sexual experience of soldiers in wartime. He writes about lovers and about prostitutes, drawing on his own wartime friendship with the Parisian prostitute Marie Louise Lallemand—a young woman whom he dated but did not have sex with.27 Many of Cummings’ early poems concern the prostitutes whom he met, some in Paris and some elsewhere. The prostitutes of the Great War have had no remarkable representative, no Vera Brittain. We might feel that it would be better if these women had left writing in their own, female voices. But if they must be heard through a male voice, then it matters that Cummings was entirely in love with Marie Louise, and made that perfectly clear to her.28 Cummings wrote to Marie Louise from the Front, and she wrote to him. We know that Cummings also gave her his father’s address in America. After his release from imprisonment, Cummings returned to Paris and searched for her, but could not find her. She had

25 The line is now generally printed ‘if Hate’s a game and Love’s a fuck’ (CP 438). Cummings also used Greek letters to spell out ‘fucking’ in ‘the waddling’ (CP 98). See Gerber 1988: 198; Hadas 1998. On Cummings and censorship, see Gerber 1988; see also letter of August 1934 to Edward B. Rowan (Cummings 1972: no. 98, p. 129). 26 Fairley 1979; Cohen 1983, esp. 602–6 and 1987: 112, 132–7; more mixed assessment: Yablon 1998; recent discussions of the erotic poetry: Fallon 2012 [2013]; Huang-Tiller 2012 [2013]; Kidd 2012 [2013]; Reilly 2012 [2013]. 27 Cummings had some sexual experiences with Marie Louise, but not penetrative intercourse. It depends, therefore, on the definition of ‘sex’, but Cummings seems to have regarded intercourse with Berthe later, after his release from prison, as his loss of virginity. See Kennedy 1994a: 141–4; 157–8. 28 Cummings openly avowed his love in a letter to Marie Louise, a draft of which survives: Houghton MS Am 1823.7 (19).

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been ill when Cummings was at the Front. It was now some months later, and it is not unlikely that she was dead.29 Some years later, Cummings wrote to his sister Elizabeth, his only sibling, urging her to embrace the same independence of spirit which he himself treasured, and arguing that a failure to exercise one’s own mind is simply cowardice. e.g. I am taught to believe that prostitutes are to be looked down on. But before believing that,I will,unless I am afraid to do it,make the following experiment:I will talk with,meet on terms of perfect equality,without in the slightest attempting to persuade,a prostitute. Through my own eyes and ears a verdict will arrive,which is the only valid verdict for me in the entire world—unless I take somebody’s word for something,which (because I desire to be alive)I do not.30

Cummings writes of what he ‘will’ do here in the sense of what he had already done in Paris and even, briefly, as an undergraduate at Harvard—in spite of the outrage and disapproval of his father.31 Cummings’ writings are the fruit of his defiance. He wrote about women whom he knew and, in one case, loved. One might contrast Eliot’s use of a stock prostitute type in his early verse.32 While Cummings’ texts must be judged as texts, and not as products of biography, Cummings’ personal involvement is relevant in the context of the wider modernist fetishization of prostitutes. (The same point about personal investment applies to a very different case from the late poetry: a transgressive and shocking poem about incestuous sexual abuse. Cummings loved, and married, a woman who had been a victim of incestuous abuse.) Leave the biography aside. As texts, the poems offer perspectives on prostitution and prostitutes which are unsettling and truthful. first she like a piece of ill-oiled machinery does a few naked tricks

29

Kennedy 1994a: 157–8. 3 May 1922, from Selected Letters (Cummings 1972: no. 64, pp. 83–7; quote at 85–6). 31 There was a terrific family row when Cummings left his father’s car outside a brothel and it was discovered by the police: Norman 1972 [1958]: 34–5; Cowley 1973: 334; Kennedy 1977: 273 and 1994a: 89–90; Sawyer-Lauçanno 2006: 69–70. 32 ‘Lulu’, in work published in Inventions of the March Hare (1996). See Johnson 2003: 19. 30

16

E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics next into unwhiteness,clumsily lustful,plunges—covering the soiled pillows with her violent hair (eagerly then the huge greedily Bed swallows easily our antics, like smooth deep sweet ooze where two guns lie,smile,grunting.) “C’est la guerre” i probably suppose, c’est la guerre busily hunting for the valve which will stop this. as i push aside roughly her nose Hearing the large mouth mutter kiss pleece33

The accent (‘pleece’) tells us that the woman is French, speaking to an American (or English) soldier. We know that she is a prostitute partly because the tone and language of the poem reflects the many poems in which Cummings directly identifies the women concerned as prostitutes, and also because we see that she is not responding in terms of genuine sexual arousal: she is ‘ill-oiled’. The fact that sex occurs even though the woman is ‘ill-oiled’ makes that act—although consensual—still an act of violence. We see the casual roughness with which the soldier treats the prostitute: ‘as i push aside roughly her nose’. It is the very smallness of this act of violence that opens up to the reader the depth of damage done by the war. At the same time that we feel the full brutality of this small violence, we also feel our own guilty participation, as the ‘i’ draws us to identify with the soldier. We witness the damage done to him, as the trauma of war is displaced onto this scene with the prostitute: our soldier-speaker is ‘busily hunting for the valve which will stop this’. In the image of two bodies falling into bed like two guns sinking into the mud of the trenches, we see the soldier’s body as well as the woman’s body through his perspective as the poetic ‘i’: the two bodies are assimilated to the metal machine with which he kills, or is killed.34 Cummings’ soldier cannot escape the war and its dark mix of death and erotic desire. The idea of guns which lie, smile, and grunt in the 33 CP 947; first published in Etcetera. ‘La guerre’ (‘the war’) is how Cummings usually refers to the Great War in his writing. 34 Compare Wilfred Owen on bodies and guns. Rawlinson 2007: 123: Owen’s ‘Arms and the Boy’ ‘metalizes desire in the form of bayonet and bullet, “famishing for flesh” and “long[ing] to nuzzle in the hearts of lads” ’.

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‘sweet’ oozing mud has a disturbing beauty. It implicates us all in the troubling erotics of war. There is much more to be said about Cummings’ presentation of women, but to say more would take me farther away from beginning this book. I hope that ‘first she like a piece of ill-oiled’ can stand as a token. Such honesty about what men do to women in times of war, and why, serves as an indication of the depth and nuance of Cummings’ treatment of sex, of prostitution, and of male and female sexuality. With this said, I turn to the topic of Cummings and the Classics. I aim to keep what follows light and readable. Today’s undergraduates are tomorrow’s scholars, and in the hope that I might play some part in changing future approaches to Cummings, I have tried to write a book which will be accessible to students as well as useful to specialists.

2 Cummings and the Classics E.E. Cummings was an undergraduate at Harvard from 1911 to 1915, staying on for a further graduate (A.M.) year in 1915–16. The Classics were his principal field of study, although he abandoned his intention to major in the Classics once he had exhausted his options in Greek literature. He took one class in Latin literature, and did not care to pursue it, or to study the history or philosophy of the ancient world, and so, in the end, he majored in ‘Literature especially in Greek and English’.1 Cummings’ familiarity with the Classics goes back to his childhood. His childhood drawings testify to a phase of infatuation with the Greek world in 1903, the year in which he turned nine. There are a few dozen drawings of scenes from the Iliad, and a series of about twenty drawings of Greek statues, copied from a book during November 1903.2 This must be kept in perspective. Cummings’ doting mother seems to have preserved every scrap of drawing from his childhood. There are literally hundreds of scenes from the tales of

1 Kennedy 1976: 269, 281–2. On Cummings and the Classics: Baker 1959; scattered references in Triem 1969; Kennedy 1976, esp. 269–79; cf. Kennedy 1994a: 52–72; Lind 1982; brief remarks on a few classical allusions in No Thanks in Webster 2002; English 2004; Webster 2012 [2013]; Rosenblitt 2013. Cheever 2014 seems to hint at a classical reading of Cummings with her first chapter title, ‘Odysseus Returns to Cambridge’, but in fact she is not interested in Cummings’ classical training or in classical aspects of his poetry. Generally on Cummings at Harvard see: Norman 1972: 29–68; Kennedy 1976, Kennedy 1977, and Kennedy 1994a: 52–104. 2 Probably Lucy Myers Wright Mitchell, A History of Ancient Sculpture (1883). This book was in Cummings’ personal library (see Appendix) and the drawings correlate reasonably well.

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King Arthur and the knights of the round table, hundreds of drawings of the First Nations (Native Americans), hundreds of locomotives and submarines, as well as drawings from nature, especially of birds, portraits of family members, and so on. Cummings grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the shadow of Harvard: he lived on Irving Street, about eight minutes’ walk from Harvard Yard. Before his undergraduate years, Cummings was educated at the Cambridge Latin School, where the ‘College Preparatory’ course consisted of English; Latin; Algebra; Plane Geometry; Greek or French or German; Greek or English history; Roman or US history; plus electives. More time was devoted to English and to Latin than to any other subjects: both were taught four times a week. The second foreign language was timetabled for three days a week; Cummings studied Greek.3 His surviving Latin schoolwork shows a completely sound grasp of Latin grammar and a fluid and easy translation style. Some of the tone of his schoolboy relationship to the Classics is captured in his juvenilia: Ah, wicked Ovid! how thy wretched Latin order has confused My mind,-to eccentricities of Latin poetry all unused; O teach me, dreamy Ovid, how thy writhing, wreathing verse to scan Mahap the gods can do the painful job - but not a common man!4

But such thrusts say more about adolescence and the flippancy of a teenage boy trying out his skills with verse than they say about Cummings’ deeper feelings for the Classics. Whatever his complaints about Ovid, Cummings chose to study the Classics at Harvard. He made that choice in spite of—or, indeed, in active rebellion against— his father, who had himself studied sociology, and who would have preferred for his son to select a subject more pragmatically engaged with the modern world.5

3 Houghton MS Am 1892.7 (193). Further details of Cummings’ schooling, see Appendix. 4 Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (27). For ‘wretched’, Cummings has ‘wreched’: see Foreword on possible dyslexia. ‘Ballad of the Scholar’s Lament’, discussed below in the Appendix, has a similar schoolboy’s tone. 5 Kennedy 1966: 446.

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics 1. CUMMINGS AT HARVARD

Cummings’ undergraduate years are the real foundation of his relationship to the Classics. The details of his Harvard syllabus and classical reading have been carefully reconstructed by his chief biographer, Richard S. Kennedy.6 In his Freshman year, Cummings studied the Odyssey Books VI–X, Euripides’ Hippolytus and Medea, and Aristophanes’ Acharnians and Frogs. His Sophomore year of Greek included Thucydides Books VI–VII, Aristophanes’ Birds, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, taught partly in a tutorial system by the Oxford-educated C.P. Parker. In this same year, he took his one Latin literature course, which covered Livy Books I–II, Terence’s Phormio and Andria, and a good amount of Horace. In his Junior year, he took a year-long general philosophy survey course, the first half of which was devoted to ancient philosophy. Finally, in his Senior year, he studied Demosthenes’ ‘On the Crown’, Aeschines’ ‘Against Ctesiphon’, Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, Euripides’ Bacchae, and Sophocles’ Electra. Independently, he read Euripides’ Electra. Cummings was particularly close to one of his Classics teachers, Theodore A. Miller, who became a mentor and who guided his reading, beyond the Harvard syllabus, in English and classical literature. On the classical side, Miller encouraged Cummings to read Catullus, Horace, Sappho, Anacreon, and the Hellenistic epigrams of The Greek Anthology (Anthologia Graeca).7 The impact of the Harvard course syllabus can be seen in Cummings’ writing throughout his lifetime. The idea of katabasis, which became important both to war poets and to modernists, is an example. Katabasis appears in Cummings’ poetry and in his prose travel-epic EIMI. Small Homeric details, like the ‘three willows’ which ‘wail’ at the entrance to the underworld in one of Cummings’ early poems, show that the Homeric engagement was direct, as well as mediated through Dante and, later, through Joyce. The Odyssey also 6 Kennedy 1976: 269–70, 274–6; 1994a: 53–6. Kennedy 1994a remains the standard biography of Cummings; neither Sawyer-Lauçanno 2006 nor Cheever 2014 supersedes it. Kennedy has also left a set of notes on Cummings’ Harvard courses, grades, and professors in with the Harry Ransom Center’s archival material (HRC 8.11) for the aid of future researchers attempting to piece together the archive. The American college course is four years: Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior. 7 Kennedy 1976: 272.

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21

resurfaces in the very last poetry collection of Cummings’ life, 73 Poems (1963), where we find the poem which, from a classical reception perspective, may justly be considered to be Cummings’ masterpiece: a reworking of the bard’s tale of Aphrodite, Ares, and Hephaistos (from Odyssey VIII. 266–366).8 The chance to study Plato was another aspect of the Harvard course syllabus which was to have a lasting influence. Cummings wrote a class essay on Plato’s Republic and remained fascinated by the allegory of Plato’s cave. Hints of it recur in his poetry, and he wrote a very short play titled Anthropos: or the Future of Art (1930), which reworks the cave allegory. Anthropos features three ‘infrahuman’ speakers, a man, and a mob. It is not a subtle piece; its three infrahuman speakers are identified by initial as G, O, and D. They spend the play discussing the need for a good slogan, while the man paints a ‘mammoth’ which is in fact a steamshovel. The play explores ideas of evolution and commercialism, conformity, man as artist, and his relationship to observation and imitation. The whole of the action is set in a cave around a fire and reworks the Platonic exploration of what one knows or chooses to know and to perceive. There are many other cases where the impact of the Harvard syllabus shows more casually. For example, the exposure to Demosthenes in his Senior year no doubt influenced jokes made in passing in The Enormous Room (1922), ‘a peroration which would have done Demosthenes credit’, or in the absurdist play Him (1927), where a character identified as a Soap Box Orator decries the dangers of ‘cinderella’: ‘Why, it’s so dangerous that the three greatest elocutionists of all time—Demosthenes Daniel Webster and William Jennings Bryan—couldn’t explain to you how dangerous cinderella is if they lectured steadily for six months without a glass of water.’9 Also important for Cummings’ relationship to the classical world is the year-long course on Dante which he took in his Senior year.10 Dante became an important lens through which Cummings’ experience of the Classics was mediated, and the points at which Cummings’

8 ‘three willows’, CP 9–10; see Chapter 7.2. ‘in heavenly realms of hellas dwelt’, CP 799, on which see (briefly) Lind 1982: 143 and Chapter 10 for further discussion. Katabasis in the war poets has been a major theme of Vandiver’s work; see Vandiver 1999 and 2010: esp. 302–21. 9 Cummings 1978 [1922]: 94; Him, Act II, Scene 3 (Cummings 2013: 34). 10 Kennedy 1976: 279–81.

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work engages the Classics via Dante are also points at which his work interacts with the giants of modernism, Eliot and Joyce. Cummings continued to read Greek for pleasure after Harvard, although he could never sight-read Greek.11 British scholars might associate the early twentieth-century with a fluency in compositional Latin and Greek which was not Cummings’ world. Even though the Cambridge Latin School emphasized Latin and taught Greek as well, Cummings’ education had never been dominated by the classical languages in the same way as those of his British contemporaries who came up through the British public schools. Robert Graves, for example, was Cummings’ nearly exact contemporary—born less than a year after Cummings. Graves captures his own world in a vivid anecdote from his autobiography Goodbye to All That (1929, revised 1957). On leave from fighting in France during the Great War, Graves was bullied by his parents into attending a church service which turned out to be more than three hours long. So I stayed and tried to compose Latin epigrams, which was, in those days, my way of killing time—on ceremonial parades, for instance, or in the dentist’s chair, or at night in the trenches when things were quiet. I composed a maledictory epigram on the strapping young curate— besides myself, my father, the verger, and an old, old man with a palsied hand sitting just in front of me, the only male in the congregation, though there were sixty or seventy women present. I tried to remember whether the i of clericus was long or short, and couldn’t; but it did not matter, because I could make alternative versions to suit either case: O si bracchipotens qui fulminat ore clericus . . . and: O si bracchipotens clericus qui fulminat ore . . . For he was now preaching a sermon about Divine Sacrifice, and bellowing about the Glurious Perfurmances of our Surns and Brethren in Frurnce today. I decided to ask him afterwards why, if he felt like that, he wasn’t himself either in Frurnce or in khurki.12

Graves’ very likeable story represents a British world of casual verse composition which was not the world of Cummings’ American 11

Lind 1982: 139, quoting Robert E. Wegner, The Poetry and Prose of E.E. Cummings, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World: 1965. Wegner’s book is not available to me; I rely on Lind’s quotation. 12 Graves 2000 [1957]: 166–7.

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childhood and education. The courses taken by Cummings at Harvard required some Greek and Latin composition, but translation rather than composition was the central aspect of Cummings’ relationship with the ancient languages.13 In any case, Cummings’ linguistic standard is not the measure of the depth of his relationship with classical literature or with Latin and Greek. While he himself stated that he could not sight-read Greek, the ancient languages—especially Greek—are integral to his development as a poet. It is a great mistake to equate language skills, in the narrow sense, with literary feeling or with the emotion of Cummings’ (or anyone else’s) engagement with the Classics.

2. READING CUMMINGS AS A CLASSICAL POET We don’t normally think of Cummings as a classically influenced poet. With his experimental form and syntax, his irreverence, and his rejection of the highbrow, there are probably very few current readers who would name Cummings if asked to identify twentieth-century Anglophone poets in the classical tradition. But for most of his life, and even for ten or twenty years after his death, this is how many readers and critics did see Cummings. Here is how Cummings was remembered by Malcolm Cowley, a fellow Harvard writer, in an obituary published 9 September 1962 in the Herald Tribune and titled ‘A Farewell to the Last Harvard “Dandy”’: After the shock of hearing that a great writer is dead, one goes back to his early years, if lucky enough to have known about him then. It is something done partly for solace and partly, if one is a critic, in an effort to place his work in context. E.E. Cummings’ early years were spent in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at home and at Harvard. When he was at Harvard, from 1911–1916, a poetic tradition there was drawing to a close, although some of the poets who represented it were still to become famous. The tradition had started about 1890, and it includes such distinguished names as those of Trumbull Stickney—our most neglected major poet—Edwin Arlington

13 See below, Appendix, on Cummings’ school textbooks, which included textbooks for composition.

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Robinson, Wallace Stevens, Conrad Aiken and T.S. Eliot, among a score of others. It has never been given a name, and an accurate one would be hard to find for a movement that comprehended so many diverse talents, but simply for convenience we might call it the tradition of the Harvard dandies. Of course, these poets weren’t dandies in the sense that they dressed or acted with any precious sort of refinement. The dandyism went into their poems, which were as proudly discriminating and as free from vulgarity (except of a deliberate sort, introduced for effect) as the costume of a Regency gentleman. All the Harvard dandies had a cold, dry, sharp New England wit of the kind that stabs you with icicles. As distinguished from other poets of the period, they all had a sense of fact that sometimes became brutal realism. Almost all of them were pagans, in the sense that they invoked Greek deities—especially goat-footed Pan—more often in their poems than they invoked Christian saints, and also in the sense that all except Robinson started as fleshly poets, in revolt against Christian austerity. Including Robinson this time, they had all received sound classical educations, and almost all of them read and admired modern French poetry. That double pattern of influence, Greek and French, was set by Trumbull Stickney, who was the first American to be awarded a doctorate by the Sorbonne, after writing a thesis in French about axioms in Greek poetry. [ . . . ]14

The ‘paganism’ of Cummings is a topic I return to in Chapters 4–5. It is only one of many aspects of Cummings as a ‘classical’ poet. Turning to a different aspect, Guy Davenport, writing in 1980 for the literary magazine Parnassus: Poetry in Review, had this to say about Cummings’ distinctive poetic style: Ancient Greek poets wrote without spaces between their words, without capital letters, and without punctuation. The classical equivalent for memorandum paper was the pottery shard, on which notes (‘The saw is under the garden bench and the gate is unlatched’ says one displayed in the Museum of the Agora in Athens) were incised, shopping lists, and the text of poems. This is the way Sappho’s Come out of Crete And find me here, Come to your grove, Mellow apple trees 14 Houghton. E.E. Cummings Miscellaneous Papers (MS Am 1769). ‘Clippings and printed matter.’

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And holy altar Where the sweet smoke Of libanum is in Your praise . . . has come down to us (Fragment 2, Lobel and Page, Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta), fitted onto the wedge shape of the ostrakon. And when these early poems, none of which has survived entire but exist on torn, rotted, rat-gnawn papyrus or parchment, are set in type for the modern student of Greek, such as Edward Estlin Cummings, Greek major at Harvard (1911–1916), the text is a frail scatter of lacunae, conjectures, brackets, and parentheses. They look, in fact, very like an E.E. Cummings poem. His eccentric margins, capricious word divisions, vagrant punctuation, tmeses, and promiscuously embracing parentheses, can be traced to the scholarly trappings which a Greek poem wears on a textbook page. Cummings’ playfulness in writing a word like “l(oo)k”—a pair of eyes looking from inside the word—must have been generated by the way scholars restore missing letters in botched texts, a Greek l[oo]k, where the l and the k are legible on a papyrus, there’s space for two letters between them, and an editor has inserted a conjectural oo.15

Davenport’s analysis is an early example of ‘reception’ thinking. His instincts about the influence of Greek literature on Cummings focus on the way in which the Greek texts have come down to us and how our encounter with classical poetry can be shaped by the nature of its transmission and presentation. Charles Norman—a friend of Cummings as well as his first biographer—suggests that Cummings had a similar perspective on his own work. ‘For his occasional separation of the parts of a word and setting a word or words between those parts, the Greek word for it is tmesis, and Cummings was right to complain that “the people who object to my way of writing have never read the classics . . .”.’16 In addition to paganism and tmesis, earlier critics and scholars instinctively reached for classical terms of reference in characterizing the tone of Cummings’ poetry. Cummings has an acerbic side—for instance, the epigram:

15 Davenport 1980: 42–3. He has simplified the point about Cummings’ major at Harvard. 16 Norman 1972 [1958]: xii.

26

E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics a politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man17

This sharper side to Cummings’ work has been likened to the epigrams of Catullus; elsewhere, Cummings has been called a ‘Juvenalian satirist’.18 Other readers have regarded Cummings’ poetic philosophy and poetic values as ‘Platonic’. Cummings actively encouraged this reading of his own poetry. In his autobiographical i: six nonlectures, when sketching out the formidable personality of his father, he concluded his character sketch with the observation: ‘& my father gave me Plato’s metaphor of the cave with my mother’s milk.’19 Cummings as Platonist has been conceived in fairly loose terms. For example: ‘He [Cummings] is a Platonist, absorbed in the discipline of contemplation and devoted to the perception of being. Existence means more to him than action.’20 This ‘Platonism’, and sometimes Cummings’ classical interests more generally, have been rolled into Cummings’ interest in American Transcendentalism. A reviewer of i: six nonlectures opined in The New Yorker Magazine: ‘. . . he [Cummings] is the personification of the old transcendentalist passion for abstract ideals. In his knowingness with words, in his passion for Greek and Latin, he takes one back to Emerson and Thoreau, who were perpetually pulling words apart to illustrate their spiritual meaning.’21 And Norman Friedman, the first serious academic reader of Cummings, wrote: It seems to me that the basic problem he had difficulty in resolving was whether transcendence meant for him a rising from the material toward the spiritual [ . . . ] or whether it meant a rising above the polarities altogether to where there is no difference between the material and the spiritual. The first is Platonic and lends itself all too well to tension and division, to us against them, and to exclusiveness—although Plato himself varies in his own position, depending upon whether you are reading the ‘Symposium’ or The Republic. Cummings’ second position,

From ‘11 [One Times One]’ (1944); CP 550. Catullus: Davenport 1980: 44; ‘Juvenalian satirist’: Ray 1962a: 287; cf. Kennedy 1976: 273. 19 20 Cummings 1967: 9. Arthos 1943: 388. 21 Kazin 1972 [1954]: 170. 17 18

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on the other hand, is more truly Oriental, and encourages integration, harmony, inclusiveness, and acceptance.22

The Platonic and the satiric Cummings are even unified by other readers—for instance, by the Socratic allusion in Seymour Lawrence’s description of Cummings’ satire as the work of a ‘gadfly’: ‘he is the natural gadfly to an opiated and pasteurized American public. He repudiates the current literary potpourri of prolific professionals, charlatans, and freaks. Cummings’ honesty does not permit compromise.’23 Some of these points about Cummings as a Platonic writer are impressionistic, and we would certainly not now write, as Friedman did, about the ‘Oriental’. But the point remains—that Cummings was seen time and again, during and shortly after his lifetime, as a poet who was deeply influenced by the classical tradition. We do not see him in this way now, only because we have forgotten.

3. 1910s MODERNISM AND CLASSICAL CONTINUITIES Cummings saw poets as makers, and articulated this view in the Forward to is 5 (1926), which (among students of Cummings) is his most famous statement of poetic philosophy (CP 221): If a poet is anybody,he is somebody to whom things made matter very little—somebody who is obsessed by Making. Like all obsessions,the Making obsession has disadvantages;for instance,my only interest in making money would be to make it. Fortunately,however,I should prefer to make almost anything else,including locomotives and roses. It is with roses and locomotives(not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my “poems” are competing.

The philosophy of poet as maker is encapsulated in the term which Cummings invented for himself as a poet: faiteur. Faiteur is not a native French word (the French for ‘maker’ is faiseur), but the sense is

22

Friedman 1979: 319–20. Lawrence quoted in Cowen 1996: 83. Chaney 2011: 41; Tal-Mason 1968: 91–2 also offer Platonic readings of Cummings. 23

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clear enough. It is Cummings’ idiosyncratic assertion of poetic identity, formulated in the context of modernist innovation and artistic self-consciousness. Webster links faiteur with the Greek poiētēs (‘poet’ or ‘maker’ in Greek).24 Cummings himself used poiētēs, notably to describe the character who represents his own person in the autobiographical narrative of EIMI. In CIOPW [Charcoal Ink Oil Pencil & Watercolours], a book of reproductions of his drawings and paintings, Cummings likens his art to that of a tightrope walker and again draws on the Greek—here, on the adjacent adjective poiētos (‘made’): ‘(distinct,teetering on his silver thread, poietos,breathing,measuring with least gestures the air most which creates self)’.25 The persona expressed by the neologism faiteur reflects the innovative and deliberate self-fashioning of the modernists, while Cummings’ use also of the Greek poiētēs counterbalances the neologistic faiteur with an equally modernist confidence in a certain kind of classical continuity. Cummings’ friend, the novelist John Dos Passos, writes of Cummings’ ‘dedication to [ . . . a] cult, based, I suspect, in his case on his Greek, a cult that dated back to the earliest Homeric beginnings and stretched forward into prosodies to come’.26 Cummings repeatedly associates claims of modernist novelty with nods towards classical continuity. One of his notebooks from France (1917) illustrates his buoyant confidence in this dual artistic self. A page of notes is given the Greek heading ‘Εγω’, under which he writes: ‘while Pound is angling for new atmospheres, I am pumping in / toward a vacuum’.27 The same habit of reaching for the Greek (and referencing Pound) in order to define the poet’s task appears in a letter written by Cummings in 1943 to one of his editors:

24

Webster 2011 (unpublished talk). CIOPW = Cummings 1931; the preface refers at this point to the famous tightrope walker Con Colleano. In a classical reception context (but tapping into larger debates), Wray 2001: 24–6 discusses Wallace Stevens as ‘a maker of meaning’ versus Pound as a ‘crafter of language’. On this polarized scheme, Cummings splits the difference; he would best be described as a maker of language. 26 Dos Passos 1966: 134; see also below, Chapter 5.1. This modernist confidence in continuity from the Classics is problematically gendered, as Gregory makes clear (1997: 11–37). 27 Houghton MS Am 1823.7 (17); ‘toward’ is written superscript to ‘in’. 25

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so far as I’m concerned,each poem is a picture γραçή – γραçω “I write”(whence our word “graphic”)but originally “I make lines”—cf the Poet-Painter of China)28

This linking of ‘γραçή – γραçω’ and ‘the Poet-Painter of China’ clearly reflects the influence of Pound’s Cathay (1915), his volume of translations from Chinese poetry.29 Cummings was also profoundly affected by Pound’s ‘The Return’, which orchestrates a poetic return of the pagan gods.30 Among the early modernists, this idea of a reawakened continuity— a Greek tradition rediscovered—was fuelled by the literal rediscovery of Sappho. The surviving Sapphic corpus was expanded considerably in the early twentieth century.31 Greek lyric generally, and Sappho specifically, could be taken to constitute a new standard of poetic authenticity. Pound’s comments on Imagism put Sappho at the headwater of ‘the best tradition’: ‘. . . their [the Imagists’] only endeavour was to write in accordance with the best tradition, as they found it in the best writers of all time,—in Sappho, Catullus, Villon.’32 While a student at Harvard, Cummings encountered and was influenced in parallel by the development of Imagism in England and by more local developments. The Cambridge, Mass. poet Amy Lowell—whose poetry was felt to be a scandal by her brother, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, the President of Harvard—was also consciously reaching back to the Greek poets in the process of crafting her poetic 28

Quoted from the archives by Huang-Tiller 2011: 168. Cummings and Cathay, see also below, Chapter 3.1. Babcock 1963 argues that there is a relationship between Cummings’ visual poetic style and Chinese characters. There are appearances of Chinese characters among the sketches and watercolours collected under the call number Houghton 1892.8 (1); notably Box 113, Sheet 3189. Triem 1969: 14 points out the reference to Tao philosophy in EIMI. 30 Norman 1972: 38–9; Kennedy 1979: 176–9; 1994a: 105–9, especially for the influence of ‘The Return’ on Cummings’ experimentation with the layout of poems; cf. letter to Charles Norman from 1957 (Cummings 1972: no. 241, p. 254). See also below, Chapter 4.2. Pound comes up throughout this book. I have outlined elsewhere (Rosenblitt 2013) some of my views on Cummings and Pound. The best overall consideration of the friendship is Webster 2012. Dempsey 2014: 124 adds a further perspective on Cummings’ ambivalence about Pound. While Cummings stood aggressively by Pound after the latter’s arrest for treason, it is only fair to Cummings to acknowledge how much pain he felt at Pound’s behaviour. ‘Pound was(perhaps is) my friend’, he wrote in 1947 (Cummings 1972: no. 140, p. 173): the painful confusion in Cummings’ feelings is clear. 31 Discussed by Gregory 1997: 149–51; Collecott 2003: 7; Carr 2009: 426, 587. 32 Quoted Rainey 1998: 31, from an essay ascribed to F.S. Flint but written by Pound (Rainey 30); see Rainey 10–41 on Futurism and Imagism. 29

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voice. Lowell saw Greek lyric as ‘hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite’.33 Cummings—who once described Sappho’s ‘Hymn to Aphrodite’ as the ‘noblest poem, messieurs, noblest poem ever written’—called Amy Lowell the ‘American Sappho’ in a witty composition from 1916, in which Lowell, George Eliot, Tolstoy, and others are made to debate literature.34 Lowell was a significant and direct influence on Cummings. He had met her personally and heard her read her poetry.35 He copied out some of her poems into his own notes.36 He also read from her poetry in his Harvard commencement address, much to the astonishment and disgust of his audience, who were accustomed to a conspiracy of silence concerning the Harvard President’s embarrassing relative.37 Lowell wrote Cummings a job reference when he left Harvard for New York (before enlisting in the Norton-Harjes ambulance unit and shipping out to France).38 She thought less of him as a poet, however, than he did of her: she once bet Scofield Thayer that Cummings would not achieve notable poetic success.39 Cummings articulated his version of the classical tradition in a Harvard-era class essay on ‘The Greek Spirit’, published here for the first time among the new prose.40 ‘The Greek Spirit’ is somewhat casual in style and extremely brief. (The professor’s comments— ‘needs time for completeness’—suggest that he thought the essay had been tossed off.) But however casually written, it sheds light on Cummings’ thought and attitudes. ‘Homer and Vergil are far less poets of antiquity than of today—and in this consists their fame. The Greek point of view is to one generation one thing & to another a different and more beautiful.’ Here Cummings expresses a modernist sense of rediscovery of the Classics, and of their inherent modernity, together with the sense that each generation will reimagine the 33

Quoted by Moore in Lowell 2004: xix–xx. Cummings on Sappho: anecdote from Burton Rascoe’s A Bookman’s Daybook, qtd. Norman 1958: 205; Lind 1982: 146. Cummings on Lowell: HRC 2.6. This composition was written for a class taught by Bliss Perry; Perry was underwhelmed. 35 Norman 1972 [1958]: 47–8. 36 Poems copied out from Amy Lowell: HRC 8.11. 37 A version of which was later published as ‘The New Art’: see Cummings 1965: 5–11; Norman 1972 [1958]: 41–6; Kennedy 1994a: 83–5; Sawyer-Lauçanno 2006: 63–5. 38 HRC 11.3; Kennedy 1994a: 113. 39 Dempsey 2014: 67, 154. 40 It is partially quoted in Cohen 1987: 225–6. 34

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Classics for themselves—not only his own generation, but each that follows. The Classics are remade by each generation of readers. In all these points, it is possible to see both engagement with the wider environment of modernism, including a well-informed engagement with developments in Europe, and also the local immediate influence of Harvard. Some of the Harvard influences are directly traceable, such as the connection to Amy Lowell. Similarly, the impact of Cummings’ Harvard studies shows in ‘The Greek Spirit’ and in other pieces of Harvard coursework, where Cummings refers to thinkers such as Arnold, Pater, Ruskin, and others whose work he had either read or heard about in Harvard class lectures.41 Other aspects of the Harvard environment which may have influenced Cummings have not necessarily left such direct traces. But the wider Harvard atmosphere should still be considered. For example, there is the printer Bruce Rogers, about whom Lawrence Rainey writes, in his study of the mechanisms of modernist publication and dissemination: ‘From 1895 to 1912 Rogers worked for the Riverside Press, which acted as Harvard’s printer, during which time he assimilated [William] Morris’s interest in the well-made book to his anachronistic and classicizing style of typography.’42 There is no knowing what impact the local printer’s classicizing typography had on Cummings, but Cummings’ interest in typographical layout is one of the most prominent aspects of his poetry. Even more intangibly, there is a Harvard mood. Take, for example, Eliot’s adolescent bawdy verse, eventually published in Inventions of the March Hare.43 Concerning the relationship of some of the bawdy verse to lewd folk ballad, the lyrics of which were closely followed by Eliot, Chinitz writes: ‘Yet in reproducing these verses Eliot went beyond the normal role of the collector. By affixing the title “Fragments” and numbering the stanzas 1, 2, 13, 24, 25, 41, 50—as if “The Tinker” had been preserved, like Sappho, on tattered papyrus—Eliot ironically invests the song with a spurious antiquity.’44 For all the difference in poetic style between Eliot and Cummings—who only met once at Harvard, and left little impression on each other at that time—Eliot’s irreverent and obscene take on the idea of a Sapphic 41

Cummings’ lecture notes are in the Harry Ransom Center collection. Rainey 1998: 101. On Harvard modernism more generally, see Rainey 1998: 101–5 and below, Chapter 4. 43 44 Ricks (ed.) 1996. Chinitz 1999: 332. Cf. Johnson 2003: 15, 20–1. 42

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fragmentary text has something in common with Cummings’ irreverent, sexualized approach to the Classics.45 A certain Harvard imagination connects them.

4. LANGUAGE AND SYNTAX Before moving into Cummings’ relationship with classical ideas, genres, motifs, and more, a prior point should be made about foreign language work and Cummings’ own idiosyncratic poetic language. Cummings had basic German and some knowledge of the Slavic language group from classes at Harvard. He later picked up a little casual Spanish (from a fellow inmate during his incarceration in France in 1917) and some elementary Russian (during his travels in the Soviet Union in 1931). He studied the Italian language for a year at Harvard in order to take a Harvard class on Dante. But Cummings’ main languages were French, Latin, and Greek.46 The impact of both Latin and French can be found in Cummings’ poetry. There are traces of Latin syntax, for example, in ‘Songs I’ (a poem discussed in more detail below, Chapter 7.2). ‘Songs I’ evokes a classical underworld setting and opens, ‘thee will i praise . . .’. Arthos observed a long time ago that this opening invites a Latinate reading: ‘The order of phrasing in . . . “thee will i praise,” asks to be known as the Latin way of ordering thought, te laudabo . . . ’.47 As for French: some of Cummings’ poems, like ‘little ladies more’ (CP 56–7) blur in and out of French and English. Lind is right to say that, ‘If Cummings had in fact an alter ego among the languages of the world it was French . . .’.48 Furthermore, both Latin and French are invoked in various poems in multilingual puns.49 45 Meeting at Harvard: Kennedy 1994a: 86–7; Ahearn (ed.) 1996: no. 127, pp. 181–3. 46 Kennedy 1976: 279–81; cf. Kennedy’s notes at HRC 8.11. Cummings 1978 [1922]: 132–3 (The Enormous Room) talks about learning Spanish from a fellow inmate, and one of his notebooks from his imprisonment at La Ferté-Macé includes some Spanish language notes: Houghton MS Am 1827.7 (8). 47 48 Arthos 1943: 378. Lind 1982: 141. 49 In terms of the influence of Latin, note also Cureton’s argument that Cummings uses words like ‘enormous’ and ‘immense’ ‘in their etymological meaning (immense from Latin immensus meaning “immeasurable,” and enormous from Latin enormis meaning “unusual,” “exceedingly large”). In Cummings’ poetry, objects that are

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But none of this comes close to the essential significance of the impact of the Greek language on Cummings’ syntax and style. Davenport points in this direction with his analogy between Cummings’ style and the appearance of scholarly restorations of Greek poetic texts. But this, I suggest, is only the tip of the iceberg. The Greek language is intimately bound up with the breakthrough in poetic style which underpins Cummings’ poetic voice. Cummings adored the Greek alphabet. He draws a delicate picture of its personal significance in an autobiographical reminiscence printed in the final work of his life, Adventures in Value (1962). This reminiscence is discussed in more detail below (Chapter 5.1), where I also discuss the delight in the Greek alphabet which is visible in the poem ‘floatfloafloflf ’ (CP 431), in which the body of the ballettap dancer Paul Draper is imagined as moving through the shapes of the Greek letters, ‘omicron’, ‘epsilon’, ‘Omega’, and ‘eta’. Kennedy has noted the role which the Greek alphabet played in freeing Cummings from the assumptions of conventional English capitalization: Cummings ‘had for some time recognized the needlessness of capitalizing the first letter of each new line of verse: he had seen for years that the Greeks capitalized only the first letter of the first word in a poem and sometimes not even that.’50 (Kennedy means to refer to the appearance of Greek in the modern printed editions which Cummings would have used.) For Cummings’ readers, the licence which he takes with capitalization is one of the most immediately recognizable features of his poetry, along with his irreverent punctuation, his experimentation with the placement of text on the page, and his unique syntax. How far he pushed his distinctive techniques varies across the different volumes of poetry, but the essential breakthrough came during Cummings’ final (graduate) year at Harvard in 1915–16 and during the months spent just afterwards in New York, in the company of his Harvard friends.51 Cummings’ first volume of poetry, Tulips & Chimneys / Tulips and Chimneys, contains work from both before and after this stylistic

immense and enormous are beyond measurement, beyond the limits of determinable size’ (1985: 72–3; quote at 72). 50 Kennedy 1979: 178. 51 Kennedy 1979. Variation across the different collections: von Abele 1955.

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breakthrough. The change, coming hand in hand with a change in diction and register, is obvious, from lines such as: Thou aged unreluctant earth who dost with quivering continual thighs invite the thrilling rain thy slender paramour to toy with thy extraordinary lust52

to: your little voice Over the wires came leaping and i felt suddenly dizzy53

Liberation from conventional English capitalization, punctuation, and syntax did not, of course, arrive exclusively via Cummings’ experience of Greek. It occurred within the cultural and literary context of early modernism. Under the influence of Cubism and Imagism, Cummings had acquired the modernist desire for novelty. In 1916, Cummings indexed his poems-to-date, divided by form (‘Ballade’, ‘Sapphic’, ‘Villanelle’, etc.). The index includes a list of ‘blank verse’ and a list of ‘rhyme’, and, finally, a list labelled ‘D.S.N.’: Webster plausibly suggests that this stood for ‘Do Something New’.54 In full recognition of the wider modernist context, there is still every reason to suppose that Greek influenced, not only Cummings’ unconventional capitalization, but also his innovative syntax. As an example, consider the discussion which Irene Fairley—writing as a linguist—offers for Cummings’ poem ‘a like a’ (CP 654): a like a grey rock wanderin

52 The classicizing ‘EPITHALAMION’ (CP 3–7), ll. 1–4, composed in 1916 for the marriage of Scofield Thayer and Elaine Orr. See Kennedy 1994a: 190 and SawyerLauçanno 2006: 86–9. 53 CP 41. Earlier published as ‘The Lover Speaks’ in Eight Harvard Poets (1917: 9). Cf. Kennedy 1979: 180. 54 Webster 2011; I agree with Webster that Kennedy’s suggestion, ‘Designatio Sine Nomine’ (Kennedy 1977: 284; 1994a: 97), is ‘overly ingenious’. The index is in HRC 8.11.

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g through pasture wom an creature whom than earth hers elf could silent more no be

Fairley describes the poem as ‘an expanded noun phrase’. She continues: Although it is a nominative expression, and an incomplete sentence for lack of a verb phrase . . ., the poem gives an unexpected impression of balance. The sense is created by the placement of the main noun phrase in central position, with eight modifying words to the left and nine to the right of ‘woman creature’. This major inversion, preposing a series of adjective phrases, is one that is never permitted in English. We may say ‘a wandering woman’, but not ‘a wandering through pasture woman’.55

Expanded noun phrases can be found throughout Cummings’ work. As additional examples, Fairley adduces ‘a few deleted of texture / or meaning monuments and dolls’ and ‘should any by me carven thing provoke your gesture’.56 Such noun phrases may not be ‘permitted’, as Fairley says, in English, but what is immediately striking from the classical perspective are the obvious parallels for such constructions in Greek. Cummings’ mature Greek translations adopt a smooth English register. However, if we turn to the translations written out as exercises, we see in Cummings’ ‘translationese’ a direct record of his processing of the Greek language. Indeed, it is partly to show this linguistic processing that I have included, among the literary translations in the 55 Fairley 1968: 107. Other work on Cummings’ syntax from a linguistic perspective: Thorne 1965; Lord 1966; Tanner, Jr.: 1976; Bivens 1979; Cureton 1979; Cureton 1980; Fairley 1980 [1975] (which returns to ‘a like a’, at 243–5); Pandeya and Mehrotra 1980; Cureton 1981; Cureton 1985. Cummings’ grammar from a stylistic or literary perspective: Sprugasci 2003; Alfandary 2007. 56 Fairley 1968: 110.

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edition of Cummings’ work, also one translation exercise from Euripides’ Hecuba. The translation of passages from Hecuba offers several useful examples of Cummings’ encounters with Greek syntax and word order. In Greek, Cummings encountered sandwich constructions whereby multiple words, including other noun phrases, can occur between article and noun. Possessives, for example, occur frequently between the definite article and its noun. In the passage from Hecuba, the phrase ‘of most beautiful water the father’ (as Cummings translates) represents the Greek ton kallistōn hudatōn patera: in Greek word order, literally ‘the of most beautiful waters father’. Secondly, Greek compound adjectives frequently require expansion in English, and these adjectives (in translationese) will also generate English nounphrases. In the expression tas kallidiphrous Athanaias, the single adjective kallidiphrous means ‘with beautiful chariot’. Cummings produces: ‘the-with-beautiful-chariot-Athena’. Another of Cummings’ English noun-phrases results from a combination of Greek word order and the expansion of a Greek adjective: or the race of Titans which Zeus with a-with-fire-at-both-endsflame puts to sleep,-the son of Cronos?

The last two lines from ‘Zeus’ to ‘Cronos’ represent the five Greek words: Zeus amphipurō koimisdei phlogmō Kronidas. Zeus Kronidas is a patronymic name, Zeus son of Cronos; in Euripides’ verse, the two parts of the name enclose the action between them. The Greek word order is ‘Zeus [with] a-with-fire-at-both-ends puts to sleep flame the son of Cronos’. Cummings has adjusted the word order slightly—but not much—for the sake of English intelligibility. In other words, through any one of several routes, Greek syntax encouraged sandwich construction, noun phrases, and tmesis. From ‘the with a beautiful chariot Athena’, it is hardly any distance to Cummings’ own ‘any by me carven thing’ or ‘a wandering through pasture woman’.57 Cummings’ notes written for the dustjacket of his play Him (1927) offer a different example of his conceptual debt to Greek syntax. 57 For the unusual nature of Cummings’ debt to Greek, note that Carne-Ross 1990 finds a much fuller history of Latinism in Anglophone poets and less successful Anglophone adaptation of Greek syntax.

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And so far as you’re concerned “Life” is a verb of two voices—active,to do,passive,to dream. Others believe doing to be only a kind of dreaming. Still others have discovered (in a mirror surrounded with mirrors), something harder than silence but softer than falling;the third voice of “life”,which believes itself and which cannot mean because it is.58

Cummings elsewhere acknowledged that his idea of a third voice arises directly from the Greek. In notes meant to explicate his dustjacket (not published by Cummings, but available in a transcription from his papers in the journal Spring), Cummings wrote: Grammatically speaking,the middle voice refers to a particular form which Greek verbs assume when they wish to represent their subject as both the agent & the object of action;in other words, as performing some act upon himself,or with reference to himself—instead of either actively doing something to someone else or passively having someone else do something to him. This action, intermediate between active & passive, immediately suggests the English word reflexive. And speaking reflexively:I call myself a poet. At a deeper level, this reflexive voice expresses the author, or creator, a 3dimensional being [ . . . ].59

This idea of the third voice underlines how embedded Greek was in Cummings’ own search for his poetic ‘voice’. As with other aspects of Cummings’ debt to the Classics, the debt to classical syntax was more instinctively recognized by an earlier generation. For example, the New York Times, Sunday, 9 September, 1962 ran this brief notice a few days after Cummings’ death. Although the author partly conflates typography and syntax, the observations are pertinent: For all of E.E. Cummings’ typographical innovations he was an oldfashioned poet. . . . Even his typography, which seemed so modern, was ancient in intention. Cummings revered Latin and Greek verse and understood that English, for all its excellences, had never achieved the concision and special effects available to the interlocking syntaxes of those inflected languages. In his poems he wanted to make many things happen simultaneously. He wanted to catch action in words and yet keep it shivering, like a pointillist painter. He wanted words to merge as

58 Self-quoted in i: six nonlectures (1967: 64). Also quoted and discussed in Webster 2004a: 97–8; reprinted Cummings 2010a and discussed Webster 2010. 59 Cummings 2010c. See also Webster 2010: 47–9; 2014: 502.

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impressions in the mind do. He wanted to reach back and forward, pulling past and future into a present instant. This was not an innovation so much as a thorough realization of a lost art.60

Cummings preferred Greek to Latin. as greek’s to latin(sun to moon religion or to science)so precision’s to exactness:no man’s thereof surer than i’m;and of you61

The Greek world was, to him, the nobler one: I innately abominate & fundamentally loathe all gangsters(including literary gangsters)& everything they sit for;& I stand for quality against quantity,Greece against Rome.62

But Latin poetry played a crucial role in freeing Cummings to write about sex and desire. In Cummings’ poetry, Catullus is one of the more frequently referenced poets—particularly Catullus 3, ‘Lugete, o Veneres Cupidinesque’.63 And if any one ancient author were to be singled out as an influence on Cummings’ poetry, there would be a case for singling out Horace. Horace, along with Sappho, became part of the fabric of Cummings’ imagination: His [Cummings’] head was a storehouse of remembered verses from Sappho in Greek, Laforgue in French, Horace in Latin, and Amy Lowell, Shakespeare, and Longfellow in English and he could weave the most incongruous quotations together spontaneously, with effects sometimes very funny and sometimes of a startling beauty.64

Houghton MS Am 1969. ‘Clippings and Printed Matter. Miss Louisa Alger.’ Note that the persona of the little ‘i’ was also understood by contemporaries from the beginning as showing the influence of foreign languages. See Thayer’s defence of Cummings in The Dial in 1924, the April issue: ‘As in all other languages than English, so in the idiom of Mr. E.E. Cummings, the first person singular does not, in itself, require a capital.’ (qtd Dempsey 2014: 141). Cf. letter to Mr Goodchild, 5 April 1955 (Cummings 1972: no. 226, pp. 243–4). 61 Scrap of a draft love poem. Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (763), Folder 40. 62 Notes for the California lectures, Houghton MS Am 1892.7 (90). 63 On Cummings and Catullus, see Baker 1959 and Webster 2012 [2013]. 64 Burton Rascoe, qtd. in Kennedy 1994a: 3–4, remembering a dinner party in Paris in 1924 at the residence of Archibald MacLeish. 60

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In Horace, Cummings found a conjunction of sex and death which is, in a sense, the essential foundation of Cummings’ poetic corpus. Much of the discussion in the remainder of this book concerns the different ways in which Cummings responded to a sexual freedom, and an ability to talk about sex, which he found in and through the classical world. Cummings found Horace, and other classical authors, through reading and through the act of translation, and it is to these translations that we now turn.

3 ‘smoking centuries of hecatombs’ Cummings and Translation

My friend, think not to buy deliverance With smoking centuries of hecatombs. It shall not profit thine inheritance. E.E. Cummings trans. of Horace, Odes II. 14

One of the first and most basic aspects of our experience of reading Horace is our knowledge that he died two millennia ago. It is in the context of this knowledge that we, as well as Cummings, approach Horace’s own obsessions with mortality, the passage of time, ruin, and the immortality of verse. The three lines quoted as a chapter epigraph come from Cummings’ translation of Horace, Odes II. 14—the Postumus ode (‘Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume,’). Death, Horace says, cannot be avoided: non, si trecenis, quotquot eunt dies amice, places inlacrimabilem Plutona tauris . . . no, not if with three hecatombs of bulls a day, my friend, thou strivest to appease relentless Pluto (trans. C.E. Bennett)

Cummings translated Odes II. 14 into terza rima, which immediately evokes Dante’s mediating influence on our encounters with the Classics. The choice of form tells us that we are looking back not only across the two millennia but also through the lens of the intervening years.

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As we read this ode, which is itself a poem about fleeting time, Cummings’ language heightens our sense of time’s passage and our awareness that we, as readers, are looking back. For a start, Cummings has multiplied the numbers of bulls. A hecatomb is already a hundred bulls. The most direct translation of Horace is ‘three hundred bulls’; ‘three hecatombs’ is a Hellenizing expression of that same number. Cummings himself was almost certainly translating from the Latin text of C.H. Moore’s edition of Horace, which includes a commentary where Moore renders the phrase as ‘three hecatombs every day’.1 While ‘hecatombs’ is convenient for Cummings’ rhyme scheme, his ‘centuries of hecatombs’ suggests hundreds of hundred-bull sacrifices— an implausible number of bulls. But with the double meaning of ‘centuries’, Cummings uses the phrase to cause us to feel the swift lapse of time. His importation of ‘smoking’—a word which is not in Horace—adds to our sense of death and distance, conjuring the ruins of time as well as the burning sacrifice. All-consuming time is a keynote of Cummings’ relationship to Latin poetry. It dominates his response to Horace, the Latin author with whom he had the deepest relationship. Horace’s Odes II. 14 with its evocation of fleeting time was a particularly important poem for Cummings. In addition to translating the poem, he frequently used ‘Eheu fugaces Postume’ (or other phrases from II. 14) as sardonic tags in his poetry, his prose, and his private correspondence.2 Meditations on mortality, destruction, and the passage of time also emerge from Horace’s seasonality. In the next section, I look at seasonality and mortality in Cummings’ relationship to Latin poetry, and—conversely—the notes of presence and eternity which colour his relationship to Greek poetry.

1. LATIN SEASONALITY AND GREEK ETERNITY A further two of the seven Horatian odes translated by Cummings— I. 4 and IV. 7—deal directly with the change of seasons and human mortality. The translation of Odes I. 4 (‘Solvitur acris hiems grata vice 1

Horace, ed. Moore 1902: 201. See notes to the edition of Cummings and Appendix on the texts used by Cummings. The Bennett Loeb (quoted just above) picks up the Hellenizing ‘hecatombs’ of Moore’s notes. 2 Poetry: see CP 234 and CP 986. Prose and letters: see Afterword n. 1.

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veris et Favoni’) shows Cummings focusing the energy of his translation on the tension between spring and mortality. This translation of I. 4 also shows how Cummings’ control of tone and tonal shift accommodates some of what Horace accomplishes through poetic structure and genre. Lyne writes about the apparent mixing of genre in Horace’s Odes I. 4: the first twelve lines appear to be a spring poem, but the last eight are clearly a sympotic poem. This surprising shift forces the reader (Lyne argues) to modify initial assumptions about the poem. ‘At 13 ff. we simply have to revise our impression about lines 1 to 12 . . . Lines 1 to 12 are not a spring poem written as it were at the desk or in abstracto . . . They are part of the utterance to Sestius at the party. Horace tells Sestius that spring is at hand—and draws gloomy thoughts from the news.’3 In Chapter 8, we will see Cummings himself using this Horatian technique of the revised setting in ‘them which despair’, a carpe diem poem written in the Horatian tradition. However, although the revised setting is a technique which Cummings later put to deft use, he does not actually make anything of it in his translation of I. 4. He omits the direct address to Sestius and de-emphasizes the poem’s setting. Yet Cummings still brings out the double nature of the poem and the sharp contrast between spring and mortality. He does this not through the juxtaposition of genre and revised setting which Lyne finds in Horace’s original, but instead through a sharp shift in tone. Cummings heightens both the delicate, lyrical first half of the poem and the dark, threatening second half. The first half delights in ‘Spring,and the breeze’. The second is portentous: ‘death knocks’. In the middle, Cummings omits four lines from the Horatian original. These are the Horatian lines 9–12, in which Horace speaks of wreathing the hair in laurels or flowers and offering sacrifice to Faunus. In Cummings’ version, as a result of this omission, the immediately preceding image of Vulcan firing up his furnaces (Horace ll. 7–8) elides with the second half of the poem in which death knocks (Horace ll. 13 ff.). Here are the third and fourth of Cummings’ five stanzas: The Graces are dancing by mountains and gorges, Like blossoms white in the moon; 3

Lyne 1995: 65–7; qt. at 67.

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Love is their light through the spell-bound night. Under the world in Hell’s huge forges Hammers gigantic croon. Open thy door;death knocks,who careth For palace and hut the same. Why wilt thou plan with life but a span? All feel the hand that never spareth, The fingers that know not fame.

The end of Cummings’ third stanza translates Horace’s ‘dum graves Cyclopum / Volcanus ardens visit officinas’ (‘while blazing Vulcan attends the grand forges of the Cyclops’). Cummings first considered the phrase ‘Hammers Cyclopean croon’, but revised to ‘Hammers gigantic croon’. As Kennedy notes, Cummings’ translations tend to minimize mythological detail in favour of universalizing imagery.4 But the effect here goes deeper than a simple shift from the particular to the universal. David Ferry’s 1983 translation is a useful point of contrast.5 Maybe, somewhere, the Nymphs and Graces are dancing, Under the moon the goddess Venus and her dancers; Somewhere far in the depth of a cloudless sky Vulcan is getting ready the storms of the coming summer. Now is the time to garland your shining hair With myrtle and with the flowers the free-giving earth has given; Now is the right time to offer the kid or lamb In sacrifice to Faunus in the firelit shadowy grove. Revenant white-faced Death is walking not knowing whether He’s going to knock at a rich man’s door or a poor man’s.

Ferry’s translation respects the role of Vulcan in the Horatian original. In Horace’s poem, the activities of Vulcan constitute part of the advent of spring, together with the dancing Venus and Graces, the flower garlands, and the sacrifices to Faunus.6 There may be a subtle ambivalence or the hint of threat foreshadowed in Vulcan’s

4 Kennedy 1976: 276, 278. Cf. remarks on Aristophanes and Him by English 2004: 87 n. 36. 5 Republished in Ferry 1997: 14–15; Carne-Ross and Haynes (eds) 1996: 207–8. Text from Ferry 1997; punctuation differs in Carne-Ross and Haynes. 6 In their commentary on Horace, Nisbet and Hubbard 1970: 65 observe: ‘Venus can frolic gaily while her lame and ponderous husband is superintending his thunderbolt factory. There was an exceptional demand for his product in the springtime . . . ’.

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activities.7 That is debated by modern readers. But whether or not a hint of threat is read in the Horace, Cummings’ line has a darker charge. ‘Hell’s huge forges’ import a heavy and looming threat which introduces the last two stanzas and cold Death: ‘the hand that never spareth’.8 The elision of Hell’s forges with impending death prompts some of the surprise which Lyne also points to in the original Horatian aesthetic. The shift in reading which occurs in Horace beginning at line 13 takes the reader aback on (as Lyne argues) multiple levels— there is not only the shift in scene and in apparent genre; but also, once the reader has tackled the ‘puzzle’ (Lyne’s word), there is the realization that Horace links thoughts of spring not with burgeoning life but with death.9 Cummings’ re-purposing of the imagery of ‘Hell’s huge forges’ creates both structural balance and a comparable element of surprise. He moves Horace’s shift earlier within the poem, so that the shift lands in the middle of Cummings’ third stanza of five. The neat bifurcation of the poem into nearly exact halves (Cummings’ ll. 1–13 and ll. 14–25, divided in the middle of the third of five stanzas) enhances the poem’s doubled aspect and balanced juxtaposition. Yet the change in thought and tone is unexpected. It arrives within an otherwise fluid stanza, and it occurs within a sequence of at first innocuous imageries, rather than arriving with the more obviously linguistic break of ‘Open thy door [ . . . ]’ at the beginning of the fourth stanza. That sense of surprise catches the reader unaware–as death does: ‘Tomorrow--who knows?--’. Thus Cummings, via a circuitous route, captures the surprise which is integral to Horace’s original, underpinning the implicit suggestion that death arrives at any moment, unannounced. This detailed look at Cummings’ treatment of Odes I. 4 shows how he heightens and dramatizes Horatian mortality.10 The distance

7

Ancona 1994: 48. What Lyne 1995: 67 characterizes in Horace as ‘studied pessimism’ becomes grander and more threatening in Cummings’ translation. 9 Lyne 1995: 65 (puzzle); 67 (the unexpectedness of spring linked with death). 10 Contrast the lightness of James Lasdun (in McClatchy (ed.) 2002: 27), who retains a hint of playfulness even in the poem’s darkest sentiment: Death, pale and impartial, stands at the door; enters with equal indifference the squatter’s shack and rich man’s villa. O lucky Sestius! Life’s too short for all but the simplest dreams; 8

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created by the passage of time is a part of our engagement with Horatian mortality: in the words of II.14, the ruin of ‘smoking centuries’. It was a relationship with the past which Cummings also found elsewhere in Latin poetry. He pulls a similar idea out of Catullus. From Catullus 3, he borrowed the phrase which he used for the title of a lengthy poem from Tulips & Chimneys: ‘PUELLA MEA’ (‘my girl’, reversing the word order of Catullus’ mea puella). In ‘PUELLA MEA’, Cummings alludes to Catullus’ lines: malae tenebrae / Orci, quae omnia bella devoratis, ‘the ill shades of Orcus, which devour all beautiful things’. But Cummings adapts the Catullan original to ‘Eater of all things lovely—Time!’. As with the phrase ‘smoking centuries of hecatombs’, here also he tweaks the Latin away from ‘Orcus’ to spotlight omnivorous time.11 But while time, death, and ruin pervade Cummings’ translations of Horace, his translations from the Greek show a different aspect to his encounters with the classical world: a heightened sense of presence. To begin with, the simple act of excerption raises scenes from a narrative context to a distilled and preserved moment in time. Cummings’ translation from a choral passage of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus takes a passage which has a pronounced narrative energy within the development of the play, and turns it into a text which presents just such a distilled image. That effect is pushed further by the language of the translation. Out of the snow of Parnassus a shining voice is uplifted, Bidding each man to follow the feet of the doer of ill, Under the tameless trees and the rock of the precipice rifted, Like a bull he wandereth still,

The sense of timelessness in these lines—‘Like a bull he wandereth still’—elevates Oedipus from human life to wanderer, with the immortal existence of the archetype.12

Talbot 2003: 168–71 complains that Lasdun’s translations are too light at the expense of Horace’s dignified tone, arguing more generally that Horace’s ability to integrate lightness with seriousness is one of the tonal aspects which it is most difficult to capture in English translation. 11 Baker 1959: 233 n. 4 points out both these borrowings from Catullus 3 and also notes the substitution of ‘Time’ for malae tenebrae Orci. 12 On Cummings and Freud, see below, Chapter 5. Anyone wanting to look at the metrics of Cummings’ translation can find the first part of the original scanned, translated, and discussed in Carne-Ross 1990: 138–9.

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The archetype is one version of immortal presence; poetic survival is another, and self-referentiality is one technique which can serve to foreground issues of poetic survival. Cummings’ translations from the Odyssey show this textual self-referentiality: ‘poem of power’ (VI. 130); ‘in epics fleet-feathered addressed him’ (VIII. 460). Cummings adopts a foregrounding of form and text which has, in fact, continued to characterize the interaction of twentieth-century and contemporary poetry with the classical tradition.13 Perhaps Cummings’ most beautifully self-referential poem is ‘REVERIE’. ‘REVERIE’ was identified by Firmage and Kennedy as a translation from Sophocles’ Electra. This is an error (the origin of which I explain in my section on editing the translations). But the poem—though not itself a translation—is imbued with Cummings’ Greek lyricism. It shows the immediate impact of the translations on his developing style and, in the larger sense of ‘translation’, it translates his reading of Greek poetry into his own work.14 Some lines do seem as if they ought to come out of Greek lyric: To watch the strong boy-swallows carolling in sunset, To barter day and thought for night and ecstasy

The speaker, apparently watching male swallows in sunset, coins the neologism ‘boy-swallows’. Though the word evidently refers to male birds, it has the feeling of Greek youth imagined as something like ‘swallow-smooth boys’. The prominence of swallows and nightingales (from the myth of Philomela and Procne) in Romantic and Decadent interactions with the Classics redoubles the classical colour in these lines.15 In Walcott’s Omeros, for example, ‘a black fisherman . . . scanned the opening line / of our epic horizon’ (1990: 13), signalling a self-reflexive textuality found throughout the poem. Since foregrounding textual self-referentiality comments implicitly on textual survival, it can also be manipulated to suggest non-survival, i.e. loss. Cf. Talbot 2003: 151–2 on the alcaic form of Hollander’s ‘Off Marblehead’. The poem refers self-referentially to the danger that ‘the meter may melt’; Talbot argues that Hollander summons the instability and loss felt in ‘the failure of the ancient meter of Alcaeus and Horace to offer sufficient consolation or permanence against the shiftlessness of the modern world’ (152). 14 ‘Translation’ studies now frequently aim not to cordon off the traditional sense of translation from ‘translation’ of topoi, images, and other textual and cultural material. See Bassnett 2011, Hardwick 2011, and other studies in the same volume, Parker and Mathews (eds) 2011. 15 See below, Chapter 7.3 and Chapter 8.1, on the importance to Cummings of Swinburne’s ‘Itylus’, which is based on the Procne and Philomela myth. Though very 13

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In ‘REVERIE’, Cummings asks: Are you not with me at all times, faithfully standing, The soul of that golden prelude which is the childhood of day, By each imperishable stanza called a moment, Unto the splendid close, glory and light, envoi, Followed with stars?

Here dawn is the poet’s ‘golden prelude’, each moment of the day is a ‘stanza’, and twilight is an ‘envoi’. Instead of the ruin evoked by ‘smoking centuries’ we have something more exquisite—something fragile but imperishable. With ‘each imperishable stanza called a moment’ (from which I borrow the subtitle for this book), Cummings reverses the expected metaphor. Instead of fleeting time immortalized by text (each moment turned into an imperishable stanza), the fabric of text is time: each stanza is (called) a moment. Cummings’ poignant question—‘Are you not with me at all times . . . ?’—evokes the presence and closeness made possible by transcendent time. However, Cummings moves away from this foregrounding of textual surface in his actual translation from Sophocles’ Electra. The Electra is the most considered and theoretically deliberate among Cummings’ translations. He must have toyed with the idea of publishing it, at least to the extent of penning a preface to the translation which is couched as an address to the reader (see edition below under ‘Translations from Sophocles’). In this preface, Cummings lays out an idea of ‘literal’ translation which ‘reproduces (1) emphasis by the word order (nearly always) (2) intentional alliteration and assonance (3) original constructions (except where very idiomatic) (4) primary ideas of the words (as opposed to over-translation) (5) Cesura (always, where noticeable) (6) syllabic substitutions (always, as far as I am aware)’. Yet the most successful aspect of Cummings’ Electra is the way in which it is imbued (consciously on Cummings’ part or not) with a Shakespearean dramatic energy. Shakespeare shows through in lines from the Electra like: We twain go forth;for time commands,which unto men Supreme of each and every act is president. (ll. 75–6)

influenced by the Decadents, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Cummings does not seem noticeably influenced by Rossetti’s ideas about translation (on which see Martindale 2008).

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(Compare, especially for the unusual use of supreme: ‘She clepes him king of graves and grave for kings, / Imperious supreme of all mortal things.’ Venus and Adonis, ll. 995–6.) Mediating Sophoclean time ‘unto men / Supreme’ through Shakespeare, Cummings activates the interplay of literary fame, tradition, and time. Electra opens with the speech of the Paidagogos, urging Orestes into promptly considered action. Cummings’ translation of this opening speech concludes with the lines: Ere,therefore,any issue from beneath his roof, Join we in words;for even to that hour we come Where is no longer shrinking,but of deeds high flow’r.

The buried rhyme in the final two lines (‘hour’, ‘flow’r’) generates a submerged couplet. The use of a couplet to close a scene with a combination of finality and forward energy is a clearly Shakespearean technique. Cummings uses his submerged couplet to give the speech of the Paidagogos energy and grandeur, and to launch the play’s action with an immediate feel of dramatic pace. It is a style learned from Shakespeare, which works for a readership or an audience shaped by Shakespeare.16 When Orestes schemes for the false announcement of his own death, he rationalizes (in Cummings’ words, ll. 59–61): How should these things bring sorrow,when,in word being dead, In deeds I live,and carry from the contest fame? My creed is:nothing,spoken with advantage,base.

When translating the Electra, Cummings may have worked from the Greek text and notes of Sir Richard Jebb (abridged G.A. Davies), in which case he had available to him the notes in which Jebb suggests that the issue at hand in l.59 f. is the fear that false report of death is ill-omened.17 (Cummings’ personal copy of the Jebb Electra consisted of Greek text and notes; if he also, separately, consulted Jebb’s

16 At Harvard, Cummings studied Julius Caesar, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, Macbeth, King Lear, and All’s Well that Ends Well (Kennedy 1976: 283). Cummings also read and studied Shakespeare on his own, beyond Harvard, as testified by his notes, Houghton MS Am 1823.7 (67). Cummings and Shakespeare, see Cowen 1996: 85–6; Triem 1969: 15. See below, Chapter 8.2, on Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra and Cummings’ portrait of Cleopatra. Harrop 2014 provides references for previous work on the mediating influence of Shakespeare in classical reception. 17 Davies 1908: 60. Cummings’ texts, see below (edition and Appendix).

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translation, he would have found: ‘I trow, no word is ill-omened, if fraught with gain. Often ere now have I seen wise men die in vain report; then, when they return home, they are held in more abiding honour’.)18 Cummings’ own translation, by contrast, shows no such historicizing dimension: he does not signal any Greek idea of the omen. The colour in the text is, once again, Shakespearean. It recalls the many Shakespearean characters who offer disquisition on their own particular understandings of what constitutes honour and advantage. In Cummings’ translation from Sophocles’ Electra, we see an unresolved tension between Cummings’ theory and his translation practice. His preface to the Electra claims that his attempt at literal translation is ‘unique in history’. He was not really, however, making a break with nineteenth-century Anglophone approaches to translation, which—as Matthew Reynolds has shown—tended to be dominated by ideas of ‘literal’ translation and ‘adherence’ to the original.19 Reynolds emphasizes that ‘literal’ translation means different things to different translators.20 Cummings lists six aspects of the Greek which he aims to ‘reproduce’, of which two are metrical aspects of the Greek original: caesurae and syllabic substitution. Occasional references in Cummings’ papers show that he knew and respected the work of Robert Bridges, the classically educated and metrically formal British poet laureate, known inter alia for his experimentation with quantitative metre in English. Martin, who makes Bridges the ‘protagonist’ of her recent study of metre in England from 1860 to 1930, argues that Bridges aimed to clarify and revitalize English metre as a part of the larger Edwardian culture of nation-making.21 Bridges wished to multiply the possibilities and components of English metre by drawing on both Old English and classical relationships; he ‘want[ed] students to see the benefit of the Anglo-Saxon literary past while, at the same time, understanding the ways that classical verse forms could be useful as one way, among many, to expand the

18

Jebb 1894: 15–17. Reynolds 2011: 121–6, 207–12. Reynolds’ discussion of Robert Browning’s ‘transcription’ (Browning’s term) of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon is a particularly salient point of comparison; see Reynolds 2011: 32–5. 20 Reynolds 2011: 32–8. 21 Martin 2012: 11 (‘protagonist’) and esp. 79–108 for Bridges’ nationalistic metrical project. 19

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possibilities for English prosody.’22 As Martin shows, Bridges made metre central to prosodic (and national) identity. And although Cummings was not a part of the English project of nation-making in which Martin situates Bridges, we nonetheless find in Cummings’ preface to the Electra a reflection of this centrality of metre to prosodic identity. On the other hand, Cummings also knew Pound’s Cathay (1915) as early as his Harvard years.23 Cathay moves far from ideas of fidelity to a source; Pound did not read or speak Chinese.24 While Cummings’ theory reflects nineteenth-century ideals of ‘literal’ translation and the metrical world of Bridges, his practice can be compared to Cathay (and also to the later Homage to Sextus Propertius and to other translations by Pound). Three aspects in particular link Cummings’ translations to the translation work of Pound: the play between absence and presence, the search for intensity, and the use of translation to engage questions of literary genealogy and immortality. Reynolds sums up Pound’s translation practice as a confrontation with ‘[t]he short-circuit between achieving presence and recognizing absence’.25 For Cummings, this powerful tug-of-war between presence and absence ruptured into the dominance of ruin or absence in his translations from Latin and closeness or presence in his translations from Greek. The sense of presence achieved in the Greek translations brings intensity, as does the distillation in the excerptions from Greek drama—especially the choral passage from Oedipus Tyrannus. Intensity also arises in the Electra from the engagement with Shakespeare, who was admired by Cummings specifically for that quality.26 Intensity was an aesthetic priority of Cummings’ friend Scofield Thayer (later co-owner of The Dial), who was to become

22

Martin 2012: 97. In his notes for the California lectures, Houghton MS Am 1892.7 (90), Cummings writes ‘I must have been a Harvard undergraduate when Cathay burst on the world’s literary horizon.’ The implication is that Cummings read the book when it first came onto the scene. He refers to Cathay in an essay written for one of his Harvard classes in 1915–16 (see Kennedy 1979: 177). He owned a 1915 copy, date of acquisition uncertain. (The bookplate is Cummings’ usual bookplate, from 4 Patchin Place. That is a later address, but of course the plate might have been added years after acquisition.) 24 See discussion in Yao 2002: 26–8, 31. 25 26 Reynolds 2011: 244; discussion 237–67. See Triem 1969: 15. 23

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(as Cummings put it) a Maecenas of modernism.27 Pound too, of course, prized intensity, and Yao argues that it was precisely Pound’s Cathay which fixed the understanding of Chinese poetry as intense (rather than formal) in the Anglophone literary world.28 Yao writes that Cathay ‘redefined the place of Chinese poetry in the West, not only virtually establishing its significance as a literary tradition for England and America, but also permanently transforming the way in which it was henceforth to be presented to general audiences through translation by poets and even scholars’.29 As well as establishing (translated) Chinese poetry within the Anglophone tradition, Cathay also embodies the construction and mediation of literary tradition by foregrounding its own layers: it advertises itself as a translation by Pound from scholarly work on a Chinese poet whose name is given in its Japanese form.30 This emphasis on the construction of the literary tradition is characteristic of Pound’s translation work. It appears in the Homage to Sextus Propertius, which explores the ambitions and limits of literary immortality.31 Reynolds also points out the foregrounding of literary tradition in Pound’s translations within the Cantos, where Browning, Tennyson, and (of course) Dante are marked intermediaries.32 By creating an Electra mediated via Shakespeare, Cummings engages these same issues of literary genealogy and the construction of the literary tradition. The implications for literary immortality are reinforced by the presence of Shakespeare at textual moments which themselves engage the power of time: ‘[ . . . ] for time commands, which unto men / Supreme of each and every act is president.’ Cummings even anticipates Pound in the play on literary immortality, monumentality, pyramids, and mausoleums (which occurs in 27 Houghton MS Am 1892.7 (90), Folder 1 of 44. Of Thayer: ‘Art was for him intensity,luminosity,precision,&miracle.’ ‘He himself,of course,would infinitely rather have been an artist than a Mycaenas . . .’ (Cummings’ spelling). Intensity: see also Webster 2015: 77. 28 29 30 Yao 2002: 26. Yao 2002: 26. Yao 2002: 31. 31 See Reynolds 2011: 252–67, esp. 252–5. On Pound’s Homage, also: Sullivan 1965; Hooley 1988; Rudd 1994: 117–50; Comber 1998; Yao 2002: 52–78; Sherry 2003: 111–20. 32 Reynold 2011: 212–13: ‘He [Pound] pays explicit homage to Browning . . . [who] nurtured that interest in the material stuff of cultural transmission which makes Pound translate, and announce that he has translated, not from Homer direct but from the Latin translation by “Andreas Divus, / In officina Wecheli, 1538” . . .’; cf. 241. Reynolds 2011: 213 on Tennyson and Dante in Pound’s translation.

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Pound’s 1919 Homage) by invoking Shelley’s Adonais in one of his own Horatian translations.33 As has long been recognized, Shelley opens Adonais with an allusion to Horace, Odes I. 24: I weep for Adonais—he is dead! O, weep for Adonais! though our tears Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!

Cummings must have recognized the allusion. He writes it back, as it were, into the Shelleyan opening to his own translation of Odes I. 24: ‘Who chides the tears that weep so dear a head?’ Adonais summons the ambivalent weight of monumentality as the poem surveys (in imagination) the field in which Keats is laid to rest in Rome: And gray walls moulder round, on which dull Time Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand; And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime, Pavilioning the dust of him who planned This refuge for his memory, doth stand Like flame transformed to marble; [ . . . ]

By invoking Adonais in his translation of Horace, Cummings brings in something of the ambivalence which Reynolds finds in Pound’s Homage. Does the death of Keats mean more to the present age than the death mourned by Horace? Does Horace’s voice survive through Shelley, or is it overtaken by him? Cummings’ translation theory and practice was caught between the world of Bridges and the world of Pound. Cummings’ translations— the Electra and the others—resonate in many ways with early modernism. However, Cummings’ diction is archaizing. The preface to the translation of Sophocles’ Electra is defensive about leaving the work unfinished, even though fragments were very much in the spirit of the 1910s. (And H.D., for example, translated excerpted passages from Euripides.) The Electra is the translation which Cummings appeared to value most, and it is prefaced by a theoretical statement which pulls in the opposite direction to modernist translation theory and practice. There is an unresolved conflict between Cummings’ thinking about translation and his own best qualities as a translator. It 33 Reynolds 2011: 253–4 for Pound’s play on pyramids and the mausoleum in the Homage.

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may be partly for this reason that Cummings did not go further, with these or other translations, after his Harvard years.34 Thus, in a deeper sense, the most significant difference between Cummings and Pound, H.D., Yeats, and others, is that Cummings did not publish any work of translation as an integral part of his public self-fashioning as poet and modernist.35 Instead, Cummings absorbed some of the qualities of his translations into his other poetic endeavours. A poem from Tulips & Chimneys—‘one April dusk the’ (CP 84)—about one of his favourite Greek restaurants shows Cummings savouring the ironies of time which he had explored in the translations. The linguistic play shows Cummings’ mastery of the sense of ruin and distance which he had earlier elicited from Horace. The poem also exhibits the self-conscious use of language—the toying with time and text—which we saw in the Odyssey translations and in ‘REVERIE’. In the light of ‘one April dusk’, the speaker climbs the stairs to the restaurant: chased two flights of squirrel-stairs into a mid-victorian attic which is known as Ο ΠΑΡΘΕΝΩΝ

(Note the pun on ‘attic’.) Here, the card-play and backgammon games of the ‘dirty circle of habitués’ are: [...] led by a Jumpy Tramp who played each card as if it were a thunderbolt redhot peeling off huge slabs of a fuzzy

34

Except for two translations from the French which arose circumstantially. One is his translation of Louis Aragon’s ‘Le Front Rouge’, done for the sake of friendship with Aragon and good relations with the authorities during Cummings’ Russian travels (see letter to John Sweeney, 15 January 1954, Cummings 1972: no. 210, p. 226). This translation of ‘Le Front Rouge’ is, in fact, an outstanding translation with nuance and emotional power. The other is his translation from the French of Jean Cocteau’s libretto for Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. See Stravinsky 1991: 35. Only the Speaker’s introduction is in French and translated by Cummings; it barely amounts to half a page. The rest of the libretto is in Latin (text by Jean Daniélou) and translated into English by Deryck Cooke. 35 See Yao 2002 on modernist translation as an ‘integral’ (6) part of modernist identity.

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics language with the aid of an exclamatory tooth-pick And who may that be i said exhaling into eternity as Nicho’ laid before me bread more downy than street-lamps upon an almostclean plate “Achilles” said Nicho’ “and did you perhaps wish also shishkabob?”

Cummings delights in the disjunctive ironies of a tramp named Achilles, who plays his card as ‘a thunderbolt red- / hot’, in a dingy Parthenon—wryly monumentalized by the switch to the Greek alphabet. The layering of time and tradition which was implicit in the use of terza rima to translate Horace, and also implicit (perhaps involuntarily) in the presence of Shakespeare colouring Sophocles, is also here in the ‘mid-victorian attic’, i.e. the mid-Victorian absorption of the Greek Attic. Cummings summons both the distance we saw with Horace and the presence and closeness we saw with the Greek translations. Behind the ironic tone which colours the displaced Achilles, the reader still senses Cummings’ deep affection for the timeless Greek tradition: ‘exhaling into // eternity’.

2. METRE AND FORM Metre is a necessary point of negotiation for the Anglophone poet translating from Latin or Greek verse. Cummings was interested in ancient metre generally, and had a particular liking for Sapphic and Alcaic metres. In a scrap of note made in Dean Briggs’ class at Harvard, Cummings copied out the first stanza of Horace, Odes I. 2 (Iam satis . . . ) and then wrote out the first line of Odes I. 10 (‘Mercuri, facunde nepos Atlantis’), appending ‘This is the only Sapphic verse in Horace (which scans – ̮ – ̮ – ̮ ̮ – ̮ – ̮) and at the same time does not

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rythmically read thus: – ̮ ̮ – ̮ || – ̮ ̮ ̮ – ̮’.36 Experimenting with the Sapphic and Alcaic metres in English, Cummings wrote both a ‘Sapphics’ and an ‘Alcaics’ during his time at Harvard. The ‘Alcaics’ is reproduced below for the first time (see Cummings’ edition). Another scrap of notes shows him experimenting with Adonic lines: ‘Nów my fine pícket / Hóp like a crícket’.37 On the reverse of the same sheet of paper are some notes on Greek syntax. This conjunction of notes on the Adonic line and notes on Greek underlines the point that the metrical experiments connect directly to Cummings’ encounters with the Classics; they do not reflect only assimilated English forms. Cummings had been writing in metre since childhood, but he used the Classics—in conscious, active experimentation—to expand his own metrical range. All of Cummings’ metres are stress-based, not quantitative, although when he wrote out scansion patterns—as he often did, in his notes, when composing or critiquing his own lines—he wrote them out using the classical scansion marks of macrons and breves.38 A perusal of the translations included in this book will quickly show that Cummings varied his strategies for accommodating classical metre in English. In some translations—Odes I. 28 and IV. 7 and Sophocles’ Electra—he attempted to replicate the ancient metre. (He may have known that the metre of Odes IV. 7 is unique in extant classical poetry.)39 His translation of Odes I. 28 is headed with a note about fidelity to the ancient metre. By fidelity, Cummings means not just adopting the form of the Alcmanic Strophe, but reflecting exactly each point where Horace substitutes the spondee for the dactyl. It almost seems that Cummings makes the metre into the poem. His preface to the Electra translation refers, similarly, to the aim of replicating every syllabic substitution, although here at least that aim is placed among other aims of ‘literal’ translation.

Houghton MS Am 1769; ‘rythmically’ is Cummings’ spelling. HRC 2.7. 38 Cummings was interested in the inherent qualities of vowels: see especially Kennedy 1979: 186–92; Antretter 2001. I have talked about Cummings and Pound, classical form, and quantitative metre in another context in Rosenblitt 2013. See Martin 2012: 38–9 on the significance of the historical controversy over marking English rhythm with macrons and breves versus with acute accents. 39 See Morgan 2010: 2–3. 36 37

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For other translations, Cummings turned outward to other established forms and metres. Cummings’ translation of Odes II. 14 and his translation from Euripides’ Medea use iambic pentameter for the metre and terza rima for the form. Elsewhere, he invents his own stanza forms. The most interesting and unusual of these is the form used for Odes IV. 5. Here, he uses iambic rhythm (with a few first-foot trochaic substitutions) in a five-line stanza form, with beats 3 - 3 - 3 5 - 1. One lesson which Cummings derived—probably from the combined influence of classical lyric and Swinburne—was the potential value of stanza-forms of mixed line-length. Later in this book, we will see him use such stanzas elsewhere, e.g. in ‘Always before your voice my soul’ (‘Songs III’), where he uses a five-line stanza consisting of three lines of tetrameter followed by two lines of trimeter. In the translations, Cummings normally adds a rhyme scheme to his metre. Thus in IV. 7: Farewell,runaway snows! For the meadow is green,and the tree stands Clad in her beautiful hair. New life leavens the land! The river,once where the lea stands, Hideth and huggeth his lair. Beauty with shining limbs ’mid the Graces comes forth,and in glee stands, Ringed with the rhythmical fair.

Cummings rhymes the poem: a b a b a b; c d c d c d; etc. The first of the alternating rhymes (a, c, etc.) are feminine: ‘tree stands’, ‘lea stands’, ‘glee stands’, and in the following stanzas: ‘retrieving’, ‘grieving’, ‘weaving’; ‘pleasure’, ‘measure’, ‘treasure’; ‘freest’, ‘seest’. Cummings’ combination of metre and rhyme imparts a feeling of elaboration and intricacy, and—one might object—a slight air of preciousness to the translation. On the other hand, he captures some of the self-conscious intricacy and artistry of Horace.40 Concerning this Horatian intricacy, it is worth returning to an issue raised in the previous chapter, via Irene Fairley’s analysis of Cummings’ syntax. To resume Fairley’s analysis of ‘a like a’ (see above, Chapter 2.4): she writes of an unexpected impression of balance . . . created by the placement of the main noun phrase in central position, with eight modifying words to the left and nine to the right of ‘woman creature’.

40

Kennedy 1976: 277–8; 1994a: 58–60 also discusses this translation.

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Such delicate poise and balance can also be viewed as a Horatian quality. John Talbot has complained about translations which fail to capture that sense of Horatian balance: What sorts of things could Horace teach English writers? Take one particular quality, a crucial dimension of Horace almost wholly absent not only from the translations in this edition [i.e. Horace, the Odes: New Translations by Contemporary Poets, Princeton 2002], but from most translations of Horace through the centuries. It’s the quality that Nietzsche, in a famous remark which McClatchy quotes in his introduction, points to as the key to Horace’s genius, the ‘mosaic of words in which every word diffuses its force by sound, position and idea, right and left, over the whole’ . . . If Nietzsche is right, Horace’s tessellation, his hyberbatonic deployment of words throughout his stanzas, is itself a kind of thought, a way of distributing meanings in all directions at once, defying the time-bound sequential progress of ordinary poems. By distributing grammatically related words hither and yon, Horace can treat his poem as a sculptor treats marble or clay, as a plastic mass to be shaped and figured.41

The idea of a balanced diffusion does very well describe the effect of some of Cummings’ poems. In fact, Talbot even cites Cummings’ inverted word order (specifically, the poem, ‘Me up at does’, CP 784) in order to refute the argument that such ‘tessellation’ is inherently impossible in English.42 But Talbot misses a trick, since he is clearly unaware that Cummings had himself translated Horace or that Cummings had studied the Classics at Harvard. The fact that Cummings, of all poets, should seem worth citing as proof of the possibility of Horatian ‘tessellation’ in English is not mere coincidence. At the same time that Cummings delved into the Classics to feed his own metrical experiments and to stretch his flexibility in stanza form, he also brought his developing modernism to the translations. The manuscript of the translation of Odes I.4 is lightly dotted, with one dot per typewriter character-width, whether that width is occupied by a letter, a mark of punctuation, or a space. This annotation suggests that Cummings was already developing his interest in typesetting and in the spacing of poems, even in the context of such a ‘traditional’ exercise as translating from the Classics.

41 42

Talbot 2003: 187–8. Cf. Tomlinson 1993: 244–5, 251. Talbot 2003: 189–90.

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Cummings meant what he wrote in ‘The Greek Spirit’: each generation finds the Classics anew. His ideas about the metre of the Greek chorus reveal another ‘modern’ aspect to his engagement with the Classics. In later life, he shared the following anecdote from his Harvard days with the scholar Norman Friedman, when the latter faced his degree examination: can well imagine how you felt while the gods pondered,& even earlier; since our(as he’s doubtless already boasted to you)nonhero was once a candidate for honours. He remembers a tiny room,an imperceptible me, & a quite immense Don Quixote smoking a huge & perfectly black cigar—Professor Gulick:a friend,luckily,of my father—all at the moment this myth of a man suggested this un of a me discourse upon freeverse (then a scandalous novelty)& Greek choruses. Somewhat to even my surprise,I promptly remarked that they closely resembled each other. A weird expression miscombining pity & terror climbed over his face: he abruptly rose;turned,stridingly reached a window:wideopened it—& Spring came in43

These ideas about Greek chorus and free verse, which so scandalized his Harvard examiner, echo—either with knowledge or with felicity— views shared by contemporaries such as Richard Aldington, who maintained that he ‘got the idea [of writing free verse] from the chorus in the Hippolytus of Euripides’.44 ‘Aldington’, (as Helen Carr writes), ‘would later argue that these choruses were really free verse in the original Greek, and that scholarly insistence that they had a prescribed form of quantitative verse was irrelevant; good imagist verse, he would insist, was no less rhythmically shaped than the Greek.’45 Cummings’ later work shows the influence of both the translations from Greek drama and the Horatian translations, but mostly in different ways. Cummings’ familiarity with Greek drama and his love of the Greek chorus influenced his ideas about the theatre, which is an art form whose importance to Cummings cannot be judged merely by the (relatively small) quantity of his theatre output. The one long play (Him) and two short plays (Anthropos and Santa Claus) which Cummings wrote might appear insignificant next to the 43 44 45

Letter to Norman Friedman, 27 January 1948 (Cummings 1972: no. 149, p. 181). Carr 2009: 425–6; Aldington quoted by Carr at 425. Carr 2009: 425.

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thousands of poems, two substantial prose works (The Enormous Room and EIMI), and hundreds of paintings which he completed during his lifetime. However, the plays interact with some of Cummings’ most personal and artistic struggles. They deal with the question of his artistic identity and, in the case of Him and Santa Claus, with his failed first marriage. For Cummings, the plays held enormous emotional and psychological importance. Among Cummings’ papers, there are several abandoned ideas for satirical or sexual scenarios for plays featuring a Greek-style chorus. In these notes, Cummings tends to write out ‘chorus’ in Greek letters, thus making it clear that he saw the chorus as fundamentally or inextricably Greek.46 This interest in the Greek chorus persists in Cummings’ published and performed Him. In Him, a Greek-style chorus comments on the action of the play in the persons of three figures who evoke both the Greek Fates and Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters.47 As Mary English observes, ‘From the beginning, Cummings’ only full-length play [Him] has been linked to comedies of Aristophanes.’ She quotes inter alia the critic Waldo Frank, who wrote that: ‘The distance from Aristophanes to Cummings is not so great as one might think.’48 Aristophanes is cited more often in connection with Cummings’ later work than the Greek tragedians from whose plays he translated at Harvard. What we see in Cummings’ later notes and published writing is a mêlée of ideas about comedy, Greek chorus, Aristophanes, circus, satyrs and satire, and sex and burlesque. Cummings typically linked Aristophanes with the circus and with modern burlesque, and he also connected burlesque with Greek satyr plays.49 Cummings’ early translations from Greek tragedy do not leave as many direct traces in his published corpus as are left by the Horatian

46 Abandoned satirical play with chorus: Houghton MS Am 1823.7 (58): these notes towards a satirical play contain a few ideas that ultimately made it into Santa Claus. Abandoned work towards some kind of (very rude) sex play/poem with chorus: Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (761). 47 Cf. English 2004: 90 with references at n. 48 for views on this chorus offered by scholars or by critics. 48 English 2004: 81. Frank’s review was included in the pamphlet himANDthe CRITICS, a copy of which is held at HRC 11.3. 49 Cf. English 2004: 87–8; see Mullen 1971; Fahy 2011: 53–84 on Cummings’ love of burlesque and of the circus; these loves are also the focus of many of the essays reprinted in Cummings 1965.

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translations. But there is no doubt about the continuing importance of Greek theatre in Cummings’ notes and his artistic imagination. The influence of the Horatian translations, on the other hand, shows repeatedly and directly in Cummings’ published poetic corpus. As I have already partially noted, aspects of that influence will recur throughout the discussion offered in the following chapters. Horace’s ability to create meaning which is balanced and structurally diffused across a text is not hard to find in Cummings’ poetry. A good example is the poem ‘of evident invisibles’, discussed in Chapter 4, where the disguised quatrain structure shows the use of form in order to hold together—but also simultaneously diffuse—meaning. The lessons in stanza form learned from Horace and Swinburne shape several of the poems discussed in Chapter 7, where I will also look at Cummings’ reuse of phrases from his own Horatian translations. As foreshadowed above, the poem ‘them which despair’ (discussed below in Chapter 8) uses a Horatian technique of the revised setting. The Horatian carpe diem motif is an important aspect of the poems which I will look at in Chapters 7 and 8, and the idea of fleeting time comes up, especially in Chapters 8 and 9. I hope that, by drawing attention to Cummings’ translations from Horace, it will be easier to see the pervasiveness and significance of the Horatian qualities of Cummings’ poetic voice.

Childhood, Harvard, and Paganism

4 The Pagan World of Goat-footed Pan Malcolm Cowley—himself a writer and a graduate of Harvard University, four years younger than Cummings—characterized Cummings as one of Harvard’s ‘pagan’ poets, who paid homage ‘especially to goat-footed Pan’ and whose poetry was ‘fleshly’ (above, Chapter 2). In this chapter, we enter the domain of the goat-footed: variously Pan, satyrs, or fauns. Cummings experimented with satyr- and faun-motifs in some of his earliest poems. ‘NOCTURNE’, for example, was published in The Harvard Monthly in March 1914.1 (Cummings was then in his Junior year at Harvard, and not quite twenty years old.) In ‘NOCTURNE’, Cummings paints the scene of an elusive love-tryst. The opening lines liken the moonlight to a satyr: When the lithe moonlight silently Leaped like a satyr to the grass

The deceiving dream-like quality of this love-tryst is indicated by its setting in ‘gardens of white ivory’, and the last three stanzas gaze directly at ‘the gates of ivory’. By the end of the poem, the speaker despairs: ‘(Wherefore this dagger at my heart.)’. It would be difficult to make sense of the speaker’s despair without the knowledge that what passes through the gates of ivory are false dreams. This is a poem which takes for granted the intelligibility of such classical references. Cummings’ early poetry and its presumed readership were both thoroughly steeped in the Classics.

1

CP 864–5. Cummings did not include it in any of his collected volumes.

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Figure 1. Pen and ink by E.E. Cummings, from The Dial, January 1922. From SKETCHES by E.E. Cummings. Copyright © by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust.

Cummings’ Pan-/ satyr-/ faun-motif builds on imagery which was ubiquitous in nineteenth-century art and literature.2 So familiar were Pan and his satyrs that it takes only a slight suggestion to conjure the satyr and his sexual world. Kidder is probably right to see something of the satyr in a line drawing by Cummings, reproduced in the January 1922 issue of The Dial (see Fig. 1). ‘The particular fullness’, writes Kidder, ‘of her legs, thighs, and belly (which take up two-thirds of the figure’s height) and the comparative delicacy of her torso and head call to mind a satyrlike being, half animal and half human. With nothing of the face but its outline, and with the arms behind the body as though they were missing, she resembles a classical bust, limbless and worn, but possessed of its original graceful form.’3

2 This imagery permeated the literary and visual cultural environment. For example, from The Yellow Book—which, according to Dos Passos, was eagerly devoured by Cummings and his literary circle at Harvard (see below, Chapter 6.1)— the reproduction of a woodcut by Laurence Housman, ‘The Reflected Faun’ (anthologized in Harrison (ed.): 1974). On nineteenth- and twentieth-century receptions of Pan, see Merivale 1969; Baker 1986. 3 Kidder 1976b: 487.

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The hint of satyric sexuality in—unexpectedly—a female form is what makes Cummings’ very simple line drawing so intriguing. The classical beauty, demure pose, and missing arms create a body which is the object-of-gaze; yet, a satyr’s sexuality is active to the point of aggressive. In the drawing, the potential for tension between these different sexualities is absorbed into the flowing lines, whereby the body’s distorted proportions also feel balanced simply because the lines are so strong and smooth. This minimalist and flowing style is reminiscent of Cummings’ admiration for Brancusi, of whom he spoke in his essay ‘The New Art’: ‘the flow of line and volume is continuous . . . this triumph of line for line’s sake over realism . . . .’4 Elizabeth Prettejohn cites Brancusi as a prime example of the difficulty of disentangling classicism and modernism: ‘the radical reduction of sculptural form in the work of Constantin Brancusi . . . might be seen either as modernist abstraction taken to an extreme, or as classical simplicity at its purest.’5 Cummings’ modernism and his classicism are similarly confluent. The female satyr is a relatively rare figure in art, especially compared to the ubiquity of Pan and of the male satyr or faun.6 The gender-crossing aspect to this satyric female body shows the stretchability of the satyr-motif in Cummings’ work—its breadth and its capacity to be still surprising, in spite of its pervasiveness in the artistic and literary culture inherited by Cummings and his contemporaries. The originality which characterizes Cummings’ use of the satyr-motif marks him out from others of his literary circle. Before we turn (in Sections 1 and 2) to Cummings’ own work, it is worth sketching out a broader sense of this literary circle and the world of the Harvard pagan poets.7 During his sophomore year, Cummings joined the editorial board of The Harvard Monthly, one of two rival Harvard literary magazines and a hub for a group of aspiring writers.8 Shortly after leaving Harvard, Cummings and seven of his Harvard connections collaborated

4

5 Cummings 1965: 6. Prettejohn 2012: 31. Aubrey Beardsley—who frequently drew Pan or fauns—occasionally drew a satyress (e.g. Beardsley 1909: 91; 1901: 43). 7 See Rainey 1998: 101–5 on Harvard/Boston as a locus of emergent modernism. For the idea of paganism in a very different—but also late nineteenth/early twentieth century—literary set, see Delany’s 1987 biography of Brooke, The Neo-Pagans: Friendship and Love in the Rupert Brooke Circle. 8 Kennedy 1994a: 78. 6

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to produce the volume Eight Harvard Poets (1917). Eight Harvard Poets is a direct window onto Cummings’ formative literary environment—although there are very few original copies of the book, in part because one of the contributors regretted his youthful poetic misadventures to the extent of seeking to buy up and destroy the evidence.9 The Harvard literary circle which nurtured Cummings’ early poetry looked backward. The novelist John Dos Passos later wrote in his memoirs, The Best Times: ‘Except for Cummings who was deep in Greek (he had graduated summa cum laude in Greek the year before) and in the invention of his special poetic typography, many of us chose to live in the eighteen-nineties’.10 Eight Harvard Poets bears out this statement only too well. The preference for an 1890s diction in many of the poems leads to a derivative, heavy-handed rhyme. Although several of the eight went on to have literary careers—most notably Dos Passos and the poet Robert Hillyer—their literary judgement at this point in their lives was dubious. The Harvard circle did not realize that Cummings was going to be the great poet among them. Dos Passos comments in The Best Times that Dudley Poore ‘had contributed what we considered the best verse to Eight Harvard Poets’.11 Poore’s style amply reflects the Decadent poetry in which the circle was steeped, and the derivative diction which was the result: Some strange and exquisite desire Has thrilled this flowering almond tree Whose branches shake so wistfully, Else wherefore does it bloom in fire?

The status accorded to Poore within the Harvard set has a great deal more to do with their 1890s predilections than with any clear-sighted assessment of literary quality. But while most of the poetry in Eight Harvard Poets is second-rate, several poems from the volume usefully illuminate the ‘paganism’ of

9 This was William Norris; see Norman 1972: 53–4. The book is available in an ULAN press reproduction, but some poems in this reproduction are missing altogether and others are missing lines. The Project Gutenberg edition (available online at www.gutenberg.org) is superior. The eight poets are: E.E. Cummings, S. Foster Damon, J.R. Dos Passos, Robert Hillyer, R.S. Mitchell, William A. Norris, Dudley Poore, and Cuthbert Wright. 10 11 Dos Passos 1966: 23. Dos Passos 1966: 49.

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this Harvard circle. Dos Passos’ ‘Saturnalia’ evokes the nineteenthcentury spirit of pagan revival: In nature, dead, the life gods stir, From Rhadamanthus and the Isles, Where Saturn rules the Age of Gold Come old, old ghosts of bygone gods . . .

This paganism, which revolves around nature and rejuvenation, also relishes the strangeness of the classical world: ‘Mist-shrouded priests do ancient rites’. Its tone is bacchant: ‘the mad gods rise / And fill the streets with revelling’. A similar yearning for pagan revival, but with more liminal undertones, appears in William A. Norris’ ‘Qui sub luna errant’, which concludes: They never see the dawn; like the pale moths That haunt lugubrious shadows of dim trees They celebrate their lunar mysteries At woodland shrines, where with green thyrsus rods And weak limbs wrapped in silken sensuous cloths They chant the name of their dead pagan gods.12

The bacchant imagery—the ‘mad gods’ of Dos Passos and the ‘green thyrsus rods’ of Norris—is a close corollary of the world of Pan, which also appears more directly in other poems from Eight Harvard Poets, e.g. in the ‘pan-pipes’, the ‘untrodden glade’, ‘woodland deities’, and ‘dancing faun’ of Poore’s ‘A Renaissance Picture’. The coupling of Bacchus and Pan is a Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent inheritance. The first chorus in A.C. Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon (1865) speaks of ‘Pan by noon and Bacchus by night’, and Cummings himself singled out this choral passage for its influence on his own poetry.13 The chorus celebrates the arrival of spring; it begins, ‘When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces’. Then ‘the hoofèd heel of a satyr crushes / The chestnut husk at the chestnut-root’, and then ‘Pan by noon and Bacchus by night’ follow

12 Note too Norris’ ‘Escape’, also in Eight Harvard Poets, where the night sees an ancient scene of ‘Bacchanalian din’. 13 Cummings 1967: 35, 38–9. The chorus is ll.65–120 (Swinburne 2000 [1865]). Cummings’ copy of Swinburne, The Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne: Poems (Philadelphia: David McKay) is held at the Harry Ransom Center, along with the rest of Cummings’ personal library. I saw no annotations, but I did notice that the book falls open at the beginning of Atalanta in Calydon.

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics The Maenad and the Bassarid; And soft as lips that laugh and hide The laughing leaves of the trees divide, And screen from seeing and leave in sight The god pursuing, the maiden hid.

The connections between Pan, paganism, and the arrival of spring in Cummings’ poetry bear the influence of Swinburne—who was himself once described by a disgusted contemporary as ‘the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs’—and also (as we will see) of Milton.14 The sexuality expressed in Swinburne’s choral passage is a sexuality of the chase. Swinburne is true in this way to the classical background and its focus on the pursuit of nymphs or women by satyrs or gods. Cummings draws directly on the imagery associated with this tradition. However, the sexuality which he depicts is not primarily based on the sexual chase, and is all the more interesting for that departure.15 In the two sections below which make up this chapter—‘Fauns’ and ‘the goat-footed balloonMan’—I look at the imagery, sexuality, and paganism which is bound up in Cummings’ use of a faun-, satyr-, or Pan-motif. The Harvard-era short story, ‘The Young Faun’ (see edition of Cummings’ work, below), offers a new and direct perspective on Cummings’ Harvard-era paganism and its connection to themes of sexual awakening. I trace the further appearance of the motif in three poems: ‘A GIRL’S RING’, which conjures up a woodland scene of fauns, satyrs, and dryads in the glint of the ring; ‘of evident invisibles’, which distils in Imagist fashion the myth of Pan and Syrinx; and, finally, ‘in Just-’, one of Cummings’ most famous poems, in which the arrival of spring is signalled by the goat-footed balloonman.

‘libidinous laureate’: John Morley, quoted in McGann 2004: 208. One of Cummings’ closest friends and literary mentors at this time, Scofield Thayer, was dominated in his own, very damaged personal life by a sexuality of the chase. See Dempsey 2011; 2014: esp. 41–6, 73–9. Thayer’s wife, Elaine Orr, later became Cummings’ lover and, after she divorced Thayer, she became Cummings’ first wife. What effect this had on Cummings’ poetry is, however, a question for biographers. In Cummings’ poetry, the one straightforward image of Pan’s pursuit of a dryad is from ‘EPITHALAMION’ which Cummings—as it happens—wrote for Thayer’s marriage to Elaine. Delany 1987 also contributes a perspective on the personal damage done to members of this pagan generation by a sexuality of the chase, constructed under the influence of the classical idea of lusty satyr and chaste, shrinking nymph. 14 15

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In these poems, we find Cummings operating within an unusual intersection of influences, including Milton, Blake, Swinburne, Debussy, Pound, and Freud. Cummings’ pagan world encompasses a complex sexual experience of innocence, voyeurism, eroticism, and transgression. It seems a fitting place to start the remaining, and more thematic, sections of this book, since it represents the earliest of the classical themes which I intend to examine. It is earliest in multiple senses. It is earliest in the sense that it comes out of a Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent idea of pagan revival—a nineteenth-century ideal which found a late flourishing in the 1910s, not only in the poetry of Cummings and his friends, but also with Pound and his literary circle. It is also earliest in the sense that Cummings’ paganism was defined during his Harvard years. Most of the poems which evoke this paganism were composed by or in 1916, even if they were not published until later. And finally, it is earliest in the sense that these poems show Cummings on the cusp of early modernism and engaging with one of the earliest modernist movements, Imagism. They reflect the influence of Pound and include two of Cummings’ most Imagist poems. S. Foster Damon had a copy of Des Imagistes (1914), which he shared with Cummings.16 Cummings responded quickly to this new style, and just as quickly moved beyond it.

1. FAUNS Although aspects of the Pan-, satyr-, or faun-motif are interchangeable or overlapping, Cummings’ depiction of the world of the goat-footed is characterized by gradation from the more faun-like, innocent, and delicate to the more satyr-like, aggressive, dangerous, coarse, or jolly (including the ‘jolly-faced’ satyr of Praxiteles, see below, Chapter 9.2).17 16

Kennedy 1977: 260; Kidder 1979b: 258–9. I mention in this and the next chapter almost all of Cummings’ published references to Pan, satyrs, or fauns, but for the sake of completeness, note also the following. In Cummings’ ‘EPITHALAMION’ (CP 3–7), the lines ‘didst thou know the god / from but the imprint of whose cloven feet / the shrieking dryad sought her leafy goal’, ll. 12–14 (in amongst a cornucopia of classical references in that poem). Mention of a woodcut with a suggestion of the world of the goat-footed in The Enormous Room 17

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The faun is particularly associated with an ideal of innocence and sexual awakening. The faun who is the protagonist in the Harvard-era prose story, ‘The Young Faun’, is an instance of this tender and sympathetic type. ‘The Young Faun’ is a story of sexual awakening (more than it is a story of erotic encounter). The setting is a pagan woodland peopled with dryads and satyrs. The faun is captivated by a woman whom he first sees as a hint of beauty within a pool. His distress attracts the attention of the King of Stars, who grants that he should see the woman in the flesh, and then in the spirit. The faun’s vision of the woman in spirit becomes a transportation, expressed as ‘a rich, strange poem: a birth of song, struggling upward from the Earth’, leaving the faun himself peacefully dead. The faun is specifically ‘young’ and ‘lithe’, and ‘his eyes were young like dawn’. The satyrs mock what they see as the faun’s naivety in failing to seize his sexual opportunity, but the story clearly sides with the faun and idealizes his innocence. Cummings depicts a sexual awareness which unfolds gradually, beginning with the initial instinct of beauty in the water and the faun’s questioning, followed by appreciation of the woman in the flesh and then finally in the spirit. All of this occurs in a setting characterized by the innocence of childhood: the woman appears out of ‘the pool of blue water, wherefrom arose lilies like souls of children’. A similar aesthetic of satyrs, fauns, and dryads takes centre stage in a poem titled ‘A GIRL’S RING’.18 This poem was written in 1916 and is therefore more or less contemporaneous with ‘The Young Faun’, itself written for Dean Brigg’s class, which Cummings took during his graduate year at Harvard in 1915–16. A GIRL’S RING the round of gold tells me slenderly twinkling fauns pinkly leapingassembled to pipe-sob

(1978: 17). References in the Miscellany: Cummings 1965: 123, 292. More on fauns in Cummings’ visual art, below, ‘Editing the Unpublished Work: About the Visual Art’. 18 CP 934. Cummings never published the poem; it appeared for the first time in Etcetera.

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and grappling cymbals lunge thwart vistas buxom swaggering satyrs from thousand coverts smooth dryads peek eyes trail with merriment of spiraea

The fauns, satyrs, and dryads of ‘A GIRL’S RING’ and of ‘The Young Faun’ are characterized in similar fashion. In both works, the tender and sensitive fauns differ from the sexually aggressive satyrs. In the poem, the contrast is created by the differing tone of ‘fauns pinkly // leapingassembled’ and ‘buxom swaggering satyrs’. The same contrast is more pointed in the story, where the ‘jolly satyrs’ cannot fathom why the faun does not simply seize the object of his desire. ‘“O Faun, foolish little faun, wherefore, after beholding her, and the eyes of her, didst thou not cease from thy playing, and take unto thee this marvelous thing?”--And they went away to their coverts, chuckling; for this is the nature of satyrs.’ ‘“They be goats”’ is the faun’s angry response. The dryads in both poem and story are merry and perhaps heartless observers. In the poem, their ‘eyes / trail /with merriment of spiraea’. In the story, ‘the tall wood only laughed in all her leaves. “I care not,” said the young faun. “For what can my brown sisters the dryads know of a whiteness beyond lilies?”’ The laughing dryads show the debt to the language of Swinburne. In Swinburne’s chorus, ‘The laughing leaves of the trees divide’ to hide the maiden, and in ‘The Young Faun’, ‘the tall wood . . . laughed in all her leaves’. In this world of fauns, satyrs, and dryads, the balance falls differently in story and poem. ‘The Young Faun’ valorizes the faun’s perspective and his innocence, whereas the poem is weighted towards the sexual frisson provided by the satyr and the puckish playfulness of the dryads. However, this sexual frisson does not come primarily out of the satyr’s potential for sexual aggression. Rather, the poem draws more on the voyeuristic potential of satyr-scenes (embedded in the long tradition that imagines satyrs gazing upon sleeping nymphs).

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Cummings’ language is mischievous—‘twinkling’, ‘peek’, ‘merriment of spiraea’ (a summer-flowering shrub).19 The woodland scene plays with the gaze and with what is hidden. The grammatically ambiguous ‘lunge thwart vistas’ relies on the archaic meaning for ‘thwart’ of ‘across; from one side to the other of anything (with motion implied)’ (OED). But it also suggests a thwarted attempt to gaze and at the same time thwarts the reader’s attempts to visualize the scene by merging action into a series of blurring images: ‘grappling / cymbals lunge thwart vistas // buxom / swaggering satyrs’. The voyeuristic charge to the thwarted gaze is underlined in the following lines with the dryads who peek from coverts. This sylvan tableau of fauns, satyrs, and dryads is triggered in the imagination of the poet by the glint of the girl’s ring. The fact that the girl is not imaginatively present within the woodland scene distances her from its potential for sexual aggression. At the same time, the location of the scene within the gaze of the poet heightens the voyeurism. As in ‘The Young Faun’, there is an element of sexual awakening in ‘A GIRL’S RING’. But the awakening this time is focused on the experience of the poetic speaker rather than the faun. The glinting gold of the ring ‘tells me slenderly’: it speaks of sexual opportunity. For the faun-motif and the idea of sexual awakening, there is one further poem to consider. Cummings’ ‘of evident invisibles’, from Tulips & Chimneys (CP 75), draws on the classical story of the nymph Syrinx who fled Pan and was transformed into a bed of reeds. Pan then cut the reeds to fashion the musical instrument called, after the nymph, a syrinx. Ovid tells the story in the Metamorphoses (I. 688–711). Cummings’ allusion to the tale is couched in compressed, Imagist form: of evident invisibles exquisite the hovering at the dark portals of hurt girl eyes sincere with wonder

19 There are different varieties of spiraea with different flowering seasons, but Cummings probably thinks of spiraea alba, or meadowsweet, which is native to New England. He writes once about spiraea running rampant at Joy Farm, New Hampshire, where he spent his summers from childhood until the end of his life (Cummings 1972: no. 230, p. 246).

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a poise a wounding a beautiful suppression the accurate boy mouth now droops the faun head now the intimate flower dreams of parted lips dim upon the syrinx

This poem is presented in three quatrains. The stanza-division is, however, obscured by the varying spacing of lines within each stanza, the effect of which is to create an overall symmetry of lines and spaces in the poem. The two lines ‘a poise a wounding / a beautiful suppression’ are at the centre of the poem, with single lines either side at a distance of one space, then single lines either side at a distance of two spaces, and so on.20 The first stanza may seem impressionistic because it is so compressed, but what it describes is, in fact, perfectly specific. It refers to that inner something (quality, emotion, spirit) which—though invisible in itself—is nonetheless evident as an expression hovering in the eyes, ‘dark portals’ to the soul. The reader is not given enough syntax to determine whether the next three lines (ll. 5–7) continue the description of the ‘girl eyes’ or look forward to the ‘boy mouth’. However, the quatrain structure suggests that lines 5–7 belong with line 8, ‘the accurate boy mouth’. The final quatrain provides the image which (to an extent) decrypts the poem: the faun lowering his head to play upon the syrinx. The poem is still full of ambiguities. It first appeared in the January 1922 edition of The Dial, where Cummings published a set of poems together with a set of line drawings including the satyr-like female figure of Fig. 1 (above). Some loose connection of theme between poem and line drawing is probably intended. Kidder has shown that Cummings chose a thematically connected set of poems and drawings for the January 1921 issue of The Dial (one of which is reproduced here as Fig. 2) and again for the January 1923 issue of 20 Cummings specialists will be familiar with this, and similar, approaches to structure in Cummings’ poetry. Nadel 1974 is an example of the dissection of symmetries; Kidder 1979b: esp. 288–90 discusses the principle of ‘bilateral symmetry’ in Cummings’ painting and poetry. An exhaustive list of symmetries in Cummings’ poems and scholarly comment upon them would run to many pages.

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Figure 2. Pen and ink by E.E. Cummings, from The Dial, January 1921 (see Kidder 1976b; Cohen 1992). From SKETCHES by E.E. Cummings. Copyright © by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. The girl and fawn was a motif which Cummings played with in his sketches (Houghton MS Am 1892.8 (1)) and which appears here in a published pen and ink drawing. The homophone fawn/ faun may shed some light on this enigmatic motif, which was clearly of significance for Cummings. The original of this drawing belongs now to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It is catalogued as ‘Woman and Fawn’ (American, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1894–1962 North Conway, New Hampshire). Accession Number: 1984.433.73.

The Dial.21 However, this is a loose play between images and texts; the line drawing does not ‘illustrate’ or depict the poem. In Tulips & Chimneys, ‘of evident invisibles’ appears in the section ‘Portraits’. It is not absolutely clear how many portraits are sketched in ‘of evident invisibles’, since it would be possible to envisage a single faun with girl eyes and a boy mouth, or to read three loosely juxtaposed images: girl, boy, and faun. However, in the context of Cummings’ experiments with Imagism, the poem can be read as a retelling 21

Kidder 1976b: 483, 493–4.

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of the classical story of Pan and Syrinx in a compressed, nonnarrative form. The draft title of the poem, ‘Syrinx’, supports a reading of the poem as a retelling of the myth.22 This seems the strongest reading, and in this case, there are two actors: girl and faun. To read the poem as a retelling of the myth involves a considerable effort of extraction from Cummings’ minimalism. But such a reading is not beyond the level of compression used by Cummings elsewhere. We will come in Section 2 to a highly compressed, nonnarrative retelling of the rape of Persephone. Whether ‘of evident invisibles’ is read as an Imagist retelling of the classical story or as an evocation, more loosely, of the classical images of the faun and the syrinx, it is possible either way to comment on what Cummings draws out of this classical background. The Ovidian tale is a tale of virginity preserved against Pan’s lechery. Cummings suppresses the role of Pan and chooses instead the figure of a faun, with its more innocent and sensitive connotations. Rather than focusing on virginity preserved, he turns the story into a sexual awakening: a double awakening of girl and faun, if the poem is read as a mythic retelling. The expression ‘hurt girl eyes’ recollects the language used of the faun in ‘The Young Faun’ (‘his face was a hurt marvel’). The moment of awakening is ‘a poise a wounding’. The playing on the pipes is given its maximum erotic potential, with the ‘intimate flower’ dreaming of the faun’s lips playing over the flute. The sexuality which is expressed in ‘of evident invisibles’ owes much to the music of Debussy. S. Foster Damon—one of the Eight Harvard Poets and a close friend of Cummings—was an aficionado of Debussy. Damon gave Cummings piano lessons, and he was a powerful influence on Cummings’ Harvard tastes in matters of music, visual art, and poetry.23 It was Damon who introduced Cummings to Imagism and also—as will be relevant below in Section 2—to Blake. Debussy composed several pieces around a Pan-motif, including the paradigm-shifting ‘Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune’ (1894); ‘La flûte de Pan’ from the Chansons de Bilitis (1900); and ‘Syrinx (La 22 Norman 1972 [1958]: 148. I am not sure which draft Norman refers to. Given the sheer volume of Cummings’ papers—more than a hundred feet of shelving at the Houghton Library not to mention the (smaller but substantial) collection at the Harry Ransom Center—one sometimes has to take on trust what other scholars have found. Norman’s biography does not give academic footnotes so there is no specific reference which can be double-checked. 23 Kennedy 1977: 260–1.

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Flûte de Pan)’ (1913).24 Mallarmé, whose poem was taken by Debussy for ‘Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune’, spoke favourably of the music’s tonal nuance. He wrote to Debussy how moved he was by ‘votre illustration de l’Après-midi d’un faune, qui ne présenterait de dissonance avec mon texte, sinon qu’aller plus loin, vraiment, dans la nostalgie et dans la lumière, avec finesse, avec malaise, avec richesse’. (‘. . . your illustration of l’Après-midi d’un faune, which presented no dissonance with my text, except for going further, indeed, into nostalgia and into light, with finesse, with malaise, with richness’.)25 Cummings’ ‘of evident invisibles’ echoes these tonal complexities of nostalgia, light, and rich sensuality. The diction conjures a vocal lightness like a Debussy flute, as if the words barely touch the page. The ‘h’s and the aspirated ‘p’s and ‘f ’ of ‘hovering’, ‘portals’, ‘hurt’, ‘poise’, ‘faun’, ‘head’, ‘flower’ and ‘parted’ create a flute-like breathiness, reinforced by the voiced plosives (g, d, b) which dominate the other initial consonants.26 In spite of this flute-like, dancing lightness, the language is infused with a deep sense of longing (like Debussy’s nostalgia), and the compression results in a kind of luxuriousness (like Debussy’s sensual richness) as the poem is distilled down to only the most evocative and sumptuous words. Cummings’ admiration for the ‘Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune’ and for Debussy in general appears in an essay written at Harvard.27 This is a fairly casual essay written as one in a series of class exercises through which members of the class commented on each other’s prose and verse compositions. In this particular essay, Cummings draws a parallel between a certain style of short story (exemplified by the work of the classmate upon which he comments) and the music of Dates are those of first public performance, from the catalogue of works in Dietschy 1990. 25 Letter from Mallarmé to Debussy 23 December 1894 in Debussy 2005: 229–30. 26 Cummings experimented in his notes with various charts and schemata aimed at categorizing the colours or tones of different sounds; some of these schemata are discussed by Kennedy 1979: 186–92; Antretter 2001. His knowledge of Greek and Latin may well have contributed to his interest in these taxonomies, since his textbooks for the classical languages would have familiarized him with basic linguistic taxonomies for consonantal sounds. E.g. his first Greek textbook was John William White’s First Greek Book (see below, Appendix), which contains a brief explanation of division into ‘Labial or π-mutes π β ç’ ‘Palatal or κ-mutes κ γ χ’ ‘Lingual or τ-mutes τ δ θ’ alongside a division into ‘smooth’, ‘middle’, and ‘rough’ mutes. There are various other taxonomies and terms which Cummings might have encountered (e.g. ‘voiced plosives’, ‘unvoiced plosives’, ‘glottals’, etc.). 27 HRC 3.2. 24

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Debussy. Although it is a casual exercise, this essay offers, usefully, a direct account of Cummings’ understanding of Debussy’s aesthetic: The name Debussy has become associated with a style of composition which is always vigorous, interesting, and unexpected in its climax . . . In the “Mandoline” Debussy gives us a quick-moving, lilting, melodious, singing creation which ends abruptly on what the uninitiated call the “wrong key”—to wit, on a note which leaves them in suspense. The real art of this type, and very high art it is, consists in just this: making the hearer finish the story on theme, as the case is . . . . To succeed, the theme must be well-founded, cleanly developed to the exquisite moment, and stopped with a real suddenness.

Much of that analysis could be applied to ‘of evident invisibles’. The poem is clean, unexpected, reaches ‘the exquisite moment’, and stops suddenly on ‘syrinx’, leaving the reader suspended but on-theme.

2. ‘THE GOAT-FOOTED BALLOONMAN’ The central and most important appearance of the satyr-motif in Cummings’ work is the satyr or Pan-figure who appears as ‘the goatfooted balloonMan’ in one of Cummings’ most famous poems, ‘in Just-’ (CP 27). In composition, ‘in Just-’ also belongs to Cummings’ Harvard years. The first draft dates to spring 1916, although the early publications are slightly later (1920 and 1923).28 ‘in Just-’ has stood out for readers, scholars, and for Cummings himself. Cummings chose it as the opening poem for the Faber & Faber Selected Poems 1923-1958; he also read and discussed it in his autobiographical i: six nonlectures (33–4). It has received more scholarly attention than almost any other of Cummings’ poems.29 28 May 1920 in The Dial (see Cohen 1992: 23; Norman 1972: 143); 1923 in Cummings’ first collection, Tulips and Chimneys. Composition: see Kennedy 1979: 192, 1994a: 97, 1994b: 25, 27. 29 Felheim 1955; Ray 1962a: 289 n. 3 and 1962b; Friedman 1962b; Marks 1964: 46– 8; Turner 1965; Norman 1972: 19–20; Lane 1976: 26–9; Kidder 1979a: 24–5; Rotella 1984: 285–6; Labriola 1992: 40–3; Kennedy 1994a: 25, 97, 122, 125, 233; Kennedy 1994b: 5–6; Landles 2001: 31–7; Friedman 2006: 59–60; Sawyer-Lauçanno 2006: 25–6, 232; Desblaches 2007: 158–60; Buck 2011; Webster 2014: 494–6. There is effectively universal agreement that the description of the balloonman as ‘goat-footed’ points to a satyr-figure or Pan.

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The startling aspect of the goat-footed figure who appears in ‘in Just-’ is that he appears among children—an incongruity which has fostered considerable critical disagreement among scholars about the poem’s tone.30 Some scholars maintain that the poem is straightforwardly joyful and innocent, but they are then forced into attempts to evade the significance of the satyr-motif. These discussions have often resorted to biography in an attempt to limit the meaning of the poem. Thus Friedman (arguing against a reading offered by Ray): ‘Ray . . . interprets the “goat-footed balloon Man” as a symbol of the tainted adult world waiting to betray the childhood world of innocence. Aside from the fact that nothing of the sort happens explicitly or implicitly in the poem, and aside from the difficulty of associating the wild god of the woods (Pan) with a world of “shady adult knowledge,” Professor Ray’s reading of this poem is further refuted by Cummings’ own comment on it in i:six nonlectures.’31 The passage in Cummings’ nonlectures to which Friedman refers presents the poem as an encounter with nature. There, Cummings glosses it with the following anecdote: ‘. . . I vividly remember being chased (with two charming little girls) out of the tallest and thickest of several palatial lilac bushes: our pursuer being a frantic scarecrow-demon masquerading as my good friend Bernard Magrath, professor Charles Eliot Norton’s gifted coachman.’32 More biographical fodder is supplied by Cummings’ sister Elizabeth, who recalled the actual balloonman of their childhood. Cummings’ first biographer wrote that: ‘She . . . reveals the genesis of one of her brother’s best-loved poems . . . .’33 These biographical approaches are reductive. Moreover, they rely heavily on the nonlectures, and it may be useful to note that there are other ways in which Cummings’ nonlectures revised the context of his earlier poetry, emphasizing the theme of innocence to the point of distorting the original publication context (see below, Chapter 6.4).

30 Regarding the goat-footed motif among children, note that the age of the girl in ‘A GIRL’S RING’ is ambiguous: ‘girl’ could be used of a child or a young woman. As it happens, it was a young woman who inspired the poem. A 1916 letter to Scofield Thayer, located in the Thayer archives by Jim Dempsey, describes the poem’s inspiration: ‘a tall-long large- big-footed blonde gave me (accidentally) her ring to keep. I think she went in swimming.’ My thanks to Jim Dempsey for permission to cite his research. He identifies the letter as Beinecke Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS 34 Box 30 Folder 783. 31 Friedman 1962b, objecting to Ray 1962a. 32 33 Cummings 1967: 33–4; quote at 34. Norman 1972: 19–20.

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I do not deny a biographical aspect to ‘in Just-’. Indeed, Cummings attributes an autobiographical significance to the poem as early as 1920, writing to his father that ‘in Just-’ contains ‘a hint of youth and Norton’s Woods’.34 What I do object to, however, is the reduction of poem to biography—especially for the purpose of ‘proving’ its innocence. Reading a ‘hint’ of Norton’s Woods (at Cummings’ suggestion) ought not to turn into the use of biography to control the poem’s meaning. Meanwhile, those who perceive something sinister in the figure of the satyr-balloonman have tried to lock down an ‘answer’ to his appearance in the poem in a way which is almost equally limiting.35 The problems arise partly from attempting to read the poem in isolation; one of my main aims here is to restore this famous poem to its context—both publication context in Tulips & Chimneys and literary context, with the paganism of Cummings’ Harvard literary circle. The poem reads: in Justspring when the world is mudluscious 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 spring and the

34

Cummings 1972: no. 55, pp. 70–1. Landles 2001 is an exception in seeking to multiply meanings, although his reading does not convince me. 35

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whistles

This slippery poem would be innocent enough were it not for the detail that the balloonman is goat-footed—a detail which identifies him as a Pan-figure or a satyr and which introduces a sexual dimension to the poem. The sinister potential of the satyr-figure is enhanced by the postponed revelation. At first the balloonman is simply ‘lame’, then ‘queer’, then finally ‘goat-footed’. The ‘reveal’ takes an added punch from being set off in one of the single lines which are interspersed between the four-line stanzas.36 This teasing of the reader is itself sexual. Even the indentation of the revelatory line creates a breathless, anticipatory, and excited pause just before the word ‘goat-footed’. Cummings loved burlesque theatre and adopted a more explicitly striptease style in other poems.37 Here we have just the merest hint of the striptease, but even that hint adds to the sinister quality of the satyr in this scene of childhood play. The balloonman of ‘in Just-’ is more satyr than faun. The fauns that we have seen above are innocent creatures stung into a sexual awakening by the appearance of a beautiful woman; this is not the scenario or the tone of ‘in Just-’. Here, the balloonman’s association with the arrival of spring situates this particular goat-footed figure in the tradition of Milton’s Pan (bringer of spring in Paradise Lost IV. 264–8) or Swinburne’s Pan and satyrs, who herald the spring in Atalanta in Calydon. Pan as bringer of spring also features in Cummings’ papers. He appears in a scrawled note—‘The great goat-footed God of all out-doors’—and at greater length in a pastoral fragment in which the first hints of spring awaken ‘The little God Pan’.38 These 36

On the emphasis accorded by the spacing of the reveal, cf. Kennedy 1994b: 6. See Mullen 1971: 505–9; Henry 1963. See also the striptease analogy which opens the nonlectures: ‘The very fact that a burlesk addict of long standing (who has many times worshipped at the shrine of progressive corporeal revelation) finds himself on the verge of attempting an aesthetic striptease, strikes me as a quite remarkable manifestation of poetic justice . . .’ (1967: 3). 38 Both the note and poem are from HRC 6.8. ‘The little God Pan’ responds to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s phrase, ‘the great god Pan’ (from ‘A Musical Instrument’). 37

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notes offer additional background to Cummings’ assimilation of the motif of Pan or his satyrs as spring-bearers. Scholarly discussion of ‘in Just-’ has tended to look at the poem as an entirely isolated artefact, without reference to its literary context or publication context. However, the literary context of pagan revival and the publication context in Tulips and Chimneys/Tulips & Chimneys are a part of the poem’s fabric.39 In the 1922 version of Tulips & Chimneys, ‘in Just-’ opens a fivepoem subsection titled ‘Chansons Innocentes’. (Three of these made it into Tulips and Chimneys.) The five poems are: I II III IV V

‘in Just-’ (CP 27) ‘hist whist’ (CP 28) ‘little tree’ (CP 29) ‘why did you go’ (CP 30) ‘Tumbling-hair’ (CP 31)

Only ‘in Just-’ is well-known and its fame has further divorced it from its context.40 These five poems together rework themes from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, to which the section title ‘Chansons Innocentes’ alludes.41 S. Foster Damon—the friend who was instrumental in familiarizing Cummings with Debussy—was also a great lover of Blake. Indeed, Damon later became an academic and

39 Cummings took great care over the ordering of work within his own collections: see discussion above, p. 11 n. 16. 40 Tulips & Chimneys publication history, above, Chapter 1. The 1923 Tulips and Chimneys included ‘in Just-’, ‘hist whist’, and ‘Tumbling-hair’. Buck 2011 also suggests that ‘in Just-’ suffers from being studied in isolation and has made her own attempt to situate the poem in context based on an argument about the musical rondo form. 41 Labriola 1992: 40–1 and Landles 2001: 32 note the allusion to Blake. Kennedy 1994a: 233 is confident that the allusion is to Debussy and does not mention Blake. The interaction of the whole section, ‘Chansons Innocentes’ with Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience seems indisputable; any connection with Debussy must be looser but is supported by Cummings’ general interest in Debussy’s music. Kennedy also says of ‘The Young Faun’ that it is ‘inspired by the ballet “The Afternoon of a Faun” ’ (1976: 295), but Cummings cannot have seen Nijinsky’s performance. (Choreographic and performance history, see Dietschy 1990: 173; Moore 2013: 71, 99–104, 271.) I do not know if Kennedy means that Cummings was inspired by the music of Debussy’s ‘Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune’ or if he thinks that Cummings was influenced by accounts of Nijinsky’s dance.

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Blake scholar at Brown University.42 At Harvard, he influenced Cummings (and others among their friends) in the direction of Blake.43 While Cummings’ section title, ‘Chansons Innocentes’, specifically refashions the title Songs of Innocence, the poems themselves evoke the darker edge of Songs of Experience. Cummings’ five poems together echo the prominence of children and animals in Blake’s collection. They draw out the themes of sleep and death, of losing and finding, of betrayal and rescue, and of sorrow and comfort which Blake had explored in simple language and nursery rhyme. The first and last of Cummings’ five poems frame this section with classical imagery, while the middle three draw most directly on Blake’s language and style. The section opens with ‘in Just-’, followed by a Halloween scene in ‘hist whist’, full of the ‘ghostthings’, witches, goblins, and noises of the season. In the third poem, ‘little tree’, a child addresses a tree cut for Christmas. The child asks: who found you in the green forest and were you very sorry to come away? see i will comfort you

In the fourth, a child fails to grasp the death of a kitten who is ‘maybe asleep?’: why did you go little fourpaws? you forgot to shut your big eyes.

These third and fourth poems, ‘little tree’ and ‘why did you go’, draw so openly on Blake’s style that they might be said to contain elements of Blake pastiche. Both poems have a disquieting edge, as does the fifth and last poem of the section, ‘Tumbling-hair’.

42 On Cummings and Damon, see Cummings 1967: 50; Norman 1972: 37; Kennedy 1977: 260–1; Kidder 1979b: 258–9. For a brief biographical sketch of Damon, see http://library.brown.edu/collections/harris/damon.php [accessed 11 May 2013]. 43 Robert Hillyer’s ‘Song’, from Eight Harvard Poets, is school of Blake: O crimson rose, O crimson rose, Crushed lightly in two little hands; A child’s soft kiss was in your heart, A child’s warm breath was in your soul.

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This final, very compressed poem evokes a classical scene. It is untitled in Tulips & Chimneys; it had earlier been published in Eight Harvard Poets with the title ‘EPITAPH’. It reads (in full): Tumbling-hair picker of buttercups violets dandelions And the big bullying daisies through the field wonderful with eyes a little sorry Another comes also picking flowers

The scene here is the rape of Persephone, but the poem is opaque and (as other scholars have noted) requires cross-reference to a passage from Milton’s Paradise Lost: ‘Not that fair field / of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flowers, / Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis / Was gathered’ (IV. 268–71).44 Charles Norman—Cummings’ first biographer—adds that in conversation, Cummings ‘expressed genuine surprise’ at the correspondence.45 Norman’s conversation with Cummings must have been decades after the composition of the poem. It does not really matter whether Cummings had forgotten the literary context in which he had written or if he was never conscious of the relationship: that is the point of taking an intertextual approach. ‘Tumbling-hair’ claims its place in a poetic lineage from Milton’s Paradise Lost through to Shelley’s ‘Song of Proserpine While Gathering Flowers on the Plain of Enna’ and Swinburne’s ‘At Eleusis’ (which reworks the Homeric Hymn to Demeter). In the lines which immediately precede the brief reference to the rape of Persephone, Milton refers to Pan as a bringer of spring (IV. 264–8): . . . airs, vernal airs, Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune The trembling leaves, while universal Pan, Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance, Led on th’ eternal Spring. Not that fair field of Enna [etc. . . . ]

44

Norman 1972: 39–40 quotes the Milton; Kennedy 1994a: 108–9, 1994b: 22, 1979:

181.

45

Norman 1972: 39.

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Since Milton’s lines about the rape of Persephone lie closely behind ‘Tumbling-hair’, these lines about Pan as a bringer of spring might usefully be sensed behind the goat-footed balloonman whose whistle betokens spring in ‘in Just-’. In other words, Cummings’ five-poem section, ‘Chansons Innocentes’, both opens and closes with a classical note mediated through Milton. This point underlines the coherence of ‘Chansons Innocentes’ as a section and highlights the importance of the classical reference in ‘in Just-’—even though it is only so lightly indicated by the single adjective ‘goat-footed’. Kennedy calls ‘Tumbling-hair’ an ‘imagistic triumph’. It has certainly been pared down to a minimum and it is one of Cummings’ most directly Imagist poems.46 The pagan turn of Cummings’ Harvard circle resonated with and was further fuelled by Imagism: pagan rejuvenation is a strong theme in Des Imagistes. Indeed, the transformation of Blake’s title into the French ‘Chansons Innocentes’—as well as evoking, perhaps, Debussy—picks up the French of Des Imagistes and evokes Pound’s self-fashioning in the French Provençal troubadour tradition.47 Cummings was particularly, and profoundly, struck by ‘The Return’, in which Pound celebrates a kind of pagan rejuvenation: ‘See, they return; ah, see the tentative / Movements, and the slow feet’.48 This is the sight of the pagan gods coming back: ‘Gods of the 46 Kennedy 1994a: 233; cf. Kennedy 1979: 180–1. Cummings’ efforts towards minimalism can be seen in progress in a working manuscript for ‘Buffalo Bill ’s / defunct’—another of his most famous poems, also from Tulips & Chimneys. See Kidder 1976a; cf Kennedy 1979: 202–4. 47 On the significance of Pound’s choice of French for christening the Imagist ‘school’ as ‘Les Imagistes’, see Rainey 1998: 29. ‘Chansons Innocentes’ as allusion to Debussy: Kennedy 1994a: 233. 48 Norman 1972 [1958]: 38–9 on Cummings’ admiration for ‘The Return’; see also Cummings 1972: no. 241, p. 254. Kennedy (1979: 176–9, 1994a: 105–9) discusses the influence of ‘The Return’ on Cummings’ experimentation with the layout of poems including ‘Tumbling-hair’. Cummings would also have known Pound’s ‘Pan is Dead’, from Ripostes, (which itself replies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘The Dead Pan’: see Moody 2007: 177). The poems from Ripostes which seem prominent for Cummings at this point in his life—‘The Return’ and ‘Δώρια’—were reprinted in Des Imagistes. (For Cummings’ knowledge of Δώρια: this must lie behind his description of Pound’s musicality as ‘Δωρια’ in a note reproduced in Antretter 2001: 186.) However, in addition to Des Imagistes, it seems that he had also seen Ripostes itself: see Kennedy 1977: 280. Cummings also must have read Canzoni (1911) at some point before the writing of The Enormous Room (completed before he left for Europe in the spring of 1921), because The Enormous Room misquotes, from mistaken memory, Pound’s ‘Song in the Manner of Housman’ from Canzoni: see letter to Elisabeth and Helmuth

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wingèd shoe!’ The pagan revivalism of Cummings’ Harvard friends looked backwards and contained much recycled imagery. Even Pound’s more ground-breaking ‘The Return’ looks backward in certain respects, since the poem connects to Pound’s programme of rescuing the classical paganism of the nineteenth-century poets whilst rejecting their language and style.49 But the self-reflexivity of Pound brings a different angle—and Cummings too, in his own manner, turns the spirit of pagan rejuvenation into a reflection on the role of poetry and the poet. Pound’s ‘The Return’ weaves the texture of the poem and its Sapphic-influenced metre into its idea of pagan revival, so that phrases like ‘the slow feet’ implicitly identify the return of the pagan gods with Pound’s own literary endeavour.50 Thus Pound as poet himself orchestrates the gods’ return. Cummings as poet, on the other hand, slips in and out of ‘in Just-’. We saw already in ‘A GIRL’S RING’ the voyeuristic potential of the goat-footed motif. In ‘in Just-’, this voyeurism complicates the relationship between balloonman, poet, and reader. It is the balloonman’s whistle which summons eddieandbill and bettyandisbel and so it is, in a sense, the balloonman who creates the scene. His act of scene-setting contests the role of author, since he and the poet each author the scene in different senses. The balloonman is both a voyeur upon the scene which he creates and also—with the hint of striptease—an exhibitionist. His status as both viewer and viewed intrudes on the reader, who reads and views the created scene. ‘Chansons Innocentes’ opens and closes, therefore, with two poems under the influence of classical imagery, Milton, Swinburne, and Pound, bookending three middle poems primarily influenced by Blake. A unifying theme of all five, however, is the treatment of childhood and sexuality under the influence of Freudian thinking. Cummings’ Freudian sexuality brings a dimension which is unique— entirely different from the paganism of his Harvard circle and more novel and ‘modern’ even than Pound. Braem, 7 August 1954 (Cummings 1972: no. 219, pp. 233–4). He knew Cathay by now as well, see above, p. 50 n. 23. 49 Hamilton 1992: esp. 12, 25. 50 The double sense of ‘slow feet’ is brought out in Martin’s discussion of Pound and metre, Martin 2012: 181–7; see also Carne-Ross 1990: 135; Tomlinson 1993: 247; Patterson 2011: 180–4.

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The more a reader reads the poems of ‘Chansons Innocentes’, the less innocent they seem. The section opens with a poem about childhood play which includes the presence of a satyr-figure and it closes with a classical scene of rape. The first four poems are explicitly set in the world of childhood, which raises questions about the imagined age of Persephone when she is snatched and raped in the fifth poem of the set. There is also a dark progression within the section—seasonal and metaphysical—from spring (whistled in by a Pan-figure) to Halloween to Christmas (winter) to death (of a kitten) to the Underworld (via the rape which established Persephone as its Queen). The sexual dimension of the five poems is neither suppressed, nor foregrounded. In ‘hist whist’, at Halloween, it is advisable to [...] look out for the old woman with the wart on her nose what she’ll do to yer nobody knows for she knows the devil

ooch

Reading a specific sexual danger into these lines would be supplying more than the lines themselves suggest. But equally, the world of an old woman who ‘knows the devil’ and can ‘do’ things to children is not a non-sexual world. In ‘little tree’, at Christmas, the comfort which the child offers the tree is wheedling and physical, with an exhibitionist aspect: then when you’re quite dressed you’ll stand in the window for everyone to see and how they’ll stare! oh but you’ll be very proud

The fourth poem, ‘why did you go’, explores the death of a kitten. As in many of Cummings’ poems, death has an erotic element: ‘is what we stroke / maybe asleep?’51

51 Buck 2011: 149–53 also considers the sexual dimension of the five poems of ‘Chansons Innocentes’, but I disagree with her readings, especially of ‘why did you go’. Buck marginalizes the significance of the relationship with Blake (137) and this distorts her reading, so that she prioritizes sexual innuendo and loses sight of the more straightforward content—a child struggling to comprehend the death of a kitten—which aligns the poem with Blake’s focus on children, animals, and death.

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As for ‘in Just-’: among scholars who have read the goat-footed balloonman as sinister, most understand him as an intrusion of adult sexuality upon childhood innocence.52 The voyeuristic potential of the satyr-motif does indeed bring an element of intrusion. However, it is not as simple as the intrusion of an adult sexuality into childhood innocence. Cummings was significantly influenced by Freudian theory (and later underwent Freudian analysis himself in 1928–29). The beginnings of his interest in Freud cannot be exactly dated, but his interest probably went back as far as his undergraduate years at Harvard.53 At the heart of the Freudian paradigm shift is the willingness to see children as sexual actors with their own desires. As Cummings put it once, ‘. . . the child(per Freud)is already sexual--------cf me & Betty Thaxter’.54 (Betty Thaxter was one of Cummings’ childhood playmates. And, if we choose to play with biography, it so happens that she is one of the girls with whom Cummings was chased from Norton’s Woods and also the childhood friend with whom he explored along the lines of ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours’.)55 Cummings’ world is a Freudian world: it is a world which is infused with sexual feelings and fantasies, even when it is seen from within the perspective of the child. Blake’s Christian compassion can generate intimacy for the sleeping and lost Lyca without introducing sexual undertones: While the lion old Bow’d his mane of gold And her bosom lick, And upon her neck From his eyes of flame Ruby tears there came;56

52 e.g. Ray 1962a and 1962b; Kidder 1979a: 24; Labriola 1992: 41–3. Landles 2001: 35 points out some problems with this, but his attempt to read the poem within a more childlike world, with ‘wee’ as urine and ‘mud’ as excrement, does not convince me. 53 Cohen 1983 for these points and for a broader discussion of Cummings’ interest in Freud. Cohen makes the point that while Freud was fashionable among the New York intelligentsia, Cummings’ engagement goes deeper than literary fashion: he read extensively in Freud’s corpus, underwent analysis, and consciously brought Freudian ideas into his literary work (591–2). 54 Houghton MS Am 1892.7 (90), Folder 5 of 44. 55 Sawyer-Lauçanno 2006: 17. 56 ll. 43–8, ‘The Little Girl Lost’, Songs of Innocence.

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By contrast, Cummings’ stroking of the maybe-asleep kitten is eroticized and his comforting of the lost tree is exhibitionist. The children experience a sexual charge in imagining the danger of the old woman who knows the devil, and the satyr-balloonman intrudes, yet is also a part of the world of eddieandbill and bettyandisbel. The girl Persephone herself both picks flowers and is picked.57 Now that Freudian terms like ‘Oedipal complex’ or ‘ego’ and ‘id’ have become everyday phrases, they have almost lost their classical charge. It is easy to underestimate the impact in the early twentieth century of Freud’s choice of a classical vocabulary for the articulation of his psychoanalytic theories.58 As Leonard notes, the early psychoanalytic community actively branded itself with its classicism: ‘the figure of Oedipus became an icon of the psychoanalytic movement itself—an image of Oedipus and the Sphinx even acted as the logo of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, the official press of the psychoanalytic movement from 1919 to 1938.’59 Cummings certainly recognized and responded to Freud’s classicism. In a later, humorous poem about Freud, he quoted (in Latin) Horace’s phrase, eheu fugaces Postume.60 Cummings draws classical connections in his own notes on Freud. These notes, taken for personal use, explicate Freudian theory and document some of his own thoughts in response. He observes, for example, a connection between Freud’s idea of the womb and the Platonic analogy of the cave: ‘caves (home) = intrauterine life’ and ‘leaving [caves (home)] = birth (“causing sorrow to my mother”) | cf. Plato’s cave + vagina’. Glosses like ‘memorial column [çαλλος]’ show his instinct to integrate Freud’s classicism into his own summaries and explications of Freudian thinking.61 As well as interpreting Freud through his relationship to the Classics, 57 This recalls more recent debates among classicists about female agency in the meadow-rape: see Deacy 2013. 58 A new interest in Freud within the field of classical reception is bringing this aspect of Freud to the fore: see Macintosh 2004; Bowlby 2006; Macintosh 2009, s.v. Freud; Orrells 2011: 236–66 (and more generally on the classical world, the modern world, and pederasty); Leonard 2013; Zajko and O’Gorman (eds) 2013; Leonard 2015 s.v. Freud. 59 Leonard 2013: 65. See further 69–71, and the article generally for a critique of the Freudian use of Oedipus. 60 ‘listen my children and you’, CP 234; from is 5 (1926). 61 Houghton MS Am 1892.7 (79). First square brackets are mine, replacing Cummings’ speech quotes which indicate the repeat of ‘caves (homes)’ from the line above. Square brackets around çαλλος are Cummings’ own.

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Cummings also read the Classics through a Freudian lens—indicated, for example, by a reference to Freud scrawled in Cummings’ hand in the margins of his mother’s copy of John Addington Symonds’ Studies of the Greek Poets (1880).62 Cummings’ decision to open ‘Chansons Innocentes’ with a poem that includes a satyr-motif and to close it with an Imagist portrayal of a classical myth is connected to a uniquely Freudian version of pagan rejuvenation which takes Cummings far beyond the ideas of pagan revival circulating among his Harvard circle or celebrated by Pound. Cummings took Blake’s edge, darkness, and fascination with the world of children, Swinburne’s paganism, and Pound’s yearning for what was new, and he reinvented it for a Freudian world.

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See below, Appendix, on Cummings’ personal library.

5 Classics and Childhood Protectors and Transgressors

Cummings’ delight in the playfulness of childhood is one of the most recognizable features of his poetry. The discussion of Cummings’ paganism has led already, in the previous chapter, to the question of Cummings’ attitudes to childhood and children.1 In this chapter, we continue with the subjects of Classics and childhood, paganism, and the goat-footed world. We move away from the beginning of Cummings’ literary career and turn instead to the very end of Cummings’ life and work—his final poetry collection, 73 Poems, published posthumously (1963) and the collaborative volume of text and photographs, Adventures in Value (1962), which was published in the year of his death.2 In the last decade of Cummings’ life, he returned (full circle, as it were) to some of the literary concerns of his earliest years.3 Therefore, 1

For other work on Cummings, the Classics and childhood, see Webster 2012 [2013], arguing that Cummings associates Catullus 3 with the idea of mourning for children. 2 73 Poems contains work composed from 1950 onwards; most of the poems date from 1958 to 1962. The order of the poems within the collection is the work of posthumous editors, and the title, 73 Poems, was also chosen by the editors. This style of title was used repeatedly by Cummings, including for the last collection which he himself saw through to print: 95 Poems (1958). See Friedman 1979: 296, 313–15; Ordeman and Firmage 2000: 166. 3 There is an oft-repeated accusation, originating in hostile reviews of his poetry during his lifetime, that Cummings did not change or develop as a writer over the course of his career. This idea is so unhelpful that it hardly even seems worth refuting; if anything, Cummings’ literary priorities evolved with an overwhelming rapidity. For previous scholarship dealing with Cummings’ development over time, see in particular von Abele 1955; Friedman 1960: esp. 159–67; Cohen 2010.

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this jump forward to the late work allows us to follow Cummings’ paganism thematically, before we return (in the next section of this book) to pick up Cummings’ life and poetry chronologically in 1917. 73 Poems (1963) sees the only appearance of the satyr-motif in Cummings’ poetry post-Tulips & Chimneys. The language of paganism also makes a return: it is more prominent during this last decade than it had been in intervening years. Some of the poets whose work preoccupied Cummings during his Harvard years also resurface in the late poetry. This includes Milton, Blake, and early Pound. In 1949, Cummings found himself rereading Pound’s Personae (1909).4 We will look in Chapter 10 at the return to Milton in several key poems from the 1950s. The return to Blake is something which we will see here in this chapter, where we will also revisit the topic of Freud’s influence on Cummings. In 1952–3, Cummings delivered at Harvard six autobiographical ‘nonlectures’ in connection with the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton visiting professorship. These were subsequently published as i: six nonlectures. Each of the nonlectures concluded with a reading by Cummings of poems (that is, by other poets) which he chose to single out for their personal significance to him. This self-retrospection involved digging out, and bringing to the fore, poems or passages from Chaucer, Dante, Swinburne, Shakespeare, and various other poets whom he had once read and studied during his Harvard years. As a narrative of Cummings’ own poetic development, the nonlectures are to be treated with caution: they refashion as well as narrate.5 But they are of great interest for the light they shed on Cummings’ attitude to his own poetry in the 1950s. It is also significant for Cummings’ work that the early 1950s sees this major statement of poetic identity. It is a chicken-and-egg question whether the nonlectures reflected an already existing sense of identity or whether that identity crystallized largely through the need to articulate it for the lecture series.6 Either way, what is most interesting, for present purposes, is the subsequent prominence of that poetic identity and, indeed, of personal biographical details in Adventures in Value. This 4 Rereading Personae: from letter to James Laughlin, 23 September 1949 (Cummings 1972: no. 171, p. 196). 5 See Chapter 4.2 and Chapter 6.4. See also Heusser 1997: 77–96 for an examination of the constructed nature of the nonlectures. 6 The series took this autobiographical form because Cummings felt extremely uncomfortable composing the lectures. See Kennedy 1994a: 438–41.

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shift over the course of the 1950s begins to align Cummings with the more personal and confessional post-modernists. The classical engagements in Cummings’ late work show a compelling ambivalence in Cummings’ relationship to the classical tradition. There is a very sincere and lifelong love for classical literature. We find joyful memories of learning Greek as a child, a mischievous sense of humour about the Classics, and a profound admiration for classical ideals. On the other hand, the satyr-motif reappears in one of Cummings’ most frankly disturbing and unsettling poems: a poem in which he writes of a woman who, in childhood, was the victim of incest. I argue in this chapter that the gentle innocence and the transgressive guilt in Cummings’ use of the Classics are two sides of the same coin. Twentieth-century literary theory offers an ample supply of theorized approaches to binaries, opposites, and oppositions, and their construction and deconstruction. Freud’s theories of dreams, which are themselves the root of much later twentieth-century theorizing of opposites, are the direct source of Cummings’ dualism. Cummings had read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.7 In an essay for Vanity Fair, he remarks: ‘In unconscious life, as manifested by the dream, “opposites” go hand in hand.’8 In his personal copy of Patrick Mullahy’s Oedipus: myth and complex; a review of psychoanalytic theory (1948), he marked up a passage on symbols in dreams—a passage in which Mullahy explains that in Freudian theory any object in a dream may represent equally either itself or its direct opposite.9 Cummings was also particularly influenced by the dictum of his own analyst Dr. Fritz Wittels: ‘Everything is two’.10 This Freudian duality pervades Cummings’ understanding of art. In a series of notes-to-self on Shakespeare, Cummings observed: ‘essence of Drama=BOTH / Drama conceives life(as Freud conceives man)dualistically.’11 7

Cohen 1983: 591–2. From ‘The Tabloid Newspaper’, Vanity Fair, Dec. 1926, rpt. Cummings 1965: 172. 9 See Appendix on Cummings’ personal library. 10 Sawyer-Lauçanno 2006: 470. 11 Houghton MS Am 1823.7 (67) (Folder 2 of 2). These are not Cummings’ Harvard undergraduate notes on Shakespeare (which also survive, separately, but which reflect mostly the transcription of teaching). These notes are Cummings’ personal thoughts about Shakespeare. They probably date from the late 1920s, to judge by references made in the notes to Cummings’ own play HIM (1927). On Cummings’ ideas about the nature of opposites: Kidder 1979b: 286–90; Cohen 1987: 69, 119–20, 123–6, 129–32 (Cohen also discusses connections to Freudian theory and to dreams); Webster 2002: 32–3 and n. 19. 8

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Thus, it was Cummings’ Freudian world view which encouraged the idea that everything is intrinsically bound up with its opposite. In the case of Cummings’ relationship to the Classics, the oppositions are the face of the protector and the face of the transgressor.

1. CLASSICS AND CLASSICISTS IN ADVENTURES IN VALUE The last literary work of Cummings’ lifetime was a collaborative book juxtaposing text by Cummings with photographs taken by his third wife, the photographer Marion Morehouse. The title of the book, Adventures in Value, is teased out in three epigraphs. The first gives a definition for ‘value’, including the etymology ‘L valere be strong’, and the second quotes Emerson, while the third reads: ‘I have never tried to do anything but get the proper relationship of values. HOMER.’ This has confused at least one scholar, who refers to ‘the puzzling attribution of a modern-sounding quote to Homer’.12 The quote is in fact attributable to the painter Winslow Homer. Cummings actively misleads. The Latin etymology in the first epigraph paves the way for the reader’s natural assumption that ‘Homer’ is the classical author, and Cummings has truncated the quote with a false full stop immediately before it becomes obvious that a painter is speaking: ‘I have never tried to do anything but get the proper relationship of values; that is, the values of dark and light and the values of color . . . .’13 This prank on the reader displays Cummings’ insouciant sense of humour and also his own sense of ownership of the Classics. He loved classical literature; he was not intimidated by it. His own work freely reworks, distorts, and plays with classical texts and classical ideas.

12

Friedman 1979: 310. Cummings probably obtained the Winslow Homer quote from Goodrich 1944: 159. The Goodrich biography of Winslow Homer is listed among the 2000-plus volumes from Cummings’ personal library which came to the Harry Ransom Center. The same quote can also be found (with the tiny variation of ‘true’ for ‘proper’) in Kelly 1995: 220. Derek Walcott, in Omeros, makes a similar joke: ‘Homer (first name Winslow) // made that white chapel stroke under the mackerel-shoaled / sky of Marblehead . . .’ (1990: 186). 13

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Figure 3. ‘ΕΛΕΦΑΣ ’. Photograph by Marion Morehouse, from Adventures in Value (1962). Morehouse’s photograph itself as well as the accompanying text—‘rocks are like clouds’—evokes ideas of transience and permanence which can be seen elsewhere in Cummings’ corpus in relation to the classical world and its stone residue. Compare the ‘motheaten forum’ and ‘ruined aqueduct’ of ‘(ponder,darling,these busted statues’ (see Chapter 9.2). Here, the title ‘ΕΛΕΦΑΣ ’, written as it is in Greek capitals and juxtaposed to the granite stone, might hint at the inscriptionary record of the ancient world.

The photographs in Adventures in Value are divided into four sections titled ‘I EFFIGIES’, ‘II STILL LIFE’, ‘III NATURE’, and ‘IV PEOPLE’. There are several classical references in this volume, among which two in particular stand out: III. 4: ‘ΕΛΕΦΑΣ’ (see Fig. 3) from ‘NATURE’ and IV. 9: ‘John Finley’ (see Fig. 4) from ‘PEOPLE’.14 The text of ‘ΕΛΕΦΑΣ’ (III. 4) stands opposite a photograph of a large, chiselled-by-nature rock hunched underneath a birch tree.

14 See also ‘MOIPA’ (III. 23) and ‘RUS’ (III. 24). RUS is a harvest scene of pumpkins, molasses, and autumn squash and has no accompanying text beyond the title. I come back to ‘MOIPA’ briefly below, Chapter 5.2.

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Figure 4. ‘John Finley’. Photograph by Marion Morehouse, from Adventures in Value (1962). John H. Finley, Jr. taught at Harvard from 1933 to 1976, and died in 1995. Finley’s national standing is reflected by the obituaries which were run in several papers, including the New York Times.

ΕΛΕΦΑΣ in what’s correctly nicknamed The Granite State,rocks are like clouds –they can assume the likeness of almost anything so huge a fellow might(you feel)have easily become a ship;if at the last moment he hadn’t turned himself into something which the enchantress Isak Dinesen calls “a being mighty and powerful beyond anyone’s attack, attacking no one” beside this mercifully how enormous friend,a Harvard teacher’s small son memorized(after multifarious strugglings)the alphabet of ancient Greece15

15

Isak Dinesen is the pen-name of Karen Blixen, best known as the author of Out of Africa. Cummings wrote about Isak Dinesen to Cicely Angleton, 11 November 1947, and again to his sister, 11 Feb. 1959 (Cummings 1972: no. 148, pp. 180–1; no. 251, pp. 260–1).

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In the photograph, the rock could seem to take the shape of an elephant, facing away, with wrinkled grey skin. But there is also a stylized black elephant created by the shadow on the face of the rock. The ambiguity involved in finding the elephant perfectly mimics the childhood game of finding shapes in clouds. Cummings’ response to Morehouse’s photograph is formulated as an autobiographical reminiscence. He was indeed ‘a Harvard teacher’s small son’, since his father taught at Harvard from 1891 to 1900 before taking up a position as a Unitarian minister at Boston’s South Congregational Church.16 His family had a summer home in New Hampshire (‘The Granite State’), and Cummings had a wellknown, lifelong affinity for elephants. This is an intensely personal passage, and the importance of the Greek letters to Cummings is clear. The ‘multifarious strugglings’ of learning Greek are remembered through a text which exudes joy and humanity, and linked to a photograph which radiates calm. This simple joy in the Greek alphabet is also found in Cummings’ poems—for example, in ‘floatfloafloflf ’ (CP 431), which takes the reader through the movements of the ballet-tap dancer, Paul Draper. Draper’s body as it moves takes the forms of Greek letters—‘omicron’, ‘epsilon’, ‘Omega’, and ‘eta’—written out as: ‘omiepsicronlonO– / megaeta?’. ‘The intertwining . . .’, as one scholar has observed, ‘suggests not only speed but body shifts as the dancer momentarily assumes the approximate forms of these Greek letters.’17 Cummings expresses the beauty of the dancer’s body by evoking the beauty of Greek letters as pure shapes.18 The elephant of ‘ΕΛΕΦΑΣ’ may not seem to have any intrinsic connection to the Greek language or to Cummings’ relationship to Greek, but this association of the elephant with the Classics is revealing. Cummings treated the elephant as a kind of ‘personal totem’ (his words). As a visual artist, Cummings drew elephants persistently throughout his life. In his writing, he represented himself as an elephant in his allegorically autobiographical children’s fairy tale, ‘The Elephant & The Butterfly’. The humane, majestic friendliness of the elephant in ‘ΕΛΕΦΑΣ’ is characteristic of the appearance of 16

Norman 1972: 15; Kennedy 1994a: 13–14. Crowder 1958. ‘floatfloafloflf ’ is from No Thanks (1935). 18 See Chapter 2 on the Greek alphabet as a formative influence in Cummings’ poetic development. 17

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elephants throughout his work. The tragic nobility of the elephant closes one of Cummings’ most bitingly satirical poems on the inhumanity of that ‘Lord of Creation,MAN: / at a least crooking / of Whose compassionate digit,earth’s most terrific // quadruped swoons into billiardBalls!’ (CP 317). (Billiard balls being made out of ivory, the ‘crooking digit’ is the finger on the trigger of the gun.)19 The friendliness and the nobility of the elephant who watches over the Harvard teacher’s small son as he learns his Greek letters are the qualities of a protector and a guardian, and they are qualities which we see also in Cumming’s portrait of the Harvard classicist John Finley. Morehouse’s portrait of Finley (see Fig. 4) captures a warm, gentle, and kind man, slightly smiling. The text offers this tender tribute: JOHN FINLEY this individual leads three lives,each a little more successfully than the other as Master of Harvard University’s Eliot House,he generates a particular precision of vitality which our forefathers called “character”:whence comes that awareness which alone makes life greater than herself as a topflight classicist,he welcomes his mortal auditors to an immortal world–that noblest realm,of Pindar & of Aeschylus,whose values are & were & will remain man’s true spiritual home as a citizen of the New England wilderness,he cheerfully toils in the sweat of his brow under skies which freeze or burn:bushing,chopping, thankfully with naked hands wrestling some peculiarly murderous tangle of undergrowth into a serene slope or a peaceful meadow or an innocence of unsuspected mountains(& pausing to hear a hermit thrush sing)– reverently worshipping at the shrine of implacability;& gladly fighting the adorable earth by way of relaxation,he officiates at The Saturday Club made famous by Emerson & Thoreau–manipulating with eerie skill a roomful of (carefully picked for their disparateness)supercelebrities from any&everywhere:lifting friends out of foes as easily as a prestidigitator

19 Personal totem: Cummings in ‘The Adult, the Artist and the Circus’ (rpt. 1965: 111); see also Dos Passos 1966: 135, cf. 162. ‘The Elephant & The Butterfly’ from Cummings 2004; for context, see Friedman 1979: 308–9. See also the friendliness of ‘the silently little blue elephant shyly(he was terri’ (CP 516) and the friendly toy elephant in Adventures in Value I.2, ‘AHMED’. For Cummings and elephants generally, see Norman 1972: 8, 20, 34; Kennedy 1976: 295–6; Kennedy 1994a: 32, 246, 394.

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subtracts rabbits from hats;& gently knocking kindred souls together while their minds are still centuries apart “my ambition” he once told Marion,as(under her umbrella)they traversed the Yard in a towering rain “was to be a theologian–but I found myself a parish priest”

Cummings’ description of the Greek Classics as ‘that noblest realm’ should not be read as a crudely hierarchical claim. Cummings’ poetry and prose seeks to inhabit moments and to express the mostness of things. Latin and Greek are not uniquely privileged in Adventures in Value; Cummings also quotes in German, French, and Italian. Having said that, Cummings’ relationship to the classical world did have a particular ethical importance for him. Cummings’ friend Dos Passos comments on it in The Best Times: An Informal Memoir.20 Comparing himself and Cummings, Dos Passos observes: In my revulsion against wartime stupidities, as a priest takes a vow of celibacy, I had taken a private vow of allegiance to an imaginary humanist republic which to me represented the struggle for life against the backdrag of death and stagnation. . . . This isn’t the sort of thing one talks about, even to intimate friends, but it is these private dedications that mold men’s lives. . . . I loved Cummings for his dedication to some similar cult, based, I suspect, in his case on his Greek, a cult that dated back to the earliest Homeric beginnings and stretched forward into prosodies to come.

In i: six nonlectures, which Cummings dedicated to Finley, Cummings speaks of his introduction at Harvard to the ‘exquisite’ lines of Catullus, ‘sublime’ lines from Horace, and the ‘magically luminous invocation’ of Sappho.21 This attitude to the Classics reflects both a lifelong emotion (as Dos Passos observed) and also the particular tone of Cummings’ references in late life to the classical past as the home of the noble, the spiritual, and the sublime. One of the ideals which Cummings consistently located in the Greek world was individual freedom. In 1931, Cummings travelled in Stalinist Russia. His novelized account of those travels, EIMI, is a protest against Stalin’s oppression of the individual. The Greek title (EIMI, ‘I am’) indelibly associates Cummings’ celebration of individuality with his

20

Dos Passos 1966: 134.

21

Cummings 1967: 50–1.

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relationship to classical Greece.22 Elsewhere, Cummings characterizes the individuality which he values as the individuality of Timoleon.23 In Adventures in Value, it is not a coincidence that Cummings begins his description of John Finley, ‘this individual . . .’. It is one of Cummings’ highest terms of praise and it associates Finley’s own life with the Greek values which Finley taught. Cummings was not himself a student of Finley, who was the younger of the two by ten years. Cummings studied at Harvard from 1911 to 1916, and Finley began teaching at Harvard in 1933 (after studying there himself). However, what Cummings expresses in the text which accompanies Morehouse’s photograph evokes wider ideas which he held about teaching and teachers, the Classics, and value (as in the title, Adventures in Value). He toyed with similar ideas in notes which he wrote in the mid-1950s towards a planned California lecture series (which was never, in fact, delivered). He intended to relate an anecdote about the Harvard professor, George Lyman Kittredge. The Kittredge anecdote stood as one of three anecdotes intended to develop the idea of ‘value’. What,first of all,do I mean by the word “values”? In answer to that question,a single word comes into my mind: the word “noble”.24

Cummings took Kittredge’s Shakespeare course in his Senior year at Harvard.25 The planned Kittredge anecdote runs:

22 EIMI could equally mean ‘I shall go’, but Cummings seems to prioritize the meaning ‘I am’. See his remarks in the nonlectures: ‘Let me add that the Greek word εἰμί signifies am . . .’ (1967: 99). Printing with accents (‘εἰμί ’) also removes the ambiguity. 23 ‘And before going any further, let me clearly state that the “individuality” of which I certainly am “a forthright partisan” is the individuality not of a Napoleon but of a Timoleon. Did most of you ever hear of that great human being called Timoleon? Of course not. Why? Because, by contrast with a murderous simpleton named Napoleon(of whom everybody’s heard)Timoleon was a true or complex individual. But whether I’m wrong or I’m right, if you haven’t yet met my friend Timoleon,please do yourselves the honour of velocitously visiting a good library & of delightedly discovering a great book called The(or maybe A)History of Greece by a great man named Grote.’ This passage comes from notes towards a planned but never-delivered lecture series (Houghton MS Am 1892.7 (90): ‘Notes for a nonexisting lecture (California)’, passim but esp. in Folder 30 of 44). This is the ‘California lecture series’ referred to just below and again in some of my later chapters. 24 Houghton MS Am 1892.7 (90): Folder 26 of 44. 25 Kennedy 1976: 282–4; 1994a: 62–3; see also Kennedy’s notes at HRC 8.11.

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On a dais at the front of the classroom,the Master was standing-buoyant and erect(communing with his wonderfully fine white beard). The master’s back was squarely to the door by which cap-&-hatdoffing students came pouring in;but(like every good teacher)he had eyes all over him & particularly in the back of his magnificent head. Presently 2 or 3 youths entered with their hats on. Suddenly Kittredge spun around:out shot his right arm;&(pointing to a spot near the ceiling directly opposite)he thundered at the offenders--“Gentlemen: take off your hats to the bust of Homer,if you can’t take them off to me!” All of us were so startled that for a long moment not one of us moved:then,recovering,we turned to stare en masse in the direction indicated. There,to our amazement,we beheld a plaster effigy,grey with the accumulated dust of ages,which even the janitor had previously never noticed.26

A note reads: ‘what is “teaching”?--Kittredge(Chiron) . . . “bustof Homer”’. Scrawled in pencil at the side is: ‘example of a value’.27 The lecture notes represent a more public form of writing than many of Cummings’ personal notes, since they were intended for delivery. They show that these questions of teaching, of the Classics, and of the measure of value represent a broader tendency in Cummings’ thinking, which was important to him before and beyond the Finley text. They also show that Cummings’ ideas about teaching and value and nobility consistently return to the Classics. The Kittredge anecdote centres on the bust of Homer and links Kittredge to Chiron—even though Kittredge taught English literature. It is these ideas of value and nobility which resurface in Adventures in Value and with the reference, in the Finley text, to ‘. . . that noblest realm,of Pindar & of Aeschylus,whose values are & were / & will remain man’s true spiritual home’.

26

Houghton MS Am 1892.7 (90): Folder 30 of 44. Houghton MS Am 1892.7 (90): Folder 5 of 44. The ‘value’ expressed in the Kittredge anecdote is contrasted with ‘power of $ – Hollywood’, which refers to an anecdote (Folder 30) in which Cummings overhears a Hollywood executive bawling out a screenwriter: ‘At a desk sat a socalled exectutive,looking very angry. Before him literally cowered a socalled writer. “What the hell are you kicking about?” the executive was yelling “--We bought you,didn’t we?” ’ (‘Exectutive’ is presumably a typo.) 27

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2. ‘SAINTS AND SATYRS’ The perspectives which Adventures in Value offer on Classics and childhood are light and innocent. ‘ΕΛΕΦΑΣ’ and ‘John Finley’ express joy, humanity, and nobility, the pleasure of learning, and the virtues of humility. This uncomplicated and confident ‘value’ is one thread in Cummings’ relationship to Classics and childhood. We find something very different and much darker in ‘annie died the other day’ (CP 794). This poem comes from Cummings’ final poetry collection, 73 Poems, which was completed at almost the same time as the work on Adventures in Value and published posthumously in 1963, the year after Cummings died. The poem is short, peculiar, and disturbing: annie died the other day never was there such a lay– whom,among her dollies,dad first(“don’t tell your mother”)had; making annie slightly mad but very wonderful in bed –saints and satyrs,go your way youths and maidens:let us pray

The choice of such a playful poetic form for a poem about incestuous sexual abuse is disconcerting, but the poem does not trivialize the story it tells. We are told straightforwardly that the abuse made Annie ‘slightly mad’. In his late poetry, Cummings frequently adopts a nursery-rhyme form when writing about disturbing or sexualized topics, and the incongruity is part of the effect. The simplicity of the language forces the reader to confront the story with no complications of syntax and no poetic difficulties to distance the reader from the incest. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934) also tells a story whose germ lies in an act of paternal incest. Central to Tender is the Night is the question of whether a victim is defined by the abuse which was suffered. When Nicole, victim of her father’s incestuous abuse, finally leaves Dick Diver, her one-time doctor and then husband, the act of leaving asserts her right to a new life, and one in which she ceases to be defined by the childhood abuse. At the moment when Nicole leaves, her decision is presented with narrative sympathy for Dick, who has been caged by his role as physician/husband:

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And suddenly, in the space of two minutes she achieved her victory and justified herself to herself without lie or subterfuge, cut the cord forever. Then she walked, weak in the legs, and sobbing coolly, toward the household that was hers at last. Dick waited until she was out of sight. Then he leaned his head forward on the parapet. The case was finished. Doctor Diver was at liberty.28

We see the same issue a few pages later from the perspective of Nicole’s new lover, Tommy, with rather less sympathy for Dick. Tommy tells Dick to his face: ‘“You don’t understand Nicole. You treat her always like a patient because she was once sick.”’29 Cummings’ poem raises the same question: what role does sexual abuse, especially incest, play in defining the female victim? The poem gives us mixed information about the ongoing role of the abuse in Annie’s life. Its effect lingers: it has made her ‘slightly mad’. It is a determining factor in her sexuality, since it has made her ‘wonderful in bed’. (Compare Nicole’s seductive beauty.) The information about Annie’s sexual past is what the poem chooses to present as relevant to the announcement of her death. In that way, the abuse frames her life at its moment of final definition. However, the incest has not stood in the way of a full, adult life and sexuality. She was (at least, from the perspective of the speaker) desired and desirable: ‘never was there such a lay’. For the purposes of Cummings’ poem, the incest has shaped Annie and her sexuality, but it has not made her any less a full woman. There is a biographical context relevant to this poem. Cummings’ second wife, Anne Barton, was abused by her father.30 By Cummings’ own report, his marriage to Anne was more sexually satisfying than his previous experiences, but it was also very unhappy. Anne had multiple affairs and Cummings at least one.31 Sawyer-Lauçanno asserts in his 28

Fitzgerald 2000 [1934]: 324. Fitzgerald 2000 [1934]: 331. Another treatment of father–daughter incest (where the father only partially acts on his incest fantasy) is Sherwood Anderson, Many Marriages. Cummings is likely to have known Many Marriages since it was published in The Dial beginning in the October 1922 issue, and The Dial, its owners, editors, and contributors, were very much at the heart of Cummings’ literary world. However, there is no discernible influence: the treatment of incest in Many Marriages and in Cummings’ work is poles apart. 30 Established by Kennedy 1994a: 297, 299–300 (quoting a direct reference to the abuse from archival material), and 504 n. 4. 31 Better sex: Kennedy 1994a: 288; unhappiness and affairs 286–326, passim; 300–1 for Cummings’ affair. 29

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biography of Cummings that ‘annie died the other day’ was written in 1961–2 in response to Anne’s death.32 However, according to the archives of the New York Times, Anne Barton died on Tuesday, 7 July 1970, eight years after Cummings’ own death.33 Sawyer-Lauçanno must be mistaken; perhaps he just assumed a biographical context based on the text of the poem.34 No doubt Cummings’ marriage to Anne, which lasted from 1929 to 1932, influenced Cummings’ interest in and attitudes to questions of sexual abuse. The name ‘annie’ is a marked choice. However, it is not simply a biographical choice, especially since ‘annie died the other day’ can be associated in subject and style with a slightly earlier poem in which the girl is variously referred to as ‘ann’, ‘annie’, and ‘annabel’—variations on the name which take that poem further away from the Anne who was Cummings’ wife.35 The earlier poem (‘“so you’re hunting for ann well i’m looking for will”’) consists of a conversation between Ann’s mother and Will’s mother, at the end of which it is implied that Ann’s mother has murdered the child Will when he refused her advances.36 As in ‘annie died the other day’, here too Ann is allegedly the subject of her father’s incestuous sexual abuse, although in this case Will’s mother adds the imputation that the abuser is not her real father: ‘and here is a riddle for you red says / it aint his daughter her father lays’. Cummings’ knowledge of Anne Barton’s history is only one part of his own engagement with the incest taboo. Cummings’ difficult relationship with his father and close relationship with his mother was deemed to fit the pattern of an Oedipal complex, and he made references to incest in the notes which he kept of his own dreams. Furthermore, Cummings’ reunion with his own daughter Nancy in 32

Sawyer-Lauçanno 2006: 538. The accuracy of the NY Times obituary has been confirmed to me by Anne’s granddaughter: pers.comm. 15 May 2013. Anne was at this time Anne M. Girsdansky (correctly in Norman and the NY Times obituary), not Girdansky (Kennedy, SawyerLauçanno). The NY Times obituary gives age at death, which further rules out any possibility that it was filed under the wrong date in the online archive. González Mínguez 2012 [2013]: 28 repeats that the poem was written in response to Anne Barton’s death, but she seems to be replicating Sawyer-Lauçanno’s error. 34 There are other culpable mistakes in Sawyer-Lauçanno’s controversial biography; see review by Webster 2004b. 35 ‘ “so you’re hunting for ann well i’m looking for will” ’, from 95 Poems (1958) (CP 707). 95 Poems is the collection immediately previous to 73 Poems. 36 See Friedman 2006: 65–7. 33

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1946 carried a sexual charge. Cummings lost custody of Nancy to his first wife, Elaine Orr, when Nancy was only five. When they were later reunited, she did not know that he was her biological father, and there was a pronounced sexual tension between the two of them before Cummings informed her of her parentage.37 Cummings’ Freudian world view allowed him (in his private papers) to acknowledge and process his taboo feelings and desires in a frank manner. Among the poetry readings which concluded each of the nonlectures are two readings from Francis James Child’s English and Scottish Ballads. Child is another Harvard connection. He was an eminent Harvard professor and a friend of the Charles Eliot Norton in whose honour the visiting professorship which occasioned the nonlectures had been endowed. (Child also provided the rose cuttings for the rose garden established by Cummings’ parents in his childhood home in Cambridge.)38 This is one of the ballads which Cummings chose: “Quhy dois zour brand sae drop w’ bluid, Edward, Edward? Quhy dois zour brand sae drop wi’ bluid, And quhy sae sad gang zee O?” “O I hae killed my hauke sae guid, Mither, mither: O I hae killed my hauke sae guid, And I had nae mair bot hee O.” “Zour haukis bluid was nevir sae reid, Edward, Edward . . . (“Why does your sword so drop with blood, Edward, Edward? Why does your sword so drop with blood, and why do you go so soberly, O?”

37 It is clear that there was no actual physical intimacy between Cummings and Nancy. The dreams, the relationship with his parents, and the sexual feelings between him and Nancy are variously discussed in Forrest 1993: esp. at 10; Kennedy 1994a: 417–30 (cf. also 1977: 287–91); Friedman 2006: 50, 66–7. Friedman connects Cummings’ incestuous feelings with ‘ “so you’re hunting for ann well i’m looking for will” ’, but does not discuss ‘annie died the other day’. 38 Cummings 1967: ‘Under one window of this room flourished (in early summer) a garden of magnificent roses: the gift of my parents’ dear friend “stubby” Child—who (I learned later) baptized me and who (I still later discovered) was the Child of English and Scottish Ballads’ (24–5); cf. Kennedy 1994a: 20. Friendship between Child and Norton: see Norton’s Collected Letters: Norton 1913: 86, 121–2 (including a plate reproduced from a daguerreotype of Norton and Child together in 1854). Brief biography of Child at .

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“O I have killed my hawk so good, Mother, Mother: O I have killed my hawk so good, and I had no more except he, O.” “Your hawk’s blood was never so red, Edward, Edward . . .”)

After further prevarication, Edward admits, ‘“O I hae killed my fadir deir . . .”’. He will find penance in exile over the sea; his wife and children will be thrown upon the world, to beg through life: “And quhat wul ze leive to zour ain mither deir, Edward, Edward? And quhat wul ze leive to zour ain mither deir? My deir son, now tell me O.” “The curse of hell frae me sall ze beir, Mither, mither: The curse of hell frae me sall ze beir, Sic conseils ze gave to me O.” (“And what will you leave to your own mother dear, Edward, Edward? And what will you leave to your own mother dear? My dear son, now tell me, O.” “The curse of hell from me shall you bear, Mother, mother: The curse of hell from me shall you bear, Such counsels you gave to me, O.”)

This ballad gives another insight into the workings of Cummings’ internal literary world in the last decade of his life. To someone, like Cummings, steeped in Freud, the ballad might seem to invite an Oedipal reading. But what is most interesting is Cummings’ gloss on its tone: a ‘terrible warning against inhuman unfeeling’.39 Cummings’ ideas about Child clarify what Cummings thought could be accomplished by simple, ballad-based verse treating transgressive subjects. The nursery rhymes and traditional ballad forms which Cummings exploited in his later life offered him a way to lay things bare. The style is sometimes blunt, as in ‘annie died the other day’, and sometimes more riddling, as in ‘“so you’re hunting for ann well i’m looking for will”’.40 The unifying feature is the bareness of

39

Cummings 1967: 71. Or in the poem which immediately precedes it in 95 Poems, ‘ADHUC SUB JUDICE LIS’ (CP 706), which reads in full: ‘when mack smacked phyllis on the snout // frank sank him with an uppercut / but everybody(i believe) // else thought lucinda looked like steve’. Riddling out the relationships of the five people named in these four lines is what gives the poem its energy. (Lucinda is the daughter of Phyllis. Mack has just become aware of Phyllis’ infidelity. Frank, who believes himself to be the father of Lucinda, has leaped to Phyllis’ defence, but everyone else assigns paternity of Lucinda to Steve.) 40

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approach, through which Cummings could lay open any aspect, however terrible, of humanity or inhumanity, human feeling or ‘inhuman unfeeling’.41 ‘annie died the other day’ has echoes of the beginning of Cummings’ literary career. It is the only appearance of the satyr-motif in Cummings’ published poetry subsequent to the Harvard-era poetry. Like the earlier poems, it associates the satyr-motif with childhood and transgressive sex. The presentation of this story as an obituary notice also obliquely recalls the presentation of the rape of Persephone in ‘Tumbling-hair’, especially the earlier incarnation of ‘Tumbling-hair’ in Eight Harvard Poets where it was titled ‘EPITAPH’. The influence of Blake which was so prominent in ‘Chansons Innocentes’ is again apparent in the use of simple nursery rhymes to handle such dark themes. Blake was clearly once again on Cummings’ mind in his late work. The penultimate photograph in Adventures in Value is a portrait titled ‘COUGAR’ and captioned ‘One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression. BLAKE’. That same famous statement is echoed in ‘everybody happy?’ from 73 Poems, in the lines ‘or 1 law for the lions & / oxen is science)’ (CP 791).42 It may have been Damon who, once again, drew Cummings’ focus to Blake, as it was in the old Harvard days. Cummings had recently been reading Damon’s scholarly work on Blake: there is a page of notes on Damon and Blake in with the materials towards the California lectures.43 But while ‘annie died the other day’ shows clear points of connection with the earlier work, it is explicitly transgressive in a way that the poems of ‘Chansons Innocentes’ are not. It ventures into unsafe territory. The satyr-motif in ‘annie died the other day’ appears in the context of an absolute violation. It is not only different from, but in a significant sense directly opposite to, the picture of Classics and childhood in Adventures in Value. Cummings’ Freudian dualism allows his presentation of the Classics and childhood to contain this duality of transgressors and protectors.

41 It would be wrong to mistake the simplicity for lack of care. There are forty or fifty versions of ‘annie died the other day’, and these represent only the late drafts after the poem was already substantially formed. Houghton MS Am 1823.5 (23a). 42 Cummings mentions Damon and Blake in the nonlectures (1967: 50) and in several letters. I talk further about Blake and Cummings’ later poetry in Chapter 10. 43 Houghton MS Am 1892.7 (90). Folder 21 of 44. Damon’s work is Damon 1969 (first published 1924), William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols.

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Cummings himself, in fact, specifically associated his totemic elephant with his Freudian dualism. ‘In gazing at any elephant in any zoo, we are, in reality, looking into a Freudian mirror of ourselves, a glass wherein we see revealed not only our powers, but our weaknesses, not only our docility but also our cruelty and our will to crush.’44 Thus the gentle and noble elephant inherently contains its opposite. Just so, classical protectors and classical transgressors are inherently entwined. In Adventures in Value, Cummings celebrates gentle protectors like the elephant of ‘ΕΛΕΦΑΣ’ and ‘John Finley’. His notes on the Kittredge anecdote refer to Chiron, that exceptional centaur who was both teacher and healer. Cummings also celebrates the avenging protector, ‘MOIPA’, in Adventures in Value III.23. ‘MOIPA’ is the title given by Cummings to the photograph of the cross-section of a felled tree, which is lit in a personifying manner and which Cummings imagines as ‘the revengeful Ghost of outraged illimitably Nature’. Homeric moira signifies an allotted portion, and thus the Greek title emphasizes Cummings’ feeling that the human abuse of nature is an overstepping of proper bounds. (The fear that humanity had overstepped its bounds in regard to nature was provoked in large part by the horror of the atomic bomb.)45 Thus Cummings’ classicism returns to the pagan natural world. The nostalgic glow which emanates from memories of learning the Greek alphabet in ‘ΕΛΕΦΑΣ’ is not triggered by a schoolroom scene. In that blurring of imagination and memory, Cummings pictures the child in the outdoors with only the elephant as friend and guide. Finley too has been photographed outdoors. He is the ‘topflight classicist’ who is also ‘a citizen of the New England wilderness’ and a worshipper at nature’s ‘shrine of implacability’. The paganism of Cummings’ Harvard era resurfaces, although the tone has changed. The paganism of the 1950s has less to do with nineteenth-century ideas of pagan revival, and more simply to do with nature and the natural world—the meadow, the mountain, or the thrush. This later paganism easily accommodates a unifying of the pagan and Christian worlds, especially around the theme of protection. 44

‘The Secret of the Zoo Exposed’. Vanity Fair, March 1927, rpt. Cummings 1965:

176.

45

334.

On Cummings and the bomb, see Kennedy 1994a: 431; Cummings 1965: 319,

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Slightly earlier, in 1944, when Marion Morehouse was in hospital and Cummings struggled to cope at Joy Farm without her, he wrote her that: I realise, being up here alone, how a pagan must have felt after christianity had marched noisily into his favorite grove and blessed away the protecting spirit whom he silently worshipped there. You are the Tutelary Genius of Joy Farm; you are its Guardian Angel. Without you, this hilltop and all its inhabitants – its birds and crickets and butterflies and flowers – are lonely.46

Cummings is casually inconsistent. Marion’s absence is likened to the eviction of a beloved and protecting pagan spirit by Christianity. Yet Marion is described in the next sentence equally as ‘Tutelary Genius’—Cummings would have known the Latin genius and the word here carries its classical import—and as ‘Guardian Angel’. A similar duality appears in Adventures in Value, where the portrait of John Finley emphasizes his classicism and presents him in pagan language as ‘reverently worshipping at the shrine of implacability’. Yet it ends with Finley’s description of his career in his own words: ‘“my ambition . . . was to be a theologian—but I found myself a parish priest”’. The final couplet of ‘annie died the other day’ also conflates Christianity and classical motifs: ‘–saints and satyrs,go your way // youths and maidens:let us pray’. The phrase ‘saints and . . .’ raises the expectation of ‘saints and sinners’, which makes the unexpected ‘saints and satyrs’ particularly marked. The reference to ‘youths and maidens’ has a classical feel, but they are adjured in the Christian manner, ‘let us pray’.47 There is an element of banishment in this couplet: ‘go your way’ and leave us be. But there is also an element of comfort evoked by the ritualized discharge which recalls Blake’s concern with comfort and comforting, itself shot through with Blake’s own (unusual) version of Christianity. We are no longer in the 1910s Harvard world of pagan revival. The presence of the satyr-motif in ‘annie died the other day’ has less to do 46

Quoted in Kennedy 1994a: 395. Classical feel of ‘youths and maidens’: cf. Horace, Carmen Saeculare ll. 6–8 (‘virgines lectas puerosque castos . . . dicere carmen’) or Catullus 34, ll. 1–4 (‘Dianae sumus in fide / puellae et pueri integri: Dianam pueri integri / puellaeque canamus.’). Cf. also Keats’ language in evoking a classical world, e.g. in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ‘What maidens loth?’ (l. 8), ‘Fair youth, beneath the trees’ (l. 15). A self-professed “Keats period” in Cummings’ poetry: see Cohen 1983: 593. 47

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with literary climate and more to do with the personal world of E.E. Cummings. As a text, ‘annie died the other day’ is not itself directly presented as biographical (whatever connections it has to Cummings’ own biography, sexual desires, or private fascination with incest), but it is textually linked to the openly autobiographical relationship with the Classics presented in Adventures in Value. The transgressive satyr of ‘annie died the other day’ is the flip side of the gentle reflections on the Classics and childhood in ‘ΕΛΕΦΑΣ’ and ‘John Finley’, one of which is framed as an autobiographical reminiscence and the other as the portrait of a close friend. At the outset of his career, Cummings’ use of the Classics was directly connected to the literary ideas which shaped early modernism. By the end of his career, his more personal and autobiographical approach took Cummings in the direction of the postmodernists. By the 1950s, the Classics were no longer the same assumed, shared currency—though poets might still choose to turn to them. Even satyrs are not forgotten: Sylvia Plath’s ‘Faun’ (1956) presents the woodland transformation of a man into a goat-footed and goathorned god through an ungoverned sexual energy. But with the increasingly personal voice of the poet and the fact that classical literature is no longer an assumed part of the world of Anglophone poetry, the second half of the twentieth century and the early twentyfirst century see a very different style of interaction with the classical tradition. A particularly prominent feature of contemporary poetry and its interaction with the Classics is the practice of reworking classical texts. At the end of his life, Cummings was moving in this direction. In addition to ‘annie died the other day’, 73 Poems also contains ‘in heavenly realms of hellas dwelt’—Cummings’ superb reworking of the bard’s tale of Aphrodite, Ares, and Hephaistos from the Odyssey (8.266–366) and, among those poems which interact with the Classics from Cummings’ entire corpus, arguably the masterpiece. This retelling of a Homeric tale (which we will look at in Chapter 10) looks forward to the poetry and classical reworkings authored by, for example, Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott, Carol Ann Duffy, and Alice Oswald.48

48 With awareness, however, that Walcott has voiced reservations about the term ‘reworking’ as a description of Omeros: see Burkitt 2007: 158.

The Great War and Beyond

6 ‘a twilight smelling of Vergil’ Cummings, Classics, and the Great War

‘The opened door showed a room,about sixteen feet short and four feet narrow,with a heap of straw in the further end. My spirits had been steadily recovering from the banality of their examination; and it was with a genuine and never-to-beforgotten thrill that I remarked,as I crossed what might have been the threshold : “Mais,on est bien ici.” ‘A hideous crash nipped the last word. I had supposed the whole prison to have been utterly destroyed by earthquake,but it was only my door closing . . . .’ E.E. Cummings, THE ENORMOUS ROOM (16)

Here, in a passage taken from the novelized version of his own imprisonment in France in 1917, Cummings describes the moment of confrontation with the first of his prison cells. Cummings had volunteered for ambulance service in France during the Great War, but his service lasted only a few months before he and his friend, William Slater Brown, were arrested and incarcerated—wrongfully suspected of espionage—in a brutal French detention camp at La Ferté-Macé.1 This chapter considers Cummings as a war poet, drawing on the relationship between his war poetry and his engagement with the classical tradition. His relationship with the Classics fed into his approach to the war and his response to it. The poetry of Cummings’

1 Biographical information, see Norman 1972 [1958]: 66–119; Kennedy 1994a: 133–88. Cummings own account: The Enormous Room with Kennedy’s introduction to the 1978 edition.

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Harvard years represents military glory in terms which are classicized, aestheticized, and removed from any actual experience of warfare, while the poetry written during and after his experience of the Great War expresses a growing sense of distance from the naive patriotism of those who remained at home. In the field of Great War poetry, this is a familiar trajectory which invites simplifications and which some recent scholars have been keen to problematize.2 Situating Cummings’ poetry within a trajectory from idealism to disillusionment means returning, in a sense, to a more old-fashioned paradigm. But what Cummings brings to that trajectory is distinctive and surprising. Cummings puts sex, gender, and sexual violence at the centre of the links he forges between the Classics and the Great War. The Harvardera poetry already foregrounds the connections between women, sex, the Classics, and war. Cummings’ insight into sex and warfare was transformed by the month between Cummings’ arrival in France and deployment to his ambulance unit—a month which Cummings and Brown spent socializing with prostitutes in the demi-monde of Paris. During this time Cummings dated the Parisian prostitute Marie Louise Lallemand.3 Cummings’ presentation of sex and of women in time of war, the female earth, male sexuality, and male bodies generates a poetry which is both surprisingly gentle and surprisingly shocking. Cummings displays a deep sympathy for those who are traumatized by war, while he echoes the brutality of war in a quieter brutality within his own poetic language.

1. WAR AS AN IDEA While Cummings was at Harvard from 1911 to 1916, the Great War was a distant idea. He wrote satirically of the disengaged philanthropy of the inhabitants of Cambridge, Mass. In mimicked voice: ‘“My dear, our church sent / three thousand bandages only last week / to those poor soldiers”’ (CP 933). But the war was no more real to him than to 2 See Vandiver 2010: esp. xii and 1–9; 2008: 452–4, 463–4; also the broadening of approach to war poetry in Van Wienen 1997. See Rawlinson 2007 on the problems with this constructed version of Owen. For the Great War and classical reception, see also Hardwick 2000: 43–61. 3 Kennedy 1994a: 142–3. See also above, Chapter 1.

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the women of Cambridge despatching bandages. Cummings’ friend, the novelist John Dos Passos, comments on this distance from the war in his own memoirs, The Best Times. Dos Passos wrote about a tight Harvard literary circle which included himself, Cummings, and other aspiring writers, orbiting around the literary magazine, The Harvard Monthly. ‘The sound of marching feet came dimly through the walls of the sanctum upstairs in the Harvard Union where we edited the Monthly. . . . The Yellow Book and The Hound of Heaven and Machen’s Hill of Dreams seemed more important, somehow, than the massacres round Verdun.’4 When Cummings did turn directly to the subject of the Great War in his poetry, he produced arguably the worst poem which he ever published—a sentimental tribute to the ‘trampled fields’ and ‘heroic dead’ of Belgium (published 20 May 1916 in The New York Evening Post; CP 876).5 Dos Passos gets to the nub of matters with his observation that, for the Harvard set, the literary tradition seemed more alive than the war. Cummings’ ideas about war during his Harvard years come directly out of his efforts to train himself as a poet, combining a classically inspired militarism with a literary aesthetic that characterized what Cummings later referred to as his ‘Keats period’.6 ‘I dreamed I was among the conquerors, / Among those shadows, wonderfully tall, / Which splendidly inhabit the hymned hall / Whereof is “Fame” writ on its glorious doors’ (CP 874). The classical side to Cummings’ militarism comes through particularly in the ‘EPITHALAMION’ which Cummings wrote in 1916 for the marriage of his friend Scofield Thayer to Elaine Orr.7 Drawing throughout the poem on classical imagery, he presents marriage and sex in terms of the triumph of spring. The deeply embedded militarism shows in Cummings’ attempts to evoke the visual aspects of the ancient world: a military scene, for example, exalts the image of Chryselephantine Zeus: ‘whose foot-stool tells / how fought the looser of the warlike zone / of her that brought forth tall Hippolytus’ (ll. 43–5).

4 Dos Passos 1966: 23. Regarding the Yellow Book etc., Dos Passos concedes that Cummings’ literary endeavours were more progressive, but that does not affect the point about the feeling of distance from the war. 5 Cf. discussions in Kennedy 1994a: 133–6; Sawyer-Lauçanno 2006: 82–5. 6 Quoted from the Harvard archive in Cohen 1983: 593. 7 It became the opening poem of Tulips & Chimneys (1922 ms) and Tulips and Chimneys (1923); CP 3–7. See Kennedy 1994a: 190 and Sawyer-Lauçanno 2006: 86–9.

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Militarism is embedded in the central imagery of the poem, the arrival of spring and its triumph over defeated winter: while hunted from his kingdom winter cowers, seeing green armies steadily expand hearing the spear-song of the marching grass.

Here the ‘spear-song’ indicates a specifically classical flavour in the triumph of spring’s ‘green armies’. It is a well-drawn poetic image. But it is also aestheticized, literary, and far removed from war’s realities. ‘EPITHALAMION’ ranges across a broad frame of classical reference. A more focused classical consideration appears in another poem, ‘HELEN’, also written at Harvard. This poem was not published by Cummings; it appears in the posthumous Etcetera: The Unpublished Poems (1983; CP 913). This Petrarchan sonnet is romantic and romanticized. However, it shows the beginnings of a more complex presentation of war and a more nuanced tone. HELEN Only thou livest. Centuries wheel and pass, And generations wither into dust; Royalty is the vulgar food of rust, Valor and fame, their days be as the grass; What of today? vanitas, vanitas . . . These treasures of rare love and costing lust Shall the tomorrow reckon mold and must, Ere, stricken of time, itself shall cry alas. Sole sits majestic Death, high lord of change; And Life, a little pinch of frankincense, Sweetens the certain passing . . . from some sty Leers even now the immanent face strange, That leaned upon immortal battlements To watch the beautiful young heroes die.

Helen was an obvious poetic subject for Cummings and his contemporaries, but one which could be taken in varying directions. Cummings’ Harvard friend R.S. Mitchell, for example, wrote a ‘Helen’ in which the reader finds Helen returned to the palace of Menelaus, reflecting on her past and Troy’s fall.8 Cummings, on the other hand, 8 In Cummings et al., Eight Harvard Poets, 1917: 70–1. Rupert Brooke’s ‘Menelaus and Helen’ also presents Helen and Menelaus after their return to Greece.

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pictures her at Troy above the battlefield. ‘Immortal battlements’ nods to the origins of Troy’s walls (built by Apollo and Poseidon), while the chosen view of Helen, who ‘leaned upon immortal battlements’, alludes to the teichoskopia of Book 3 of the Iliad. Thus Cummings highlights the military, heroic, and Homeric contexts. ‘from some sty / Leers even now the immanent face strange’: with ‘even now’, Cummings suggests that every man has his Helen, a face he would fight for. Helen is simultaneously ‘immanent’—present again in each woman who watches any soldier off to war—and ‘strange’—a face belonging to the classical past.9 Cummings finds in Helen a recurrent type which appears here leering from ‘some sty’. This may be any path or enclosed forecourt (OED) but it conjures the pigsty and brings Helen into the level of the mundane, or even the dirty.10 The leer on the face of today’s immanent Helen opens up undercurrents within the scene of military glory played out beneath the battlements. Although much else changed in Cummings’ poetry during and after his experience of the Great War, Cummings persisted in the view that soldiers fight with sex on the mind. The ‘leer’ in ‘HELEN’ suggests the woman’s sexual interest in the masculine display of war. Other sexual perspectives are confronted in the later poetry. Cummings writes about prostitutes touting for the custom of soldiers in Paris: ‘(ladies // accurately dead les anglais / sont gentils et les américains / aussi,ils payent bien les américains’. He writes of the soldier in the mud of the trenches, thinking lasciviously of his girl: ‘dreaming, / et/ cetera,of / Your smile / eyes knees and of your Etcetera)’.11 He openly acknowledges the wartime problem of venereal disease and consistently undercuts the widespread idealization

9 The tendency to see classical figures as archetypes was encouraged in Cummings by his interest in Freud, whose theories looked to classical figures as archetypes—most famously, of course, transforming Oedipus from a specific classical figure into a universal archetype for the Oedipal complex. See especially Leonard 2013 for the discussion of the process by which Oedipus came to be seen as universal and archetypal. More generally for Freud and classical reception, see above, Ch. 4, p. 88 n. 58. 10 I am very grateful to Rob Shorrock for the excellent suggestion that behind Cummings’ choice of ‘sty’ is very likely the description by William Simpson of Schliemann’s excavated Troy as ‘Priam’s pigsty’. On Simpson and Schliemann, see Allen 1999: 185–6. 11 Respectively from ‘little ladies more’ (CP 56–7) and ‘my sweet old etcetera’ (CP 275). The French reads ‘the English are nice and Americans also, they pay well, the Americans’.

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of the noble soldier fighting chastely for the pure, untouched, and untouchable girl back home. He takes on this patriotic idealization directly in ‘come,gaze with me upon this dome’, in which the young man wants ‘to do or die / for God for country and for Yale’: by the high minded pure young girl much kissed,by loving relatives well fed,and fully photographed the son of man goes forth to war with trumpets clap and syphilis12

Cummings’ early Harvard poetry does not have this sarcastic bite, but the realism about sex in warfare is already anticipated in Helen’s leer.

2. ‘DUSTY HEROISMS’ Several of the young men among Cummings’ circle volunteered for ambulance duty. They sought adventure. As Dos Passos remarked of himself: ‘I was all for an architecture course,’ (as his father desired) ‘but first I wanted to see the world. The world was the war.’13 The war changed Cummings’ poetry. The following poem comes from the section titled ‘La Guerre’ in Tulips & Chimneys (CP 54): earth like a tipsy biddy with an old mop punching underneath conventions exposes hidden obscenities nudging into neglected sentiments brings to light dusty heroisms and finally colliding with the most expensive furniture upsets ‘come,gaze with me upon this dome’ is CP 272. Dayton 2010 on ‘my sweet old etcetera’ also suggests that Cummings rejects images and attitudes pervasive in contemporary patriotic poetry and wider discourse. 13 Dos Passos 1966: 25. 12

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a crucifix which smashes into several pieces and is hurriedly picked up and thrown on the ash-heap where lies what was once the discobolus of one Myron

There is a clear change of tone from ‘HELEN’ to ‘earth like a tipsy’. In ‘HELEN’, ‘the beautiful young heroes’ die under ‘immortal battlements’. As a transferred epithet, the phrase nods to the immortal gods of Homeric epic and to the origins of the Trojan walls. However, the immortality of the battlements of Troy also embraces the ideal of military glory immortalized by poetry. In ‘earth like a tipsy’, on the other hand, the heroisms are not shining but ‘dusty’ and they belong to a world which is also full of ‘hidden obscenities’. Cummings placed ‘earth like a tipsy’ in ‘La Guerre’ between a poem about the inanities of humanity and a poem about the silence which falls between barrages of cannon. ‘earth like a tipsy’ depicts a drunken earth lurching around, breaking the artefacts of human civilization. This seems like earth under cannon bombardment. It is surprising, since the opening image of earth with a mop might suggest a post-war cleaning up and recovery. But the shaking and the smashing, the colliding and breaking, and the ash-heap all belong to the war itself, as most properly does the exposure of obscenities and heroisms. Part of the effect of the poem is the surprise occasioned by subverting the idea of mopping up; the poem reimagines the war’s smash-up as an act of earth cleaning itself of human artefacts. The ‘tipsy biddy’ captures, in a remarkable and original manner, the feel of a bombardment. The experience of being shelled was an experience of earth shifting and shaking underfoot. Erich Maria Remarque’s famous description of a shelling describes how earth becomes as unsteady as the sea: The next moment part of the wood is lifted up above the tree tops when the second shell hits, three or four trees go up with it and are smashed into pieces in the process. . . . In the light of one of the shell-bursts I risk a glance out on to the meadows. They are like a storm-tossed sea, with the flames from the impacts spurting up like fountains. . . . The earth

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explodes in front of us. Great clumps of it come raining down on top of us. . . . the earth is torn up again . . . 14

Cummings’ language is more gentle than Remarque’s, but captures the same experience: tipsiness, the punch of shells, the smashing up, the fires and ashes. The victims of the smash-up are the crucifix and the discobolus. Cummings—who was the son of a Unitarian minister as well as a student of the Classics—foregrounds the conjunction of the Christian and the classical. This is another aspect of Cummings’ war poetry which we have seen already in ‘HELEN’. ‘HELEN’ grasps a classical motif but adopts a Biblical register: ‘generations wither into dust; / Royalty is the vulgar food of rust, / Valor and fame, their days be as the grass’. The language here contains a suggestion of the burial service, ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’, and also of ‘for all flesh is as grass’ (King James: 1 Peter 1. 24). In the next stanza, ‘vanitas vanitas’ echoes the Latin Vulgate, ‘vanitas vanitatum dixit Ecclesiastes vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas’ (‘vanity of vanities, said Ecclesiastes; vanity of vanities, all is vanity’: Ecclesiastes 1. 2; cf. 12. 8). Behind the Biblical language, the reader might also sense something of Glaucus’ words (Iliad 6.145–9), in which the generations of men are likened to the generations of leaves, which come and pass. In any case, this use of a Biblical register for the classical subject of Helen brings Christian and classical together in this early poem. In the later poem, ‘earth like a tipsy’, the icons of the Catholic and the classical worlds, the crucifix and the discobolus, topple and lie jumbled together on the ash-heap. The totality of European civilization is the victim of war. This European dimension comes to the fore in Cummings’ poetry. He served under American command in an American and French ambulance unit, but he experienced the war as a French and European affair. (Indeed, his preference for socializing with the French rather than with his fellow Americans in the unit caused friction with his commander and contributed, ironically, to his arrest by the French authorities.) The association of the Classics with Europe appears in Cummings’ poetic corpus in different ways: from tourists in Venice—‘(O to be a metope / now that triglyph’s here)’—to the irony which attends the disjunctions of the classical heritage in 14

Remarque 1996: 45–6.

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America, for example in the Boston restaurant, ‘The Parthenon’, where the disjunctiveness is drily highlighted by the presence of a particularly memorable customer, a ‘Jumpy Tramp’ called Achilles.15 In ‘earth like a tipsy’, the discobolus is coupled with the crucifix, which summons the impact on the Unitarian Cummings of his war experience in Catholic Northern France. Here it is worth bringing in a passage from The Enormous Room, Cummings’ account of his own imprisonment during the war. En route to the detention camp where he was to be imprisoned for three months, Cummings and his guard of two gendarmes pass a crucifix in a grove by the side of the road. –The wooden body clumsy with pain burst into fragile legs with absurdly large feet and funny writhing toes;its little stiff arms made abrupt cruel equal angles with the road. About its stunted loins clung a ponderous and jocular fragment of drapery. On one terribly brittle shoulder the droll lump of its neckless head ridiculously lived. There was in this complete silent doll a gruesome truth of instinct,a success of uncanny poignancy,an unearthly ferocity of rectangular emotion.16

Cummings’ vivid description undercuts traditional aesthetics (‘the droll lump of its neckless head ridiculously lived’). However, it remains an exquisite and aestheticized presentation. As Kennedy remarked, this is ‘a passage full of cubistic obliquities’.17 Cummings was himself a painter as well as a poet, and both his painting and his poetry were influenced by the paintings of Matisse, Picasso, and the Cubists in general.18 The Cubist aesthetic pervades this passage, presenting itself most obviously in the ‘cruel equal angles’ and the ‘rectangular emotion’. The Enormous Room was published in 1922, which is the same year that the manuscript of Tulips & Chimneys was assembled.19 It was acclaimed at publication and made Cummings’ name, even though it

15 ‘(O to be a metope . . .’ from ‘MEMORABILIA’ (CP 254); Achilles from ‘one April dusk the’ (CP 84), discussed above, Chapter 3.1. I come back to ‘MEMORABILIA’ in Chapter 9.2. 16 Cummings 1978 [1922]: 38. 17 Kennedy in Cummings 1978 [1922]: xiv. On this scene, see also W.T. Martin, 2000 and (taking a rather unkind view) Fussell 2013 [1975]: 174. 18 Cohen 1987 generally for Cummings as a painter. Note that Cummings himself described The Enormous Room as analogous to a quilt (Cohen 1987: 40). 19 Publication history of Tulips & Chimneys: see above, Chapter 1.

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Figure 5. A Cubist crucifix. Pencil sketch by E.E. Cummings. Houghton MS Am. 1892.8 (1). Box 112. Sheet number 2617. From SKETCHES by E.E. Cummings. Copyright © by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust.

is now largely forgotten outside of specialist circles.20 An aesthetic of the crucifix which is reminiscent of this passage in The Enormous Room appears elsewhere in Cummings’ poetry, for instance in ‘the 20 There were negative as well as positive reviews, but on the whole, the book made a splash. Reception of The Enormous Room: Norman 1972 [1958]: 106–16; Kennedy 1994a: 242–3; Headrick 1992.

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bed is not very big’ (CP 207), where above the bed, ‘a Jesus sags / in frolicsome wooden agony’. The reader of ‘earth like a tipsy’ may imagine a more traditional crucifix, or may be influenced by these other aspects of Cummings’ corpus into imagining a more Cummingslike, Cubist crucifix (see Fig. 5). Either way, the crucifix is a highly aestheticized presentation of the male body, as is Myron’s discobolus.21 Between crucifix and discobolus, the poem offers two beautiful, naked or nearly naked male bodies, smashed up by the drunk cleaning woman who is earth. These are not simply bodies, but specifically male bodies created through art. Earth destroys, equally, a pinnacle of ancient art and an image which lies at the heart of Christian art. The male bodies created by the (explicitly or presumptively) male artist are wrecked by a drunken female earth, subverting female earth’s normally procreative role. The presentation of aestheticized and (in the case of the discobolus) classicized male bodies recalls the ‘beautiful young heroes’ who die in ‘HELEN’. But while there is continuity in this aestheticized approach, there is also a new and transformative context. The aesthetic of the male body—especially of the dying male body—was fundamentally altered by the experience of the trenches.22 We can read ‘earth like a tipsy’ in the context of this challenge to the aesthetics of male bodies and to the construction of gender; it affects not only the crucifix and the discobolus, but also the central figure of the poem—the cleaning lady. This drunk biddy is a female figure and an embodiment of earth. As a cleaning lady, however, she is not a female figure particularly associated with fertility. This distinguishes the image from some of Cummings’ other war poetry, where a female earth, however damaged and abused, nonetheless asserts her capacity to regenerate and recover.

21 There is no knowing whether Cummings would have associated the discobolus principally with bronze, as per the lost original, or—perhaps more likely—with marble, as per surviving copies. See Prettejohn 2012: 151–63 for a discussion of marble versus bronze in modernist interaction with classical art. 22 Das 2002: 63: ‘The aestheticization of the male body and the eroticization of male experience one notes in Read and Nichols—poets who, unlike Sassoon or Ackerley, were not overtly concerned with homosexuality—might result from the effort to find a suitable poetic language with which to articulate the specificity of war experiences.’ See also: Das 2005; Bourke 1996. Imagery of the crucifixion in the Great War, see Fussell 2013 [1975]: 126–9.

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The poem seems somehow out of kilter. Like The Enormous Room, its aesthetics are surrealist and absurdist. The Enormous Room is a world-turned-upside-down narrative, and ‘earth like a tipsy’ is an inebriated upside-down earth. It is a poem of a very gentle brutality. That gentle brutality is itself a kind of gender confusion, which undermines the gender polarities of an anonymous cleaning lady who opens the poem and the closing image of the iconic athletic nude of Myron.

3. ‘ÇA PUE’ Cummings and Brown had the following interchange with a fellow prisoner, a Mexican national, as reported in The Enormous Room: ‘When we asked him once what he thought about the war, he replied “I t’ink lotta bullshit!” which,upon copious reflection,I decided absolutely expressed my own point of view.’23 In his poetry, Cummings’ disillusionment with the war takes familiar targets. In ‘lis / -ten’ (CP 271), he writes about those back home who neither know nor want to know what it means to be gassed. ‘lis / -ten’ appears in Cummings’ 1926 collection is 5, followed by ‘come,gaze with me upon this dome’—the poem we met above, with its memorable image of the boys of Yale heading out to war accompanied by ‘trumpets clap and syphilis’. The refusal of those at home to recognize the horrors of gassing; the disconnect between educational ideals (‘for God for country and for Yale’) and war’s realities—these could be compared to the famous complaints of Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. But there is also a major difference. Unlike Owen, Cummings does not associate the Classics with these complaints. Owen was affected by specific British cultural and educational forces which did not shape Cummings’ upbringing or his classical education. The changes in Cummings’ relationship to the Classics have more to do with a growing sense of regret and nostalgia, though that is also tinged at times with ambivalence. Cummings’ presentation of the classical world becomes more liminal and blurred. These blurrings of boundaries connect Cummings’ 23

Cummings 1978 [1922]: 132.

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poetry to a prominent aspect of Great War literature—its confrontation with social and linguistic breakdown and a loss of confidence in the ability of language to articulate the war experience.24 The following poem is from 1918, published (like ‘HELEN’) in Etcetera: The Unpublished Poems (1983; CP 945). It is one of several poems about prostitution which we find in Cummings’ war corpus. He was influenced not only by his month with Marie Louise in the wartime world of Paris prostitution but also by his respect for the dignity and courage shown by the prostitutes incarcerated at the military detention camp at La Ferté-Macé.25 For many writers—not only Cummings, but also men like Robert Graves or John Dos Passos—one of the first experiences of the war zone was the encounter with prostitution.26 Few writers, however, face the subject as frankly as does Cummings, in poems including this sonnet. Like most of Cummings’ sonnets, this poem stretches the form.27 The ellipsis in line 12 is Cummings’ own punctuation, and itself enacts some of the limits and lacunae of language. through the tasteless minute efficient room march hexameters of unpleasant twilight,a twilight smelling of Vergil, as me bang(to and from)

24 This has been studied from many angles, including Martin 2007 on metre; Das 2002 on touch and intimacy: ‘ “Frightful intimacy” is perhaps as far as language can go, and the dying kiss was perhaps its true sign, the mouth filling the gap left by language’ (69). Stallworthy 2008: 24 remarks on blurring in David Jones’ In Parenthesis. See Sherry 2003 on literature and the civilian experience; assessing Sherry, see Harding 2004. It is not known at what point Cummings first encountered Owen’s poetry. The earliest reference which I have found is the joke ‘Owening’ in a letter from 1935. (Cummings 1972: no. 99, pp. 129–32, letter to Pound.) This could suggest that Cummings became conscious of Owen’s poetry in connection with the 1931 edition of Owen, edited by Edmund Blunden. 25 Cummings 1978 [1922]: 123–5. 26 Neither Graves nor Dos Passos slept with prostitutes, but both write about them: Dos Passos 1966: 71, 74; Graves in his autobiography, 2000 [1929]: 67, 79, 103–4, 150–1, 153, 195, 247. See also Hirschfeld 2006 [1941]: 92–109, 141–70 on wartime prostitution. 27 Cummings mentions his own preoccupation with the sonnet in his i: six nonlectures (New York: 1967 [1953]): 30. It is perfectly clear that Cummings would consider this poem to be a sonnet. It is less stretched than many of the poems appearing under the section-titles ‘SONNETS – REALITIES’, ‘SONNETS – UNREALITIES’, and ‘SONNETS – ACTUALITIES’ from Tulips & Chimneys and from & [AND] (1925). See also Huang-Tiller 2001; Lewis 2003 on Cummings’ use of the sonnet form.

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics the huggering rags of white Latin flesh which her body sometimes isn’t (all night,always,a warm incessant gush of furious Paris flutters up the hill, cries somethings laughters loves nothings float upward,beautifully,forces crazily rhyme Montmartre s’amuse!obscure eyes hotly dote . . . . as awkwardly toward me for the millionth time sidles the ruddy rubbish of her kiss i taste upon her mouth cabs and taxis.

Montmartre was the red light district of Paris. The poem places the speaker in the bedroom of a prostitute, where they have sex: ‘as me bang(to and from) / the huggering rags of white Latin flesh / which her body sometimes isn’t’. To hugger (OED: ‘to conceal, keep secret; to wrap up’) comes across today as a somewhat outré flourish of vocabulary. It may not have seemed quite so archaic to Cummings, whose circle was steeped in the literature of the late nineteenth century when the word enjoyed a minor vogue.28 In reference to ‘Montmartre s’amuse!’, compare Cummings’ interchange with his French interrogators in The Enormous Room: ‘Leaning forward Monsieur asked coldly and carefully: “What did you do in Paris?” to which I responded briefly and warmly “We had a good time.”’29 In ‘through the tasteless minute efficient room’, Cummings gives language itself an agency which is charged with a classicized militarism. Hexameters march (line 2) and forces rhyme (line 10). The military behaviour of language and the poetic capacities of the military reach an epitome in the last word of the poem. Cummings frequently puns on Latin or Greek words in his poetry, and here the tightening of the rhyme scheme as the poem proceeds (float / dote; rhyme / time) encourages the reader to read a pun in ‘taxis’. Taxis as a method of transportation, if the word merely elaborates on ‘cabs’, is

28 The OED provides sixteen citations for hugger or hugger-mugger between 1860 and 1900, including ‘hugger-mugger’ in Tennyson’s ‘The Village Wife’. The OED is not necessarily systematic, but this forty-year window furnishes a high proportion of the OED citations and this does suggest a floruit for the word. Scofield Thayer (friend of Cummings at Harvard, later co-owner and editor of The Dial) uses the word ‘hugger-mugger’ in a letter home from Oxford, where he studied from 1913 to 1915, so the word was clearly current in Cummings’ set. Letter quoted in Dempsey 2014: 20. 29 Cummings 1978 [1922]: 12.

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doing little for the poem. But taxis (rhyming with ‘kiss’) puns on the Greek and evokes both battle lines and syntax.30 The ‘rags of white Latin flesh’ which the body of the prostitute ‘sometimes isn’t’ explores the gap between the reality of the woman’s body and the ideas in play in the poem. Latin flesh in the sense of Mediterranean skin might more naturally seem olive: the disjunctive whiteness changes the reading; the whiteness evokes classical marble statuary. The disjunction between rags and evoked marble heightens the disjunction between the body of the prostitute and the idealized beauty of classical marble. White marble is an idea which is distant— which the woman’s body ‘isn’t’. Or, more precisely, the sense of distance blurs in and out, since it is only ‘sometimes’ that the woman’s body ‘isn’t’. (Contrast the discobolus of Myron, which lies present but destroyed on the ash-heap.) ‘Latin’ also retains the meaning ‘the Latin language’. Just as the twilight is composed of Virgil’s marching hexameters, the woman’s body is composed of a flesh which is Latin, and taxis can be tasted on her mouth. The poem brings together sex, language, and war so that the boundaries among the three are dissolved and they seem to be animated by the same essential ordering force. As a reader, it is hard to know whether ‘furious Paris’ is the city alone, or whether it hints at the Homeric hero. It is also hard to know whether a kiss that ‘sidles’ forward ‘for the millionth time’ could hint at the thousands and hundreds of kisses demanded by Catullus of Lesbia (Catull. 5). (In Cummings’ corpus, Catullus is one of the more frequently referenced classical poets.) This uncertainty of reading is itself intrinsic to the poem, where the relationship between the classical and the contemporary worlds is unstable and uncertain. There is a more obvious uncertainty in the poem: what does Virgil smell like? All we know of this twilight is that it is ‘unpleasant’. There is one extensive and memorable description of the smell of twilight in Cummings’ war writing. There, he describes the twilight on the first night of his imprisonment, as he lies in his cell observing the silhouette of a small creature which has joined him on the windowsill: ‘Then I lay down,and heard(but could not see)the silhouette eat something Taxis, ‘an arranging’, has in Greek a wide semantic field, covering specifically battle-formation as well as generally form and order (see Liddell and Scott, Greek– English Lexicon). It is the etymological root of the English ‘syntax’ (prefix ‘συν’ (syn) + ‘τάξις’ (taxis); see OED). 30

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or somebody . . . and saw,but could not hear,the incense of Ça Pue mount gingerly upon the taking air of twilight.’31 ‘Ça Pue’ (‘It Stinks’) is the name Cummings gave to the latrine pail which inhabited one corner of his cell. Both this passage from The Enormous Room and ‘from the tasteless minute efficient room’ summon the experience of a tight, enclosing space, and one might easily put a reader in mind of the other. In the unpleasant twilight of the poem, if Virgil smells of anything identifiable, perhaps he smells of shit. Or perhaps he merely smells of regret and nostalgia at the twilight of the classical world.32 In any case, the disjunctive march of Virgil’s hexameters through a broken sonnet—a classical metre marching through the broken English form—and of his unpleasant twilight which marches across the surrounding warmth and life of Paris, creates a synaesthetic masterpiece of uncertain and unidentifiable emotion. In ‘earth like a tipsy’, Cummings emphasizes jumbling, breaking, and cleaning. The primary aesthetic of ‘through the tasteless minute efficient room’ is the aesthetic of blurring. The feeling of enclosure and control suggested by the ‘minute’ and ‘efficient’ room contrasts with the liberation felt in the ‘gush’ of Paris and in the freely tumbling nature of the language in ‘cries somethings laughters loves nothings’. The feeling of escape intensifies as they ‘float upward’, which they do ‘beautifully’, and the aliveness of Montmartre is captured in the eyes which ‘hotly dote’. These contradictions of enclosure and freedom, of the ease of Paris and the awkwardness of the prostitute’s kiss, frame this exploration of language, war, sex, smell, and emotion, and of the Classics and the life of Paris. The poem has an elusive quality which enacts the complexities injected by experience of war into Cummings’ relationship with the classical world. 31 Cummings 1978 [1922]: 21. I first assumed that this unspecified creature was a bird, on the grounds that it is omnivorous (eating ‘something or somebody’ and able to reach a windowsill). However, in terms of the biographical facts lying behind the text, it appears to be a rat, as described in a letter from Cummings to Scofield Thayer: Cummings 2007b: 103; on the letter generally, see Gill 2007. 32 For the possibility of Virgil as representing an imperialism which failed on the outbreak of the Great War, cf. Comber 1998: 54 n.113 on Pound, Virgil, and the Great War. Comber cites the line ‘Virgil is Phoebus’ chief of police’ from the Homage to Sextus Propertius (XII) and connects it to Pound’s complaints about the ‘infinite and ineffable imbecility of the British Empire’ (cited by Comber from Pound’s Selected Letters). From a different and much later perspective, on Virgil and twilight, cf. Eliot: ‘If we are not chilled we at least feel ourselves, with Virgil, to be moving in a kind of emotional twilight.’ (Eliot 1957: 131, from ‘Virgil and the Christian World’ (1951)).

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4. LOOKING BACK E.E. Cummings is seldom, if ever, thought of as a war poet, and the canon of war poets seldom includes Cummings. Cummings himself contributed to this neglect of his war poems. It is true that the Great War appears prominently in his published poetry, especially in his first collection, Tulips & Chimneys and in his fourth collection, is 5 (1926). But Cummings also left some of his best war poetry unpublished. A great debt is owed to the good judgement of Firmage and Kennedy, the editors of Etcetera (1983), who included twelve poems directly concerning the war and its aftermath in the volume of poetry selected posthumously from Cummings’ papers. It is hard not to suspect that Cummings actively suppressed some of the war poetry. ‘through the tasteless minute efficient room’ is a unique exploration of the relationship between poetry, sex, prostitution, and war; it is genuinely haunting. Comparable points might be made concerning the literary value of several other brilliant and disturbing war poems from Etcetera. These poems deserved publication, and this posthumous volume is critical to any proper appreciation of Cummings’ relationship to the war. Selective publication, however, is only part of the story. Cummings’ literary self-presentation has been equally significant in obscuring the idea of Cummings as a war poet. Cummings’ own later narrative of himself as a poet buried the earlier importance of the war. There is a striking example from i: six nonlectures. In the second nonlecture, Cummings speaks about the emotional awakening occasioned by his childhood encounters with Nature and with a ‘semiwilderness’ near his childhood home in Cambridge, Mass.33 Then he offers the reader this glimpse of nature reawakened by the irrepressible burst of spring: O sweet spontaneous earth how often have the doting fingers of prurient philosophers pinched and poked

33

Cummings 1967: 32.

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics thee ,has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy beauty .how often have religions taken thee upon their scraggy knees squeezing and buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive gods (but true to the incomparable couch of death thy rhythmic lover thou answerest them only with spring)

Thematically—earth, death, spring—this poem is characteristic of Cummings’ work. Cummings’ romantic memories of childhood invite us to read the poem as a straightforward celebration of nature over human thought and science. The human world does not seem so bad—after all, the fingers of philosophers are at least ‘doting’, science is only a bit ‘naughty’, and religions show a paternalistic care for the world which they take ‘upon their scraggy knees’. We might cheer for nature and enjoy her victory, but the human world over which she triumphs is essentially harmless. The ‘couch of death thy / rhythmic / lover’ might simply be winter, over which spring triumphs with every rhythmic turn of the year.34 The reader of the nonlectures would never guess that the poem, which says nothing explicit about the war, had appeared in the 1922 Tulips & Chimneys as the fifth in the five-poem section ‘La Guerre’.35 34 And it is read this way by a number of scholars: Marks 1964: 69–71; Everson 1979: 249; Cohen 1987: 154–5; Gill 1996: 108. 35 CP 58. Its very first appearance was in the magazine The Dial in May 1920: see Cohen 1992: 23. It appeared in the mangled Tulips and Chimneys as the second of two poems in ‘La Guerre’. (The first was ‘the bigness of cannon’ and the other three did not make the editor’s cut.) In the Houghton Library archives, there are various early

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It is a very different poem in its early context, where it echoes and expands upon the other four poems of ‘La Guerre’. The first of these, the ironic ‘Humanity i love you’, is a bitter indictment of human failing, with an especial venom reserved for unthinking sentimental patriotism: ‘because you / unflinchingly applaud all / songs containing the words country home and / mother’ (CP 53). The second is ‘earth like a tipsy’, discussed above, in which a female earth cleanses itself of human civilization (CP 54). The third poem, ‘the bigness of cannon’, includes a scene of shell-shocked earth, where ‘i have seen / death’s clever enormous voice / which hides in a fragility / of poppies . . . .’ (CP 55). And the fourth, ‘little ladies more’ (CP 56–7), is arguably Cummings’ single most brilliant presentation of the prostitutes of Paris courting the custom of soldiers. When ‘O sweet spontaneous’ is situated as the final poem of ‘La Guerre’, the reader is led to imagine an entirely different scene—not a wood in Cambridge, Mass. but a battlefield. We are looking at a field in France which has been shelled into oblivion, where generative earth is presented in terms of sexual violation: ‘pinched / and / poked’ by philosophers; ‘prodded’ by science; forced to ‘conceive gods’ by the ‘squeezing and // buffeting’ of religions. Instead of the rhythmic turn of the seasons, spring after winter, we might imagine the rhythm of cannon pounding the battlefield. Standing as the concluding poem of a section which indicts humanity, contemplates the damage done to the natural world, and depicts the frank realities of sex during warfare, we now have ‘death thy / rhythmic / lover’ who has in all senses fucked the earth. As a Great War battlefield poem structured through an imagery of sexual violence, this is as quietly disturbing and as impossible to shake off as the very best of the Great War poetry. Cummings has travelled a considerable poetic distance from his celebration of the militarized and classicized triumph of spring in ‘EPITHALAMION’ to the rape which is implicit in the figuring of spring in ‘O sweet spontaneous’. Yet the classical world remains present. In ‘O sweet spontaneous’, it lingers in the idea of an act of sexual violence which conceives gods. and incomplete drafts in various contexts. The poem was at least partly drafted by 1916: it appears in Cummings’ 1916 index of his own poetry, which is among his papers at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC 8.11). It seems that for Cummings, this poem perhaps initially hovered between a ‘spring’ poem and a ‘war’ poem. But when it came to his first collection, Cummings chose very decidedly to fix it in a war context. That setting changes the text, and this is what he later erased.

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Cummings apparently told his first biographer, Charles Norman, that ‘World War I was the experience of my generation’.36 Only if we understand Cummings as (among other things) a war poet can we fully appreciate the entirety of his life and work—both including and far beyond his relationship to classical literature. We cannot know Cummings’ own motives in obscuring the importance of the Great War for his poetic corpus. But we are not obligated to accept his own narrative; we can allow his poetry to speak for itself.

36

Norman 1972 [1958]: 68.

7 ‘let not thy lust one threaded moment lose’ Death in the Meadow

Against the backdrop of the Great War, Cummings forged a poetry of death and decadence, of erotic love and fantasies of annihilation. Some of the poems which will be discussed in this chapter were demonstrably on Cummings’ mind when he was in France, since several of them feature in draft in a notebook from France, 1917. However, Cummings’ fantasies of exquisite, eroticized annihilation have earlier roots in his classical engagements at Harvard and also in his Harvard exposure to the poetry of the Decadents. Although Cummings’ interest in the Decadents, including Swinburne, is widely known to Cummings scholars, Cummings’ Decadence has been little studied or discussed—probably as a result of Kennedy’s resoundingly negative attitude: ‘Part way through Cummings’ college career, something happened to his verse that moved it beyond Keatsian richness to a decadent over-ripeness . . . he developed a wish to become a poet-painter like Rossetti. As a budding poet, it was the worst thing that could have happened to him.’1 In this chapter, I argue for a more appreciative stance towards Cummings’ classicized and Decadent (especially Swinburnian) fantasies of annihilation.

1 Kennedy 1976: 290; cf. 290–1, 295–6 and Kennedy 1994a: 67–71. Kennedy’s judgement is no doubt affected by the male modernist construction of an antiRomantic, anti-Decadent self, aptly discussed by Laity 1996: 1–28, where she argues that Eliot, Pound, and Yeats narrativized themselves as male poets who had overcome a dangerous adolescent phase in which they were temporarily seduced by feminized Decadence.

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Cummings’ early explorations of erotic love engage with a Decadent fantasy of exquisite annihilation. This Decadent annihilation fantasy is, especially in Swinburne, already classically engaged: it is imagined as a recovery of the pagan eroticism of Venus or Sappho. Cummings’ exquisite annihilations incorporate two further classical dimensions: a Horatian carpe diem motif and a classically influenced pastoral setting. Cummings’ classicized pastoral mode encompasses an amalgamated imagery. Cummings is not exploring, pointedly conforming to, or challenging genre, and so I have not worried about generic boundaries between ‘the pastoral’ and ‘the rural’; Virgil’s rural Georgics are, for Cummings’ ‘Songs’, a key locus of the pastoral. The Harvard-era short story, ‘The Young Faun’, represents one of Cummings’ earliest explorations of the fantasy of exquisite annihilation. (For the full story, see the ‘Prose’ section of the Cummings edition at the back.) ‘The Young Faun’ articulates the fantasy through a classical idiom and embeds it in a pastoral setting. The story intimates that the purest and most innocent sexual awakening finds its perfect expression through annihilation in death. The sensitive faun rejects the crude, carnal perspective of the satyrs: But the jolly satyrs loudly laughed, saying: “O Faun, foolish little faun, wherefore, after beholding her, and the eyes of her, didst thou not cease from thy playing, and take unto thee this marvelous thing?”--And they went away to their coverts, chuckling; for this is the nature of satyrs. But the young faun was angry, and said: “They be goats.”

The faun’s sensitivity is rewarded with a chance to see his love—first in the flesh, with ‘her arms which were whiter than starlight’, and then, more exquisitely still, in the spirit. —Answered the King of Stars: “Tomorrow shall the young faun behold her in the spirit.”--And the sun rose. That day, a great loneliness walked with the young faun; and guided him, once and for the last time, to the blue pool of perfect lilies. And the young faun sank down beneath the tallest tree. Fairer was his body than a fluttering song; and his face was a hurt marvel.

The King of Stars thus grants to the faun a privileged and perfect knowing of his beloved, in flesh and spirit. At the same time, the equation of the spirit of the beloved with ‘a great loneliness’ combines

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the faun’s knowledge of her with an impossibility of attainment. It is her essence to be lonely, and so it is essential to her being that she cannot be attained. The effect on the faun—‘his face was a hurt marvel’—looks towards Cummings’ developing poetic diction. It shows the influence of the Decadent language of bruising love, and it implies that true sensitivity in love is an exquisite pain.2 The attainment of love, therefore, is not attainment of the loved one but of death. ‘And the young faun moved not. [ . . . ] “Lord, I hid and I watched. The young faun is dead.”’ This annihilation fantasy is partly an expression of adolescent sexuality, but it is also a literary development out of the Decadents, drawing on the classical world. The story of Pan and Syrinx—which Cummings borrowed for his own ‘Syrinx’ (above, Chapter 4.1)— belongs to a class of myths which recount the transformation of woman or nymph at the moment of impending sexual seizure. In the classical paradigm, the woman/nymph is transformed in order to protect her virginity, whereas in ‘The Young Faun’ and elsewhere in Cummings, it is the man who is annihilated at the precise moment of perfected desire. Swinburne influences this shift from the transformation of the virgin nymph to the annihilation of the male lover. Being fain to see her, he bade set sail, Touched land, and saw her as life grew cold, And praised God, seeing; and so died he.3

Behind Swinburne, the classical roots of this construction of sexuality survive the change in gender role and the shift in the sexual aesthetics of the transformation/annihilation. Such roots make classical idioms Bruising love: e.g. Swinburne’s ‘Laus Veneris’, which opens with a description of a lovebite: ‘Asleep or waking is it? for her neck, / Kissed over close, wears yet a purple speck / Wherein the pained blood falters and goes out; / Soft, and stung softly—fairer for a fleck.’; or ‘Anactoria’: ‘lips bruise lips’ (l. 12); or ‘Dolores’: ‘The white wealth of thy body made whiter / By the blushes of amorous blows, / And seamed with sharp lips and fierce fingers, / And branded by kisses that bruise;’ (ll. 267–70). In ‘The Young Faun’, note the wording of the question asked by the King of Stars: ‘ “Who is he that bruiseth the blue flower with his dreams?” ’ 3 Swinburne, ‘The Triumph of Time’ (ll. 326–8). It is this poem which gave Joyce the sea as the ‘great sweet mother’ (l. 257)—‘Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it : a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.’ (Joyce 1993 [1922]: 5.) (Cummings, incidentally, alludes to the passage from Joyce in a letter to Pound, 3 October 1935: 1972: no. 109, pp. 144–5.) The shore-scape of ‘The Triumph of Time’— where ‘The strong sea-daisies feast on the sun’ (l. 56) with ‘Sea-fruit that swings in the waves that hiss’ (l. 313)—also influences H.D.’s imagery in Sea Garden; see Laity 1996: 49. 2

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and classical settings peculiarly appropriate to this annihilation fantasy. In this chapter, I focus on the nine-poem section ‘Songs’, from Cummings’ Tulips & Chimneys. ‘Songs’ is the first subsection of Tulips & Chimneys, preceded only by two ungrouped poems: ‘EPITHALAMION’ and ‘OF NICOLETTE’. As the opening poem of Cummings’ very first collection, the heavily and obviously classicized ‘EPITHALAMION’ is Cummings’ own clear indication of the classical starting point of his poetry. The second poem, ‘OF NICOLETTE’, rewrites (in brief) the medieval French ‘Aucassin et Nicolette’. Its presence advertises the influence on Cummings of the medieval tradition and of Pound’s interest in the French troubadours. The title of the section ‘Songs’ marries these two influences of classical carmina and French chansons. The poems included in ‘Songs’ (as we will see) continue this marriage between classical influences and medievalism—the latter reimagined through the medievalism of the Romantics, especially Keats and Tennyson. The thoroughly classicized ‘EPITHALAMION’ was written in 1916 for the marriage of Scofield Thayer and Elaine Orr. Cummings takes up a classical genre (the epithalamium or epithalamion, which is the celebration of a wedding) and produces a poem replete with classical references. More than that, his poem shows how deeply he had absorbed the classical heritage. A glance at Cummings’ epithalamion in the light of Denis Feeney’s recent analysis of Catullus and of generic characteristics of the epithalamion shows how many aspects of the classical genre are invoked in Cummings’ poem. An implicit analogy between marriage and the coming of spring structures Cummings’ poem, and it ends with an extended invocation of Venus. Except for the fact that Cummings’ analogies are implicit metaphors, and not explicit similes, Feeney’s summary of the role of comparison in epithalamia could have been written about Cummings as much as about Catullus: ‘similes locate the human institution of marriage between the poles of myth and nature, and they afford a vehicle for considering the way marriage links together the disparate terms of male and female’.4 This tricky negotiation includes, in Cummings, the same disruptive presence of seemingly inappropriate mythical references which Feeney finds in the classical texts.5 Cummings’ references

4

Feeney 2013: 70.

5

Feeney 2013: 78–85.

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to the apple of Discord and the judgement of Paris recall Catullus’ epithalamion; his allusion to the adulterous affair of Ares and Aphrodite echoes Sappho.6 Catullus’ ‘goal of constructing a kind of meta-hymeneal’ (Feeney) is also replicated in the meta-comment of Cummings’ poem, which actually ends with reference to the poet-bard and ‘his wandering word’.7 Thus Cummings’ engagement with the Classics in his ‘EPITHALAMION’ goes far beyond the peppering of the poem with learned allusions; the poem is classical in structure, genre, and—as it were— literary world-view. It is important to bear in mind the extent to which Cummings was steeped in the classical tradition when considering the far more submerged classical material in ‘Songs’. The nine ‘Songs’ are poems of death. They create a pastoral space within which Cummings pursues a fantasy of exquisite annihilation. The unfolding of theme and imagery as the ‘Songs’ section develops reveals a carefully ordered set of poems in close dialogue with each other. ‘Songs I’ serves as a threshold poem and defines the reader’s entry into the space of ‘Songs’; its complex layering of Virgil and Horace is the focus, below, of Section 2. This chapter’s Section 3 then traces the development of Cummings’ themes and images across the ‘Songs’ section. My focus on ‘Songs I’ as a threshold poem, and on the order and development of poems in the ‘Songs’ section, parallels the readings which others—especially Eileen Gregory—have offered for H.D.’s Sea Garden. Gregory argues that the first three poems of Sea Garden serve as a threshold, to initiate the reader into the sea garden’s space and time. She has argued, too, for the significance of the ordering of the poems and the importance of the overall structure of the volume.8 Indeed, more broadly, H.D.’s Sea Garden proves to be a valuable point of comparison for Cummings’ ‘Songs’. That comparison is explored in detail, below, in Section 3.

6 Feeney 2013: 80 on Catullus and the judgement of Paris; 81 on the references to Ares by Sappho. 7 Catullus’ meta-hymeneal: Feeney 2013: 83. 8 Gregory 1986. On the selection and ordering of the poems in Sea Garden and the need to read the collection as a whole, see arguments adduced at 536–8 with references there to theoretical positions; Gregory pursues her reading at 536–50. On the three initiating poems, see 538–42. See also Laity 1996: 44.

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Cummings certainly knew some of H.D.’s work, though how much is not clear. He would have known three of the poems later included in Sea Garden in the context of their earlier appearance in Des Imagistes, and he would have read H.D. in 1920 in The Dial. Whether he knew Sea Garden itself or not, reading ‘Songs’ against Sea Garden helps to illuminate Cummings’ relationship with a classical landscape and to express what that relationship means for his poetry. Both Cummings and H.D. were shaped by the early modernist environment, but also by a formative relationship with Swinburne. Both poets adapted within their own poetry a Swinburnian fantasy of exquisite annihilation.9 For both poets, exquisite annihilation is classicized. But there are also essential differences in the quality of the annihilation. In Sea Garden, H.D. looks for a violent and fractured dissolution against a pastoral landscape defined by the crashing sea. In ‘Songs’, Cummings looks for a peaceful and suffused dissolution within a pastoral landscape defined by the meadow. The many points of comparison between Cummings and H.D. can sharpen our sense of the underlying contrast between fractured, seascaped dissolution and suffused, meadowed dissolution. Reading Cummings against H.D., we can appraise more exactly the nature of Cummings’ Horatian, seasonal meadow by juxtaposing it to H.D.’s Sapphic, time-suspended shore.10

9

For H.D., Swinburne, and exquisite annihilation, I rely greatly on Laity 2004. On H.D. and the Classics, see Gregory 1986 and 1997; Bruzzi 1988; Friedman 1990; Collecott 1999 and 2003; McRae 2010; Tarlo 2012; Kozak and Hickman 2014. This last concerns Sea Garden’s relationship to the classical seen in the context of its interaction with the Great War; on Sea Garden and the Great War, see also Friedman 1990: 60–2; Laity 2004: 430–2. The connection with the Great War is another link and point of comparability between H.D.’s Sea Garden and Cummings’ ‘Songs’. On the pastoral aspect of Sea Garden, see Friedman 1990: 51–2; see Tarlo 2012 generally on H.D. and the classical pastoral. On H.D.’s erotics, see also (in addition to the work on H.D. and the Classics) Laity 1989, 1996, and 2004. Adjacently, on gender, sexuality, paganism, and self-annihilation in T.S. Eliot, see Kaye 1999 and Laity 2004. For Cummings and landscape/nature from the perspective of eco-criticism, see Webster 2000; Terblanche 2004; and Moe 2007. Webster in particular touches upon issues relating to the landscape and the dissolution of the self, though he looks at later, and non-classical, poems. For another perspective on issues arising in this chapter and the next, including the Lethe, the classical underworld, Plato’s cave, gender, and classical reception, see Homans 1988. 10

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2. PASTORAL DEATH ‘Songs’ opens at the threshold of the classical underworld, with a carpe diem poem of seduction framed against a shimmering, shadowy, chthonic setting. SONGS I (thee will i praise between those rivers whose white voices pass upon forgetting(fail me not)whose courseless waters are a gloat of silver;o’er whose night three willows wail a slender dimness in the unshapeful hour making dear moan in tones of stroked flower; let not thy lust one threaded moment lose: haste)the very shadowy sheep float free upon terrific pastures pale, whose tall mysterious shepherd lifts a cheek teartroubled to the momentary wind with guiding smile,lips wisely minced for blown kisses,condemnatory fingers thinned of pity—so he stands counting the moved myriads wonderfully loved, (hasten,it is the moment which shall seek all blossoms that do learn,scents of not known musics in whose careful eyes are dinned; and the people of perfect darkness fills his mind who will with their hungering whispers hear with weepings soundless,saying of “alas we were chaste on earth we ghosts:hark to the sheer cadence of our grey flesh in the gloom! and still to be immortal is our doom; but a rain frailly raging whom the hills sink into and their sunsets,it shall pass. Our feet tread sleepless meadows sweet with fear”) then be with me:unseriously seem by the perusing greenness of thy thought my golden soul fabulously to glue in a superior terror;be thy taut flesh silver,like the currency of faint cities eternal—ere the sinless taint of thy long sinful arms about me dream

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics shall my love wholly taste thee as a new wine from steep hills by darkness softly brought— (be with me in the sacred witchery of almostness which May makes follow soon on the sweet heels of passed afterday, clothe thy soul’s coming merely,with a croon of mingling robes musically revealed in rareness:let thy twain eyes deeply wield a noise of petals falling silently through the far-spaced possible nearaway from huge trees drenched by a rounding moon)

Although Firmage and Kennedy date the composition of all the poems in the ‘Songs’ section to Cummings’ time at Harvard, this is perhaps not the whole story. ‘Songs I’ is not listed in Cummings’ 1916 index of poems-to-date, and a draft of the poem appears in one of Cummings’ notebooks from his time in France in 1917.11 This shows, at a minimum, that the poem was on his mind while he was in France. In the French notebook, the stanzas are written out twice; Cummings was trying to find the right order for them. The text in this notebook is nearly final, with only minor variations between what is handwritten there and the published version. However, stanza two is missing. Cummings must have come to realize in the process of ordering the stanzas that there was a dimension lacking from the poem and, presumably, composed stanza two in response. Without the second stanza, ‘Songs I’ is clearly an inferior poem. It may be interesting that stanza two appears to have been added last, during or after Cummings’ experience of the Great War. These lines deepen the emotional impact of the dead in the underworld. They add a greater element of compassion for the dead, evoked in the reader by the shepherd’s very lack of compassion: ‘condemnatory fingers thinned / of pity’. And they adopt a more sorrowful tone, with more of a sense of loss: ‘so he stands counting the moved / myriads wonderfully loved’.

11 Kennedy and Firmage in Cummings 1976: xi. Kennedy may have assumed a date pre-1916 because of the poem’s more archaized diction. There was a major stylistic shift in Cummings’ writing in 1916: see Kennedy 1979. Index of 1916 poems: HRC 8.11. Notebook: Houghton MS Am 1823.7 (17); on the same page as the draft of ‘Songs I’ are several other poems, including a draft of what became ‘Songs VII’.

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‘Songs I’ opens with ‘those rivers whose / white voices pass upon forgetting’—a generalization about the rivers of the underworld from the memory-erasing Lethe. The ‘three willows’ which ‘wail’ over the night are an image taken from Circe’s directions to the underworld in the Odyssey (10. 510), while the injunction not to lose ‘one threaded moment’ summons the widespread classical imagery of life as a thread spun by the Fates. But some of the imagery is more surprising. Meadows implies Elysium, but the blessed meadows of Elysium (most notably in Virgil’s Aeneid) are not a fearful place. Cummings’ ‘meadows sweet with fear’ in fact point us towards a different Virgilian precedent.12 The classical text which lies most directly behind ‘Songs I’ is Virgil’s retelling, in the Georgics, of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice: Taenarias etiam fauces, alta ostia Ditis, et caligantem nigra formidine lucum ingressus, manisque adiit regemque tremendum nesciaque humanis precibus mansuescere corda. at cantu commotae Erebi de sedibus imis umbrae ibant tenues simulacraque luce carentum, quam multa in foliis avium se milia condunt, Vesper ubi aut hibernus agit de montibus imber, matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptaeque puellae. impositique rogis iuvenes ante ora parentum; quos circum limus niger et deformis harundo Cocyti tardaque palus inamabilis unda alligat et noviens Styx interfusa coercet. Even the jaws of Taenarus, the lofty portals of Dis, he entered, and the grove that is murky with black terror, and came to the dead, and the king of terrors, and the hearts that know not how to soften at human prayers. Startled by the strain, there came from the lowest realms of Erebus the bodiless shadows and the phantoms of those bereft of light, in multitude like the thousands of birds that hide amid the leaves when the evening star or a wintry shower drives them from the hills—mothers and men, and bodies of high-souled heroes, their life now done, boys and unwedded girls, and sons placed on the pyre before their fathers’ eyes. But round them are the black ooze and unsightly reeds of Cocytus,

12 Dante might also influence the imagery in a general way, but there is no one passage or place from Dante that ‘Songs I’ clearly draws on.

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the unlovely mere enchaining them with its sluggish water, and Styx holding them fast within his ninefold circles. (Georgics IV. 467–80; trans. H.R. Fairclough)

Virgil’s ‘grove that is murky with black terror’ (caligantem nigra formidine lucum) has developed into Cummings’ ‘meadows sweet with fear’. The fearfulness of Cummings’ setting is also felt in the ‘terrific pastures pale’, where ‘terrific’ has a hint of its older relationship to ‘terror’. Although Virgil’s grove has morphed into Cummings’ meadow, the relationship between the imagery of the Georgics and the imagery of ‘Songs I’ is close. In particular, Cummings picks up Virgil’s emphasis on the pitilessness of Dis: ‘the king of terrors, and the hearts that know not how to soften’; ‘condemnatory fingers thinned / of pity’. In both texts, the image of pitiless Dis is followed immediately by music: ‘Startled by the strain’; ‘scents of not known / musics’. The figuring of Dis as a shepherd in ‘Songs I’ also evokes more generally the rural context of the Georgics. Virgil likens the souls of the dead to birds driven from the hills by a wintry shower or by Vesper, the twilight star. Cummings picks up this image of souls and rain in hills at twilight. In his poem, rather than being driven by the rain, the souls have become the rain itself: ‘but a rain frailly raging whom the hills / sink into and their sunsets’. The inversion of subject and object and the personification of the rain (grammatically, ‘whom’; semantically, identified as the souls) means that it takes a moment to piece together, unpick, and then savour the image—a literary strategy which is itself reminiscent of Latin poetry. When the image is unpicked, its closeness to Virgil is apparent. Cummings’ sunsets pick up Virgil’s Vesper, while Cummings’ main image concentrates on the souls as rain absorbing the hills, varying Virgil’s idea of souls as birds driven from the hills by the wintry shower. Virgil summons the oppressive power of the encircling Styx, whose stifling effect is enhanced by the deep and heavy blackness. The black terror of the grove is picked up a few lines later by the black ooze (limus niger) with its misshapen reeds (deformis harundo) and sluggish water (tardaque unda). Cummings’ underworld, like Virgil’s, is defined by the river (in his case, the Lethe rather than the Styx) and by an absence of colour. However, Virgil’s deep blackness becomes Cummings’ shimmering whiteness. The heavy eeriness of Virgil’s black underworld is reversed into a shimmering underworld which is bleached and drained of colour. The threshold of Cummings’

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underworld are the ‘rivers whose / white voices pass upon forgetting’, ‘whose courseless waters are a gloat / of silver’. The ‘shadowy sheep float’ on ‘pale’ pastures and the ghosts speak of the ‘cadence of our grey flesh in the gloom’. The absence of colour—whether lost in Virgil’s blackness or in Cummings’ silvery whiteness—is liminal and eerie. We have already seen with ‘Tumbling-hair’ (see above, Chapter 4.2) a poem whose classical subject—the rape of Persephone—is only identifiable via knowledge of a passage from Milton’s Paradise Lost as a mediating text. ‘Songs I’ could be read as a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, but a reader would only arrive at that reading by identifying the Georgics as a source-text. The opening words, ‘thee will i praise’, are fitting for any anonymous poetic voice, but they can also be understood as Orpheus singing of Eurydice. It could be Orpheus’ music, as in Virgil’s Georgics, which summons the souls, who appear to fill up the scene of the poem in response to music: ‘scents of not known / musics in whose careful eyes are dinned; // and the people of perfect darkness fills / his mind . . .’. It is even possible to read the last two stanzas as the ill-fated journey out of the underworld, as Eurydice is nearly resubstantiated in flesh: ‘be thy taut / flesh silver’, ‘clothe thy soul’s coming merely’, while the overworld hovers just almost within reach and is hinted at with phrases like ‘the far-spaced possible nearaway’. Independently of the Georgics, ‘Songs I’ is a carpe diem poem of seduction: ‘let not thy lust one threaded moment lose’. The ghosts are left with nothing to show for their chaste lives; ‘then be with me’, says the poet. The earthly chasteness of Cummings’ ghosts echoes Virgil’s ‘boys and unwedded girls’ (pueri innuptaeque puellae). Virgil’s heroic men, mothers, or grieving parents, however, are not relevant to Cummings’ theme. Cummings selects his Virgilian echo in order to craft it to an Horatian carpe diem plea. As a carpe diem poem of seduction, there is as much of Horace in ‘Songs I’ as there is of Virgil’s Georgics. The ‘new wine’ in the penultimate stanza of ‘Songs I’ is also a Horatian touch. Indeed, the influence of Horace is more pervasive than might be suspected at first glance, because ‘Songs I’ draws at multiple points on the language of Cummings’ own Horatian translations. There are several borrowings from or echoes of Cummings’ own Horatian translations in ‘Songs I’. The ‘condemnatory fingers thinned / of pity’ recall Cummings’ version of Odes I. 4, which represents Death as ‘the hand that never spareth / The fingers that know not fame.’

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Cummings also reused working material from earlier drafts of his Odes I. 4 translation. His discarded draft of the last stanza of Odes I.4 includes the line, ‘The shadow gloats in the gloom’; compare, from ‘Songs I’, the waters which ‘are a gloat of silver’ and ‘our grey flesh in the gloom’. It is not only the Horatian translations which feed into Cummings’ language. Cummings’ ‘making dear moan’ (l. 6) echoes ‘making low moan’ from his own translation of Electra (l. 79), as well as ‘made sweet moan’ from Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, and ‘The joy whose mouth makes moan’ from Swinburne’s ‘Rococo’. This small phrase illustrates the interwoven role played by the translations and by Keats and Swinburne in the development of Cummings’ poetic diction. Cummings’ self-described ‘Keats period’ (see above, Chapter 6.1) and ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ linger, as we will see, in ‘Songs V’. But I want to concentrate on a reuse in ‘Songs I’ of a phrase from Cummings’ translation of Odes I. 24. In Odes I. 24, Horace asks what avail would be even a music more sweet than that of Orpheus, since not even such a music could recall the dead to life: quid, si Threicio blandius Orpheo auditam moderere arboribus fidem? num vanae redeat sanguis imagini, quam virga semel horrida, non lenis precibus fata recludere, nigro conpulerit Mercurius gregi? [ . . . ] Suppose that you were able to play the lyre Even more skillfully than Orpheus played it, Causing the very trees to listen to him, What good would it do? Could the music restore Blood to the veins of the empty shade of one Who has died? How could the music persuade the god To open the door he has shut, and shut once and for all, The god whose horrid wand shepherds the dead To where they are going down there to be shut away? [...] (trans. David Ferry)

Cummings has translated these lines: What tho’ more sweet thy lyre than his of Thrace, When listening trees joyed in the music’s grace, Would life reclaim the shade from the beyond, Which,with his fearsome wand,

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The Shepherd,harsh the doors of fate to keep, Has gathered once unto his shadowy sheep?

The image of the Shepherd, with the exact phrase ‘shadowy sheep’, is reused in ‘Songs I’: ‘the very shadowy sheep float / free upon terrific pastures pale // whose tall mysterious shepherd [ . . . ].’ The phrase ‘shadowy sheep’ for Horace’s black flock in Odes I. 24 is far from inevitable.13 From the ‘shadowy sheep’ of ‘Songs I’, we would never get back to Horace’s Odes I. 24 without Cummings’ own mediating translation: it is Cummings’ translation of the Horatian ode which turned Horace’s sheep into shadows and rechristened Mercury as ‘The Shepherd’. And yet, by whatever instinctive or academic process, Cummings’ decision to bring the Horatian ‘shadowy sheep’ into his Virgilian ‘Songs I’ makes a connection between Horace and Virgil which Putnam has argued for, in his analysis of Horace’s own poem. Putnam, who cites the use of the Orpheus myth as the ‘clearest link’ between Odes I. 24 and Virgil’s Georgics, also argues that Horace’s phrase conpulerit . . . gregi deepens Horace’s evocation of Virgil through allusion to the Eclogues, where ‘we find that the phrase conpulerit . . . gregi (18), unique in pre-Horatian Latin literature except for its appearances in Virgil, occurs twice at 2.30 (gregem . . . compellere) and 7. 2 (compulerant . . . greges).’14 Thus Cummings’ Virgilian ‘Songs I’ alludes to Horace, and specifically to a Horatian poem which itself alludes to Virgil. By selecting the phrase ‘shadowy sheep’ for ‘Songs I’, Cummings (though he turns to the words nigro . . . gregi rather than conpulerit . . . gregi) has chosen the same textual moment as Horace to encapsulate his own Horatian–Virgilian overlay. It is possible that Cummings was influenced by some philological awareness, anticipating the points which Putnam would make seventy years later.15 However, I think it is more likely that Cummings arrived at the conjunction of Horace and Virgil by instinct, and for

13 I have checked a half-dozen or so other translations, and I have not found the phrase ‘shadowy sheep’ in them. 14 Putnam 2009 [1992]: 194. 15 Neither the Georgics nor the Eclogues was a part of the Harvard curriculum, but since Cummings studied Horace’s Odes, it would not be surprising if his professor had drawn on the Georgics to elucidate I.24 in a classroom lecture. In that age of philological erudition, it is even conceivable that Cummings’ professor would have cited the Eclogues as precedent for conpulerit . . . gregi, as Putnam does.

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much the same reasons as Putnam outlines in his comments on Horace. Putnam suggests that ‘Horace’s allusion thus performs a variation on a pastoral theme of his friend [Virgil], by turning ordinary shepherd and flock into the god who exchanges life for death and is possessed of a herd of souls, not white, like favored sheep in the world above, but black, like the hell in which they are now penned.’16 In other words, Horace creates a relationship here between Virgilian pastoral and his own ode. Cummings also integrates a Virgilian pastoral mood with a Horatian imagery and a Horatian carpe diem plea. In fact, ‘Songs I’ establishes for the reader a combination of the classical pastoral and a Horatian relationship to seasons, death, and time which is then nuanced and explored over the eight ‘Songs’ which follow.

3. NINE SONGS OF DEATH Only two of the songs—‘V’ and ‘IX’—have received any significant level of scholarly attention, and no consideration has been paid to the structure of ‘Songs’ as a whole or the ways in which the poems build on each other. Here, I read the poems of ‘Songs’ not as isolated artefacts, but as a section in which each poem builds on others; their imageries are layered in a gauze-like aesthetic of submersion and translucency. ‘Songs I’ creates a liminal space and an experience of liminality: shadowy sheep, the doom of immortality, and the souls likened to ‘a rain frailly raging’ which the more substantial hills ‘sink into’. The poem opens between the waters of the Lethe at the border of the classical underworld, and it defines the way in which the reader crosses into the space of ‘Songs’. Ovid’s Lethe lulls the listener into hypnotic sleep (Met. XI. 602–4). Sleep and dreams are thematic to the ‘Songs’ section—II: ‘while a bee dozes’; III: ‘and before your dead face / which sleeps,a dream shall pass)’; V: ‘Fleeter be they than dappled dreams’, ‘Softer be they than slippered sleep’; VII: ‘Doll’s boy ’s asleep’; VIII: ‘thy hair is acold with / dreams,’. But to ‘pass’ the Lethe ‘upon forgetting’ is more Virgilian

16

Putnam 2009 [1992]: 194.

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than Ovidian. Virgil’s souls pass through the waters of the Lethe in order to forget and thus to be reborn (Aeneid VI. 748–51). ‘Songs I’ opens with praise voiced ‘between’ the rivers. The voice which sings ‘Songs I’ is thus poised on the brink of the dip into the Lethe and into forgetfulness. The reader of ‘Songs’ occupies an ambiguous space. Voices must surely ‘pass’ in order to reach us as readers or listeners, but we are hearing the voices of ‘Songs’ in some way across their own forgetfulness. The unresolved threshold space of the opening of ‘Songs’ recollects the unearthly, eerie, and liminal settings of Swinburne’s edge-of-the-world classical underworlds, where voices are caught in quiet and dreams are caught in uncertainty: Here, where the world is quiet; Here, where all trouble seems Dead winds’ and spent waves’ riot In doubtful dreams of dreams;17

Through this underworld space, inherited from the Classics and also shaped by Swinburne, the reader enters the space created for Cummings’ ‘Songs’. The opening ‘Songs I’ is followed by the shortest of the nine poems. ‘Songs II’ submerges its classical imagery. In its second stanza, when love’s had his tears out, perhaps shall pass a million years (while a bee dozes on the poppies,the dears;

The obvious metaphor of sleep for death is softened by Cummings into a bee which merely ‘dozes’, but the sense is clear, since the poem offers a succession of images of death.18 ‘The Garden of Proserpine’, ll.1–4. For liminality in Swinburne, including a discussion of ‘The Garden of Proserpine’, see McGann 2004. Though I focus in this section on classical texts and on Swinburne, I do not mean this as an exhaustive discussion of the influences on ‘Songs I’ or ‘Songs’ more generally. These influences are eclectic. Just as an example: the line ‘a noise of petals falling silently’ (Songs I, l. 43) reflects the influence of one of Cummings’ favourite burlesque and comedy show sketches by Jack Shargel, which involved throwing a rose timed to hit the floor with the sound effect of breaking glass. Cummings pays tribute to its oxymoronic effect with ‘noise . . . silently’. On the Shargel sketch, see Cummings 1965: 127–8 (‘You Aren’t Mad, Am I?’); Norman 1972: 129; Cohen 1987: 123. 18 Cf. ‘un(bee)mo’ (CP 691) with Moe 2007: 146–7. In this much later poem, Cummings returns to the image of a bee ‘asl[ . . . ]eep’, i.e. dead, nestled into a rose. 17

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Considering the date of Tulips & Chimneys (1922) / Tulips and Chimneys (1923), no mention of the poppy can be free from the iconic association of the poppy with the Great War. Cummings evokes the Great War connotations explicitly in a poem from the section ‘La Guerre’, where death ‘hides in a fragility / of poppies’ (CP 55). However, the dominant note here in ‘Songs’ is not the bloom of No Man’s Land, but the flower of the Lethe and of the classical underworld. The poppy is the flower of the Lethe both in Ovid (Met. XI. 605) and in Virgil (Georgics I. 78, IV. 545), and Swinburne’s classical underworlds are also troped with poppies.19 Additionally, in a famous line, Virgil’s souls arrive at the Lethe ‘when they have rolled time’s wheel through a thousand years’.20 There is a light echo in Cummings’ lines, ‘perhaps shall pass / a million years’. Cummings’ image of the bee on the poppy is followed by the image which concludes ‘Songs II’—that of the beloved buried in the earth: under the grass lies her head by oaks and roses deliberated.)

The pastoral imagery of ‘Songs II’ recollects the debt of ‘Songs I’ to the Georgics. When Orpheus, having turned too soon, mourns his second loss of Eurydice, the oaks are among his audience (agentem carmine quercus, l. 510). Virgil then reminds his reader that it is the sickness of his bees which has brought Aristaeus to hear the story of Orpheus in the first place (l. 534). Aristaeus’ placatory gift to Orpheus consists of Lethe’s poppies (inferias Orphei Lethaea papavera mittes, l. 545). Thus the oak, bee, and poppy of ‘Songs II’ develop the pastoral death established in ‘Songs I’, deepen the relationship to Virgil, and also enrich it with a rose (‘by oaks and roses / deliberated’) which recalls Swinburne’s characteristic contrast of the poppies of the underworld with the rose of the overworld.21 19 ‘Where the poppies are sweet as the rose in our world [ . . . ]’ (‘Hymn to Proserpine’, l. 97), ‘poppied sleep’ (‘Ilicet’) and the poppies in ‘The Garden of Proserpine’ (l. 27), ‘Hesperia’ (l. 55), and ‘At Eleusis’ (l. 208). 20 Aeneid VI. 748–9: has omnis, ubi mille rotam volvere per annos, Lethaeum ad fluvium deus evocat agmine magno (‘All these, when they have rolled time’s wheel through a thousand years, the god summons in vast throng to the river of Lethe’ (trans. H.R. Fairclough). Also Dante, Purgatorio, 11.103–8. 21 See above n. 19; additionally, ‘The Garden of Proserpine’ where death and Proserpine’s poppies will close over everyone, even ‘Though one were fair as roses’.

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While ‘Songs II’ develops the imagery of ‘Songs I’, ‘Songs III’ reworks ‘Songs I’ even more directly. In Section 2 (above), I argued that the reference to ‘shadowy sheep’ in ‘Songs I’ works to layer Horace and Virgil, creating a pastoral space which draws on what Putnam has described in Horace as an imagery of death ‘possessed of a herd of souls, not white, like favored sheep in the world above, but black . . .’. Cummings plays further on the implied contrast between the ‘shadowy sheep’ of the underworld and what Putnam calls the ‘favored’ white sheep of the overworld by returning to the image in Songs III, a song filled with praise of the beloved: or as a single lamb whose sheen of full unsheared fleece is mean beside its lovelier friends,between your thoughts more white than wool My thought is sorrowful:

The speaker’s anguished heart ‘quivers’ to his beloved, As to a flight of thirty birds shakes with a thickening fright the sudden fooled light.

The poem then turns to thoughts of autumn, death, and harvest: death— (whose hand my folded soul shall know while on faint hills do frailly go The peaceful terrors of the snow, and before your dead face which sleeps,a dream shall pass)

Here Cummings riffs on ‘Songs I’ and on his own earlier borrowing from Virgil. The souls in ‘Songs I’ are likened to rain ‘frailly raging whom the hills / sink into and their sunsets,it shall pass’. ‘Song III’ tightly repeats this phrasing and imagery: ‘my folded soul’ and ‘on faint hills do frailly go’. ‘Songs I’ closes the image with ‘it shall pass’ and ‘Songs III’ with ‘a dream shall pass’. The ‘peaceful terrors of the snow’ in ‘Songs III’ pick up the tone established in ‘Songs I’ with ‘terrific pastures pale’ and ‘meadows sweet with fear’, as well as the ‘superior terror’ in ‘Songs I’ of the soul thrilling to the beloved. Finally, in ‘Songs III’, the flight of the birds in ‘thickening fright’ might even seem to constitute a return to the source-material in the

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Georgics, where the souls are as the ‘thousands of birds that hide amid the leaves when the evening star or a wintry shower drives them from the hills’. The image in ‘Songs III’ of the birds taken suddenly to flight thus picks up the one element of the original Georgics’ imagery—the birds in flight—which had been omitted from ‘Songs I’. ‘Songs III’ continues: and these my days their sounds and flowers Fall in a pride of petaled hours, like flowers at the feet of mowers whose bodies strong with love through meadows hugely move.

Again we find the relationship to ‘Songs I’. For ‘sounds and flowers / Fall in a pride of petaled hours’ (III), compare the ‘noise of petals falling silently’ (I). This is an important moment for the whole of ‘Songs’. It functions to reinforce the ‘pastures pale’ and ‘sleepless meadows’ of the underworld by anchoring the imagery of meadow and mowers in the overworld as well. This textual moment clinches the centrality of the meadow within the pastoral space of ‘Songs’. The echo here of the end of Catullus 11 confirms the continued presence of the classical inheritance in ‘Songs’, though Catullus’ angry words become gentle in Cummings. In Carm. 11, Catullus renounces Lesbia with ‘non bona dicta’ (‘not good words’, i.e. not words of wellwishing) and leaves her to her fornications, warning her that his love for her is no longer what it was: nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem, qui illius culpa cecidit velut prati ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam tactus aratro est. And let her not look to find my love, as before; my love, which by her fault has dropped, like a flower on the meadow’s edge, when it has been touched by the plough passing by. (Trans. G.P. Goold)

Cummings repeats this Catullan image of the mowed flower, but the tone of Cummings’ poem takes him far from the anger of Catullus. Cummings’ beloved, whose ‘thoughts’ are ‘more white than wool’, nowhere incurs any blame, and his characterization of the mowers, ‘strong with love’, reinforces the tenderness of his imagery. The effect is not so much to summon directly Catullus’ repudiation of Lesbia as to fix further, via this echo, the importance of the classical meadow.

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Cummings dwells on this meadow setting. The meadow (on which more below in Section 4) is prominent in classical poetry as an erotic space and a locus of seduction/rape.22 Cummings’ sensitivity to the classical resonances of the meadow is something which we have already encountered in ‘Tumbling-hair’ (see above, Chapter 4.2). In ‘Tumbling-hair’, Cummings portrays the moment of seizure of Persephone by Hades. But he portrays this moment by focusing his poem on the meadow setting to the point where the excluded narrative has to be supplied entirely from the reader’s own external knowledge. The meadow setting itself becomes the story. In ‘Songs’, the meadow is a space for both love and death. Cummings’ use of the meadow setting, with its flowers in spring or mowers in autumn, also reinforces his seasonality. It is, therefore, essential to the Horatian aspects of ‘Songs’, which revolve around death, time, and the seasonal cycle. The last stanza of ‘Songs III’, however, brings in a non-classical element which is also essential to reading ‘Songs’. ‘Songs III’ concludes: The flute of morning stilled in noon— noon the implacable bassoon— now Twilight seeks the thrill of moon, washed with a wild and thin despair of violin

The flute, the bassoon, and the violin, woven into the rhythm of the natural day with a focus on the moon, are all elements taken from Tennyson’s ‘Come into the garden, Maud’ (Maud: A Monodrama, Part I, ll. 862–7): All night have the roses heard The flute, violin, bassoon; All night has the casement jessamine stirred To the dancers dancing in tune; Till a silence fell with the waking bird, And a hush with the setting moon.

Maud, or at least the section known as ‘Come into the garden Maud’, was an important poem for Cummings. A portion of it is among the very few poems by other poets which Cummings copied out among his own working papers and notebooks: six stanzas are copied into a 22

See recently Deacy 2013, which also provides references for earlier discussion.

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Harvard-era notebook.23 The relationship to Maud which is so overtly signalled here will return in ‘Songs VI’ and ‘Songs IX’. With ‘Songs III’ ending on an emphatically Tennyson-driven note, ‘Songs IV’ continues the move towards the medieval as imagined through a Romantic imagery and diction.24 At the same time, ‘Songs IV’ also continues the relationship with the Horatian carpe diem tradition. The poem’s opening lines—‘Thy fingers make early flowers of / all things’—nod to the Latin semantics of carpe diem, most literally ‘pluck the day’, as in plucking flowers. The Romantic medieval vision and the carpe diem tradition are effortlessly combined: ‘(though love be a day) / do not fear,we will go amaying.’ Here, the Romantic medievalism of the tradition of ‘amaying’ is cast in terms of a carpe diem embrace of the present. Just as II and III develop and rework ‘Songs I’, so ‘Songs IV’ reworks ‘Songs III’. The opening of IV draws on the stanza already quoted from III: and these my days their sounds and flowers Fall in a pride of petaled hours like flowers at the feet of mowers whose bodies strong with love [ . . . ]

This is answered in IV with ‘thy fingers make early flowers of / all things. / thy hair mostly the hours love’ and with the line repeated in all three stanzas of IV: ‘(though love be a day)’. The relatively generic nature of the images—flowers, hours, days, and love—relaxes the reworking, but the relationship between III and IV is nonetheless strong. The two poems create an implicit dialogue. In ‘Songs III’, the man speaks in praise of his beloved and in awe. The ‘I’ of the speaker: ‘Expects of your hair pale, / a terror musical’. It turns out that the ‘expect[ation]’ of the speaker of III will indeed meet with a response from the beloved. That response comes, implicitly, in IV:

23 The stanza ‘All night have the roses heard’ is from ‘Come into the garden, Maud’, though it is not one of the six which Cummings wrote out in this notebook. No one is the complete master of the Cummings archives, which extend to thousands of folders. In addition to these stanzas from ‘Come into the garden, Maud’, I have seen two short portions of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King; lines from Keats’ ‘Lamia’ and Shelley’s Adonais, four of Amy Lowell’s poems: ‘Bullion’, ‘The Bungler’, ‘The Letter’, and ‘Grotesque’, and Donald Evans’ ‘Rue d’Aphrodite’ in HRC 6.8; 6.9; 8.11. Moe 2014: 60–1 discusses a scansion study of lines copied from Walt Whitman. 24 Previous discussion of the poem: Marks 1964: 68–9.

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thy hair mostly the hours love: a smoothness which sings,saying (though love be a day) do not fear,we will go amaying.

The ‘hair’ whose smoothness ‘sings’ in IV responds to the ‘musical’ terror inspired by the pale hair of the beloved in III. The man’s ‘terror’ is answered by the woman’s attitude to life and love: ‘do not fear’. ‘Songs IV’ establishes an easy relationship between classical carpe diem and Romantic medievalism. However, the relationship between classical motifs and the imagery of Romantic medievalism is more tangled in ‘Songs V’. ‘Songs V’—‘All in green went my love riding’—is one of the most famous and most disputed of Cummings’ poems.25 The poem recounts an aestheticized, bloodthirsty, fast-paced hunt. It has a distinctive feel and in some ways stands out from the other eight songs. However, it is intricately bound up with the themes of the ‘Songs’ section. It is, like the other songs, a song of dreams, sleep, and death. The deer are ‘Fleeter . . . than dappled dreams’.26 They are also ‘Softer . . . than slippered sleep’.27 Finally, they are ‘Paler . . . than daunting death’, presaging the poem’s final line: ‘my heart fell dead before’ and situating ‘Songs V’ firmly among these nine songs of death. If ‘Songs I’ is the threshold poem for ‘Songs’, then ‘Songs V’ is its acme, at the climax of the curve. The figure of the hunter of V becomes a foil to the shepherd of I; indeed, V juxtaposes both scene and setting to those of I. The poem creates an overworld foil to the underworld of ‘Songs I’. The speaker’s love rides hunting across ‘white water’, ‘level meadows’, and into the ‘green mountain’. This traversing of white waters– meadows–mountains follows the same sequence of locations as ‘Songs I’, which also opens with white waters (‘those rivers whose / white voices pass’), moving on to ‘terrific pastures’ and ‘sleepless meadows’, and then above ground to the ‘steep hills’ and ‘huge trees’.

25 Sanders 1966; Jumper 1967; Robey 1968; Gidley 1968: 194; Davis 1970; West 1973; Lane 1976: 59–63; Frosch 2002; some further references are given by Frosch. 26 Compare ‘thy long sinful arms about me dream’ (I); ‘a dream shall pass’ (III); ‘thy hair is acold with / dreams’ (VIII). 27 Compare ‘sleepless meadows’ (I); ‘a bee dozes’ (II); ‘before your dead face / which sleeps’ (III); ‘Doll’s boy ’s asleep’ (VII).

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The colour palette of the underworld in ‘Songs I’ is bleached but luminescent: ‘rivers whose / white’; ‘gloat / of silver’; ‘shadowy sheep’; ‘grey flesh’. In the last two stanzas of ‘Songs I’, the colours change to the palette of an overworld, retaining the shimmering quality of the underworld but acquiring more vibrancy and hue. The overworld is still characterized by silver—the most saturated and shimmering of the whites—but also by green and gold: ‘be thy taut / flesh silver’; ‘the perusing greenness of thy thought’; ‘my golden soul’. The hunt in ‘Songs V’ echoes this vibrant overworld colour palette: ‘All in green’, ‘the silver dawn’, ‘the red rare deer’, ‘a gold valley’. But the overworld of ‘Songs V’ too is poised against awareness of the spectre of pale death: ‘Paler be they than daunting death / the sleek slim deer / the tall tense deer’.28 ‘Songs V’ is soaked in medieval, Keatsean, and Pre-Raphaelite imagery. In particular, it is possible to read the hunter as a version of ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. Some of the Pre-Raphaelite responses to Keats’ poem, such as the paintings by Frank Dicksee and Arthur Hughes, pick up on the line ‘I set her on my pacing steed’ and depict la belle dame on a horse. This visual tradition perhaps enhances the echoes of Keats in Cummings’ poem. The hunter in ‘Songs V’ can be read as a figure of pitiless seduction set against the tall shepherd of ‘Songs I’ as a figure of pitiless death. A different kind of predecessor to ‘Songs V’ is Swinburne’s ‘Itylus’. ‘Itylus’ draws on the myth of Philomela and Procne: in Swinburne’s poem, Philomela, transformed into the nightingale, calls out to her sister Procne, transformed into the swallow. ‘Itylus’ begins, ‘Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow’. Variations on that line become a refrain in Swinburne’s poem: ‘Sister, my sister, O fleet sweet swallow’; ‘O swallow, sister, O fleeting swallow’; ‘O sweet stray sister, O shifting swallow’. The music of these lines is very similar to the shifting refrains used by Cummings in ‘Songs V’. Swinburne’s alliterative tones (‘O sweet stray sister’) are recognizable in Cummings’ phrases: ‘the sleek slim deer / the tall tense deer’. The ‘fleet sweet swallow’ is echoed in Cummings’ ‘swift sweet deer’ and ‘fleet flown deer’. Both poems also end with a sheer, dead weight: ‘But the world shall end when I forget.’; ‘my heart fell dead before.’

28 Colour imagery in ‘Songs V’ is particularly emphasized by Sanders 1966 and Davis 1970, but neither make any connection to ‘Songs I’.

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While the language and musicality of ‘Songs V’ is highly influenced by Swinburne’s classicized ‘Itylus’, there is no sense that ‘Songs V’ evokes the classical story which is retold in Swinburne’s poem. This raises the question, what then is the relationship of ‘Songs V’ to the classical world? The best response is that ‘Songs V’ disguises its own relationship with the classical world, and this disguise has made it a difficult poem to read. Scholars have previously disputed whether the rider in green evokes Artemis/Diana the huntress, with strongly worded opinions offered on both sides.29 Some scholars have felt that neglecting echoes of Diana in the poem means missing an essential and necessary dimension; others feel that reading Diana into the poem constitutes an unjustifiable over-reading. I would suggest that ‘Songs V’ denies any resolution of the relationship between the poem and the classical world, because one of its functions in the ‘Songs’ section is precisely to submerge that relationship beyond knowability. On the surface of ‘Songs V’ is the vividly shimmering, Romantically medieval overworld of the hunt, juxtaposed to the pale and shimmering classical underworld of ‘Songs I’, with its sheep and shepherded souls, its poppies, and its forgetfulness. The very nature of an underworld—submerged and always lurking beneath—is replicated in the equivocal nature of the relationship of ‘Songs V’ to the classical world, with its strong reminiscences of the language (but not the subject) of ‘Itylus’ and the ambiguous evocation of Diana. The hunt in ‘Songs V’ is intensified by a transience—‘Fleeter . . . than dappled dreams’ and ‘Softer . . . than slippered sleep’—which renders the concentrated force of the overworld somehow as elusive and ephemeral as the pale, shadowy sleep of death, submerging the ephemeral underworld even further beneath an ephemeral overworld. This effect is essential to the layered, gauze-like texture of ‘Songs’. The Songs section rises into and then moves out from Romantic medievalism, so that the three central poems of the Songs section— IV, V, and VI of nine—draw most heavily on the imagery of Romantic medievalism, and of those three, ‘Songs V’, the central poem of the nine, most of all. After the high pitch of the medieval hunt, the nod

29

Sanders 1966 and Davis 1970 suggest the Diana reading; Jumper 1967 argues against it. Robey 1968 argues for a layering of classical, medieval, and Pre-Raphaelite imagery. Lane 1976: 59–63 also argues for layering of classical and medieval, and (on the classical side) specifically the myth of Diana and Actaeon.

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towards ballad form, and the Keatsean femme fatale of ‘Songs V’, ‘Songs VI’ falls back down to a lighter engagement. Where’s Madge then, Madge and her men? buried with Alice in her hair,

Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ is so strongly signalled in ‘Songs III’ that it becomes possible to construe the ‘Madge’ of ‘Songs VI’ as a kind of demotic answer to ‘Maud’. The burial of Madge also recollects ‘Songs II’ (‘under the grass / lies her head’). Like II, VI focuses on the imagery of the natural world—rain, wind, cold, earth, flower, autumn—and on the passage of time: ‘beauty makes terms / with time and his worms’. The puzzling ‘Songs VII’ moves back towards the classical.30 In full: Doll’s boy ’s asleep under a stile he sees eight and twenty ladies in a line the first lady says to nine ladies his lips drink water but his heart drinks wine the tenth lady says to nine ladies they must chain his foot for his wrist ’s too fine the nineteenth says to nine ladies, you take his mouth for his eyes are mine. Doll’s boy ’s asleep under the stile for every mile the feet go the heart goes nine 30 Gidley 1968: 192 refers to the poem as ‘an intriguing and amusing riddle’. The tone of the poem strikes me as more disquieting than amusing. It is a challenging poem and one which has been very neglected. It would be useful (but beyond present concerns) to explore the significance of ‘Doll’s boy’. See Webster 2005/2006a on the doll motif in Cummings’ The Enormous Room; Chaney 2011 on the doll motif in Cummings’ Tom.

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The poem toys with the number nine and variations on nine plus one: among the eight and twenty ladies (three times nine plus one), the first, the tenth (nine plus one), and the nineteenth (twice-nine plus one) address nine ladies, while ‘for every mile the feet go / the heart goes nine’. Nine is programmatic for both this poem and for the ‘Songs’ section, which consists of nine poems.31 Although ‘Songs V’ is the central poem of the nine by position in the sequence, ‘Songs VII’ has a different kind of centrality. Its emphasis on ‘nine’ gives it a standing from which to comment metonymically on the nine-poem section as a whole. The last line of the poem, ‘the heart goes nine’, might seem to encapsulate the whole poetic ambition of ‘Songs’. There is a play here on a passage of desire from Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself ’ (11. 199–201). Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore, Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly; Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.

But Cummings’ variations on nine/nine-plus-one go beyond Whitman’s twenty-eight men. If Cummings’ nine ladies perhaps naturally suggest the Muses, then ‘the tenth lady’ (and more generally the variations on nine plus one) recall the description of Sappho, in both the classical and later traditions, as the tenth Muse. The impassioned sensibility of the boy in ‘Songs VII’ (his lips drink water / but his heart drinks wine’) is matched by the exquisiteness of his form (‘they must chain his foot / for his wrist ’s too fine’). There is more Sapphic grace and delicacy in ‘Songs VII’ than in any other of the ‘Songs’, or perhaps any other of Cummings’ poems.32 The stile, at least in its most common incarnation, offers a crossing with steps or wooden planks which jut out at a perpendicular angle to the farm wall or hedge. Thus the setting ‘under a stile’ indicates a boundary and a kind of crossroads. In anticipation of the comparison between Cummings’ ‘Songs’ and H.D.’s Sea Garden to which I turn in the following section, it is worth noting the pivotal role played by the crossroads poem ‘Hermes of the Ways’ in Sea Garden.33 Moreover,

31

Cummings certainly played this kind of number game. For another example, see Huang-Tiller 2005/2006. 32 For H.D. in relation to Sapphic grace and delicacy, see Collecott 1999: 17. 33 See esp. Gregory 1986: 548; Collecott 2003.

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Diana Collecott draws a three-way connection between the crossroads setting, H.D.’s Sapphic engagements, and the importance of chiastic structures in Sea Garden. In that context, it is interesting that while ‘Songs VII’ is Cummings’ most Sapphic poem, ‘Songs VIII’, which follows, is the most chiastic. ‘Songs VIII’ is chiastic in stanza structure, with four stanzas of (respectively) 4, 7, 7, 4 lines. It is the only chiastic stanza arrangement used in ‘Songs’. The structural chiasmus is reflected in chiastic phrasing. The injunction, ‘walk the autumn long’, from the first stanza is balanced in the fourth by ‘walk the longness of autumn’, with a partial chiasmus created by ‘autumn long’ / ‘longness of autumn’. The overall symmetry of the poem is reinforced orally by the ‘c’, ‘r’, and ‘l’ sounds of the first and final lines, respectively ‘cruelly,love’ and ‘who crookedly care.’ Again we might suspect an echo of ‘Maud’, who walks Tennyson’s garden, when Cummings adjures his ‘love’ to ‘walk the autumn’ in VII. (And similarly in ‘Songs IX’, with ‘my love walking in the grass’.)34 Those lines would not in isolation conjure ‘Maud’, but they are changed by the presence of Tennyson in ‘Songs III’ and the way that ‘Songs’, as a section, reworks and builds upon itself. ‘Songs VIII’ particularly answers ‘Songs IV’: Thy fingers make early flowers of all things. thy hair mostly the hours love (IV) love,for the last flower in the hair withers; thy hair is acold with dreams

(VIII)

34 In IX, ‘my love’ walks above the speaker’s dead body, which has blossomed into a rose. Compare the last lines of the ‘Come into the garden, Maud’ section (i.e. the close of Maud Part I, ll. 916–23): She is coming, my own, my sweet; Were it ever so airy a tread, My heart would hear her and beat, Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead; Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red.

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The coldness and cruel autumn of ‘Songs VIII’ presage the death in ‘Songs IX’—a death with more finality in tone (‘when god lets my body be’) than the deaths invoked in the preceding poems. ‘Songs IX’ wraps up the ‘Songs’ section. It evokes a very different predecessor: ‘Trees’ by Cummings’ near-contemporary Joyce Kilmer.35 This different literary relationship affects the tone of ‘Songs IX’ and separates it, somewhat, from the eight previous poems. However, ‘Songs IX’ also turns back to the Swinburnian undertones which pervade ‘Songs’. A Swinburnian dissolution in the sea gives the poem, and the ‘Songs’ section, its final lines: ‘and all the while shall my heart be / With the bulge and nuzzle of the sea’. Earlier in ‘Songs IX’, the speaker has imagined the regeneration fertilized by his decomposing corpse (which feeds the rose and also the birds, who eat the worms which have consumed the body): Between my lips which did sing a rose shall beget the spring that maidens whom passion wastes will lay between their little breasts My strong fingers beneath the snow Into strenuous birds shall go

The simultaneity of spring and snow signals another engagement with Swinburne which can be compared, this time, to T.S. Eliot: that is, the ‘midwinter spring’ identified by Cassandra Laity as one of Eliot’s chief debts to Swinburne’s imagery.36 In conclusion, throughout ‘Songs’, Cummings harmonizes classical, Romantic, and Decadent imageries. One clue to his approach may come in a note which he wrote much later, expressing his view that some imagery is universal. In this note, he quotes both Tennyson and Aeschylus on waves, remarking that ‘everyone has seen a wave grow climbingly & topple to crash thundering in hugely racing snow’.37 The fact that Swinburne was himself so classicizing must also ease the harmonies. The question remaining for the last section of this chapter is what, now, to make of the imageries which we have so far been unpicking. 35

Pointed out by Dundas 1971. Other discussion of the poem: Lane 1976: 56–9. Laity 2004 on Eliot’s ‘chill rose gardens’ (426) and ‘midwinter spring’ (434–6, 441–4). 37 MS Am 1892.7 (90) (California Lectures). Folder 10 of 44. 36

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4. CUMMINGS’ ‘SONGS’ AND H.D.’S SEA GARDEN The poems of H.D.’s Sea Garden express a yearning for erotic fracturing and aestheticized death.38 The collection idealizes a harsh, hard beauty; it opens with the lines, ‘Rose, harsh rose / marred and with stint of petals’ (‘Sea Rose’). The highest beauty is a broken beauty: ‘Reed, / slashed and torn’ (‘Sea Lily’). The speaker expresses the desire both to tear—‘we broke hyssop and bramble’ (The Helmsman’)—and to be torn: ‘’O wind, rend open the heat’ (‘Garden’).39 The classical engagements of Sea Garden are signalled by its temples and its allusions to pagan gods. But, as a succession of scholars have shown, the classical grounding of Sea Garden goes far deeper than these direct references. In Sea Garden, H.D. fashions her own Sapphic voice.40 Moreover, the space of the sea garden, between sea and inland, is a classicized space. The liminal shoreline, as Gregory argues, holds an ‘interior landscape’ which summons the liminality of the Sapphic island setting, while it also, as Tarlo argues, refigures the spaces of the classical pastoral.41 The submerged classicism of Sea Garden offers a valuable point of comparison for the submerged classicism of ‘Songs’. There are many parallels—some surprising—to prompt the comparisons between Sea Garden and ‘Songs’. Both Sea Garden and ‘Songs’ are heavily influenced by Swinburne and by Decadent exquisite deaths. Cummings was influenced by Imagism—a poetic movement with H.D. and Pound at its centre. Sea Garden was published in 1916. At least some of the poems in ‘Songs’ were composed in 1917, while Cummings was in 38 I do not claim anything original in my reading of H.D., and I am greatly indebted to all the scholarship cited above, n. 305. On erotic fracturing and aestheticized death, see: Gregory 1986: 538–50 on salt, ‘sea-torture’, and ‘the near annihilation of elemental power’ (539). Laity 2004 on self-shattering and Swinburne: ‘the Decadent’s Sapphic sublime of elemental obliteration—surfacing initially in H.D.’s (and Pound’s) imagist, floral bodies whirled by a maelstrom of forces—dramatized at once modernity’s keenly shattering intensity and a correspondent awareness of corporeal fragility’ (425); cf. Laity 1996: 42–51 on Swinburne and Sea Garden. McRae 2010 on the relationship in H.D. between ‘erotic dissolution’ and ‘artistic and spiritual truth’ (36), whereby the ‘textual personae’ of H.D. ‘not only repeatedly invite . . . but eroticize’ ‘emotional fragmentation’ and ‘emotional violence’ in pursuit of artistic otherness (38). 39 See McRae 2010: 40–3. 40 See Gregory 1986; Collecott 1999 passim; note esp. 25–61 on Sea Garden, Sappho, and Swinburne. 41 Gregory 1986 (‘interior landscape’ at 529); Tarlo 2012, esp. 240–2, 247–50.

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France. The Great War serves as unspoken backdrop to both; more precisely, both H.D. and Cummings refigure death and the pastoral mode against the unspoken background of war.42 Both ‘Songs’ and Sea Garden rely heavily on an imagery of flowers, and the chosen colour palette is highly significant for both poets. Cummings juxtaposes a shimmering white/silver/grey underworld to a silver/green/gold/red overworld. H.D. uses white and silver to express an aesthetic of salt and the ‘fulfillment’ of the white/silver pear tree (Gregory), she evokes the red/purple Sapphic rose (Collecott), and she draws on a Decadent heritage of ‘the white or crystal boy androgyne, the scarlet femme fatale’ (Laity).43 The structure of the ‘Songs’ section and of H.D.’s Sea Garden present surprising similarities. Both (as noted above) begin with a threshold poem or poems which invite the reader to cross a boundary into the space explored beyond that threshold. As Gregory demonstrates, the three opening poems of Sea Garden are poems of initiation through which the reader crosses into the classicized, liminal, and Sapphic space of the sea garden.44 Cummings’ ‘Songs I’ begins at the Lethe—that ultimate, definitive boundary between underworld and overworld, past and new life, remembering and forgetting. The reader crosses to create the liminal space of ‘Songs’, and its liminal time: ‘in the sacred witchery / of almostness which May makes follow soon / on the sweet heels of passed afterday’ (I) or the ‘earthless hour’ (III). The exactly middle poem of both ‘Songs’ and Sea Garden departs on the hunt. ‘Songs V’ (fifth of nine) and ‘The Huntress’ (fourteenth of 42 On the Great War and the pastoral, see Longley 2007. Sea Garden and the Great War, see Friedman 1990: 60–2; Laity 2004: 430–2; Kozak and Hickman 2014. 43 Gregory 1986: 542–3, 545, 549 (importance of the colour scheme is implicit in what Gregory says about salt and explicit in what she says concerning the pear tree); Collecott 2003: 3–5; Laity 1996: quote at xi; 42–51. Houghton MS Am 1823.7 (17), which shows that at least some of the poems in ‘Songs’ were in progress in France in 1917 (see above, Chapter 7.2), also reinforces the points about the Great War background, the flowers, and the colours in Cummings. These poems are mixed in among scraps of composition in French—which was the language, for Cummings, of la guerre. A French composition on the same notebook page as the poems which became ‘Songs I’ and ‘Songs VII’ is built around the varying refrain ‘dormes la p’tite chanson rouge’, ‘dormes la p’tite fleur / d’orange . . .’, etc. The language of sleep, songs, flowers, and a succession of colours echo the themes of ‘Songs’. H.D.’s interest in pagan revival (see, e.g. ‘Sea Gods’), and in the pagan Pan (see H.D. quoted in Tarlo 2012: 246) are also points in which she might be compared to Cummings. Another point of comparison is that both Cummings and H.D. translated from Greek tragedy. 44 Gregory 1986: 538–42.

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twenty-seven) both stand out in certain ways from the poems which surround them. Gregory connects ‘The Huntress’ to Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon, while for ‘Songs V’, I have noted already the linguistic echoes of Swinburne’s ‘Itylus’.45 Third from the end of ‘Songs’, and third from the end of Sea Garden, is a poem set at a crossroads (‘Songs VII’ at the stile, and ‘Hermes of the Ways’). There may be only coincidence operating here, but it is a coincidence which reveals the similarities in underlying vision between Cummings’ ‘Songs’ and H.D.’s Sea Garden. Both Sea Garden and ‘Songs’ reject the garden. The speaker in Sea Garden finds it a stifling place—‘I gasp for breath’—and wishes it out of existence—‘O to blot out this garden’ (‘Sheltered Garden’). Cummings rejects the garden through omission: none of the poems of ‘Songs’ is set in a garden space, though Cummings writes of gardens elsewhere in Tulips & Chimneys. The silence is made more of a felt exclusion by the echoes of ‘Come into the garden, Maud’. ‘Songs’ sustains a relationship with Maud but actively rejects the importance of Tennyson’s garden space. All these underlying similarities throw into relief certain key differences in the times and the spaces created by ‘Songs’ and Sea Garden. Sea Garden focuses on a liminal space at the shore and dramatizes ritual time.46 ‘Songs’ is accessed across the liminal threshold of ‘Songs I’, but across that threshold is a pastoral, meadowed place filled with sheep, mowers, and stiles; oaks, poppies, and grass; rain, wind, and seasonal change. Unlike H.D.’s fractured annihilation, Cummings’ poems speak of a peaceful, suffused dissolution. Where H.D. has sharp edges, Cummings has an expanse. This expansiveness is vital to the space of ‘Songs’. The souls as ‘shadowy sheep’ of the underworld ‘float free’. ‘Songs I’ ends with a gaze outward ‘through the far-spaced possible nearaway’: even what is near has immeasurable depths and distances. Vast spaces are covered in the one hunt narrated in ‘Songs V’: across water, across meadows, across the valley, into the mountain. ‘Songs IX’ ends with the great expanse of the sea. The expansiveness of space is equalled by the expansiveness of time: ‘perhaps shall pass / a million years’ (II).

45

Gregory 1997: 235. On ritual time: Gregory 1986: ‘atemporal’ (537) and the seer’s struggle against ‘the loneliness of a being held in a dead absence within time’ (546). 46

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Time is liminal: twilights and dawns and the ‘earthless hour’ (III). But though liminal, time in ‘Songs’ occurs within the seasonal cycle. H.D.’s Sapphic ritual time offers an imaginative removal from ordinary, cyclical, seasonal time. But Cummings’ ‘Songs’ do not stand outside of time. They find expansiveness within seasonality, within time: they find ‘the longness of autumn’. Surrendering to seasonality means surrendering to death, but inevitable death offers the ultimate expansive and suffused dissolution: beauty makes terms with time and his worms, when loveliness says sweetly Yes to wind and cold; and how much earth is Madge worth? Inquire of the flower that sways in the autumn she will never guess. but i know (Songs VI)

Death is an affirmation (‘Yes’), and an exquisite one (‘sweetly’). Death is ‘wind and cold’. In the Horatian seasonality of ‘Songs’, death means walking the autumn out into the cold, cruel winter (VIII): it is the ‘cruel bugle’ (V), it is the ‘shallowness of sunlight’ when ‘cruelly, / across the grass / Comes the / moon’, when ‘thy hair is acold with / dreams’ (VIII). But the question in ‘Songs VI’, ‘how much earth / is Madge worth?’ invites the answer of infinite expanse. It is more than the autumnal flower will ever guess. And even if ‘i know’, the fact that the poem ends here—with no final mark of punctuation—leaves the impression of an immeasurable openness. Poetry is built on this capacity to expand beyond: ‘for every mile the feet go / the heart goes nine’ (VII). The expansiveness of space and time in ‘Songs’ is accompanied by a language of sweetness and rarity. The meadows of ‘Songs I’ are ‘sweet with fear’, while the beloved’s soul is ‘musically revealed / in rareness’. In III, the speaker’s ‘soul seriously yearns beyond’ in ‘a rare / Slowness of gloried air’. In V, the hunter pursues ‘the swift sweet deer / the red rare deer’. The sweet/rare language contributes to an aesthetic, which I have alluded to already, of layered gauze. Both H.D. and Cummings create submerged classical spaces. With such submersion of the classical,

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both poets are fascinated by layering. But for H.D., layering is palimpsestic, and involves erasure—hence also, implicitly, tearing and violence.47 Cummings’ gauze-like layering is more shimmering, suffused, and blurred. Some of Cummings’ early poetry is, arguably, under-signalled— especially where it interacts with the Classics. Cummings himself, as a Greek and English literature major, was very knowledgeable. He belonged to a tight literary circle at Harvard whose members constantly shared with each other their reading and thinking. This small, erudite, and self-reinforcing world, combined with Cummings’ aesthetic push for distillation, leads to poetry which assumes too much about the reader’s capacity to decode. We have looked already at ‘Tumbling-hair’ (Chapter 4.2)—a poem which is coded and compressed, and which relies on the mediation of a classical myth via a few brief lines in Milton. Its original title, ‘EPITAPH’ (from its publication in Eight Harvard Poets), at least indicates to the reader that there is something unstated within the poem. Yet even this hint was removed by Cummings when he republished the poem in Tulips & Chimneys. Similarly, the title ‘Syrinx’ was removed from ‘of evident invisibles’, leaving it unclear whether the text retells the myth of Pan and Syrinx or merely summons a cascade of juxtaposed imagery.48 In ‘Songs’, Cummings submerges the classical even further. Only knowledge external to the text can bring out, for the reader, the relationship of ‘Songs I’ to the Georgics and to Horace; nothing in ‘Songs I’ warns the reader to look for it, even though it is clearly there when the reader does look. Even the relationship to Maud, though it is overtly signalled at the end of ‘Songs III’, is missable—especially if the reader does not know (from Cummings’ papers in the archives) of the importance of ‘Come into the garden, Maud’ for Cummings. When the best readings rely on biographical knowledge, and moreover, biographical knowledge buried in composition notebooks in archives, then there is a fair case that the poetry has strayed into obscurity. However, the deep submerging of classical (and Romantic) layers is also essential to the gauze effect created in ‘Songs’. Not only is a classicized suffusion and a Horatian seasonality part of ‘Songs’, its 47

On H.D. and the palimpsest, see esp. Collecott 2003: 9–10. See above, Chapter 4.2 on ‘Tumbling-hair’ and Chapter 4.1 on ‘of evident invisibles’. 48

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submersion almost to the edge of readability is integral to the gauze texture that ‘Songs’ creates: layers of thin, almost unreadable association, connotation, and meaning. Ron Bush has observed, recently, of Eliot’s allusions, that they are . . . torn between clarifying the reader’s understanding and preserving a deliberate obscurity that is not (as student readers sometimes assume) accidental or perverse, but essential. As instances of reading memory, dramatic allusions suggest complexes of association whose significance and charge lie by implication beyond their speaker’s conscious awareness, and the more occluded the awareness, the more intensely charged the utterance.49

‘Songs V’, in spite of frustrating the efforts of many critics, has been one of Cummings’ most beloved poems: it holds a compelling emotional intensity. Its aesthetic success and, in Bush’s word, its ‘charge’ is inseparable from its unknowability. H.D.’s Sea Garden achieves its emotional intensity partly through its submerged Sapphism. Cummings’ ‘Songs’, I would suggest, also achieve their emotional intensity partly through their submerged classicism. What might seem like thin images of flowers, autumns, meadows, and such, acquire a depth of emotion through their felt (if not always understood) relationship to the classical pastoral and the seasonality of Horace.

49

Bush 2013: 709.

8 ‘cast like Euridyce one brief look behind’ The Post-War World

Dreamily “I hate war” the Turkess said “as a woman,you should” peesahtel affirms “you mean,war destroys what women create?” “war is your only rival,I mean. Or isn’t it?—both woman and war being essentially . . . shall we say Sexual Phenomena?” E.E. Cummings, EIMI (212)

This conversation occurs in the travel narrative EIMI (1933), and ‘peesahtel’ refers to the character representing Cummings. This authorial persona continues his conversation with his host: she thought. And asked “what’s sexual about war?” “everything is. Not that I’ve gone over the top with a dreamgirl clenched in a heart of gold and a kind of knife on the end of a gun,or anything like that . . . little me has only fallen into the merciful mud by day. And by night I’ve only seen such flowers cruelly opening . . . if there’s anything more sexual,probably it’s—” “you mean something by Sexual that I don’t” she said. “I mean intense. Magic,I mean. [ . . . ]”

In Chapter 6 we looked at the centrality of sex in Cummings’ war poetry, and in Chapter 7 we looked at the fantasy of exquisite death as a kind of sexual perfection. To these two terms—sex in war and sexualized annihilation—we now add a third, which is the idea that the intensity of war itself can be characterized as sexual. Moving on from the sexual intensity of warfare is, therefore, a unique experience. If war is the only rival to women, it also follows that only women can match that lost, magical intensity of war. In

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Cummings’ poetry, the relationship between the spheres of war and women includes—as might be expected in such a classicizing poet— elements of militia amoris. However, the dynamic of militia amoris is not the primary dynamic of Cummings’ militarized love poems. His seductions are not campaigns leading to the conquest of one party by the other. The militarized language more typically characterizes the couple together: ‘let us invade’ (as in the poem which forms the focus of Section 1 of this chapter). The strongest classical relationship is, therefore, with a Horatian inheritance of carpe diem. One of the purposes of classical reception scholarship may be, on occasion, to refocus our sense of the ancient texts.1 If so, then Cummings’ engagement with Horace offers something very different from other twentieth-century Anglophone poets. I have argued already in Chapter 6 that Cummings’ war poetry focuses on the sexual experience of soldiers and of prostitutes in wartime. With his carpe diem corpus, Cummings fashions a Horatian poetry of seduction, which comes partly in response to a period of cataclysmic war. Stephen Harrison’s survey of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglophone responses to Horace refers to Owen’s ‘Dulce et decorum est’ and then discards the rest of the war poets with the comment: ‘It is hard to find uses of Horace in other First World War poetry, presumably because war is not a major theme in his work.’2 But Horace writes as he does in the constant, if implicit, shadow of the convulsive wars which shaped the Rome of his era. Cummings’ corpus offers to us the work of a major twentieth-century Anglophone poet who writes a carpe diem poetry in a Horatian tradition against the background of catastrophic war, setting the present against an implicit memory of that war. To see what Cummings does with Horace, in our own language and with respect to a war which lies within our own cultural memory, might open up Horace’s texts for us in a unique way. Moreover, Cummings’ post-war poetry also offers a chance to see classical stabilities and instabilities at work. Elizabeth Prettejohn, in her reconsideration of modernist visual art, comments on the

1 See Martindale 1993: 7 for the theoretical point and, in practice, see, e.g. Comber 1998 on Propertius and Pound; Wray 2001, esp. 36–63 on Catullus and Louis Zukofsky. 2 Harrison 2007: 340; see also the survey of receptions of Horace by Ziolkowski 2005.

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potential for the classical tradition (itself a construct) to be mythologized as a stability against which modernism can define its own desire to destabilize.3 For Cummings’ post-war poetry of seduction, his use of the classical tradition affords stability both through direct allusion to classical material and through a wider understood relationship to classical poetry. Classical allusions allow the reader to unpick the setting and scenario, and a relationship to Horace’s carpe diem poetry anchors the poetic tone. We will see this exemplified especially in the poem, ‘them which despair’, to which this chapter turns in the next section. Similarly, for ‘inthe,exquisite;’ (Section 3), the tone is governed and anchored by the use of ‘Fields Elysian’ to describe a scene set in the Champs-Élysées. The constructed stability of classical references and classicized tone serves to enable modernist instabilities: disruption of linear language, slippage of setting, or loneliness juxtaposed to seduction. However, these instabilities are not created by a simple rejection of classical stability. In these poems, Cummings’ instabilities also draw on his relationship to the classical tradition. His anti-linear syntax is, in part, learned from Latin and Greek; his slippages evoke classical memories. In this way, his modernist instability is also classicized, and not simply defined against the Classics. The effects of this play of classicized stability against classicized instability become more clear through contrast with instability in non-classical contexts. Thus, Section 4 of this chapter concludes with a discussion of the Chimneys section of Tulips & Chimneys, in which non-classicized instabilities lead to a greater shattering of the speaker-self.

1. MOVING ON I begin with a poem which was written in the 1920s, but not published until it was selected from Cummings’ papers and included in Etcetera: The Unpublished Poems (1983).4

3

Prettejohn 2012: 102–3. CP 998. Since it was never edited for publication during Cummings’ lifetime, Cummings’ spelling ‘Euridyce’ was never corrected. I take this to be a mistake and likely connected with dyslexia (see Foreword). 4

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them which despair do we despise,being seated in the cave’s oblong darkness having commanded our minute glasses of colourless fire. Nothing is better than this except which has not happened,thence i bid you(as very deeply you near the gates of Hell)cast like Euridyce one brief look behind yourself. Voilà Monsieur Le Patron, excuse me:I was talking. He pours quickly skilfully just. It. Glistens. Voilà–the waterhued extract of Is believe:sipping,enter my arms;let us invade sumptuously the hurrying extravagant instant . . . come mon amie let us investigate suddenly our lives,let us drink calvados, let us shut ourselves into the garret of Now and swallow the key.

This is a difficult poem, especially on first reading. It opens abruptly with no clear frame of reference. The reader must revise backwards as she or he reads. Arriving at a classical allusion, ‘cast like Euridyce’, the reader now places the poem within a classical framework of references. Perhaps the cave, with its darkness and its colourless fire, is Plato’s cave. The cave allegory, with its search for philosophical truth, suits the claim that ‘we’ have some deeper insight than those who despair. A reader who knows Cummings well is unsurprised to find such a reference, remembering Cummings’ fascination with this particular allegory. Cummings’ short play, Anthropos, reworks the cave allegory in a modern setting, and his nonlectures speak of receiving the allegory of the cave from his father together with his mother’s milk.5 Suddenly, the poem is interrupted: ‘Voilà Monsieur Le Patron’. As the drinks are poured in what we now understand to be a French setting, we register the French sense of ‘cave’, some kind of cellar bar,

5

Cummings 1967: 9.

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restaurant, or nightclub, while ‘commanded’ takes on the French commander, the natural French word for ordering food or drink. It is alcohol which burns the throat as ‘colourless fire’. The reader cannot disentangle the poem without assimilating new information and revising earlier readings. Like Eurydice, the reader must look back. First we look back to (mis)understand the setting as Plato’s cave: that reading is invited by the text and lingers, even as we cast a second look behind and revise to a French (presumptively Parisian) café/bar.6 This revision of setting is, itself, a Horatian technique. Chapter 3.1 (above) has discussed already Cummings’ translation of Odes I. 4 in the light of Lyne’s arguments about the Horatian original. Lyne argued that the reader’s process of revision is essential to the aesthetics of Odes I. 4, since the first twelve lines of the ode appear to be a poem in celebration of spring, whereas the last eight are clearly a sympotic poem. Readers are thus forced to revise their understanding of setting and genre.7 Cummings here shows some of what he has learned from Horace, as he revises abruptly to a drinking scene. The poem layers a physical and a temporal topography. The physical topography of Hell lying behind as Eurydice approaches the gates is also a temporal topography of 1920s Paris, behind which lies the Great War. (Compare Isaac Rosenberg’s ‘From France’ for the Great War as a disruption of French café culture.) Cummings’ poem is reminiscent of the frequent appearance of the trenches as a hellish place in the war poetry of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and others.8 This hell of the trenches can be a

6 Almost all of Cummings’ poems about France are set in Paris. I take it that the speaker in the poem is male. The companion is female: mon amie is the feminine form. 7 Lyne 1995: 65–7. 8 Among many such poems, Owen’s ‘Mental Cases’ is particularly interesting as a point of comparison for the sexual violence of Cummings’ ‘O sweet spontaneous’ (see above, Chapter 6.4). In ‘Mental Cases’, Rawlinson (2007: 123) sees both elements of Dantean katabasis and elements of sexualized violence: ‘ “Mental Cases” associates its aetiology of madness with a first-person plural pronoun; we are interpellated as latterday Virgils and made to walk the wards of some institutional inferno. The mad are mentally “ravished” by the dead, a verb that blends the sense of military seizure with connotations of sexualized violence.’ Rosenberg: see ‘Girl to Soldier on Leave’ for interplay with Tartarus and the fettered Titans.

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Christian, Dante-influenced Hell, or a classical underworld, or both.9 In ‘them which despair’, hell is the past. When the glasses are filled, the speaker returns to his praise of the present: ‘let us invade sumptuously / the hurrying extravagant instant’. The urge to ‘invade’ picks up the military overtones of the earlier ‘commanded’—a word which does not lose its forceful, military flavour even when the reader also reads the French commander. The intensity of love—‘let us invade sumptuously’—can indeed rival the sexual intensity of warfare, as described in EIMI, and the carpe diem creed of seduction makes the present vitally, intensely, magically alive. ‘let us drink calvados’ is a delicate variation on Horace’s many wines (including vina liques, ‘strain the wine’, from I.11, the carpe diem ode); calvados pinpoints the French setting with a modernist eye for precision. Other Horatian poems might also be sensed here. We saw above (Chapter 7.2) that Cummings’ translation of Horace, Odes I.24 (‘Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus’) influenced the presentation of the classical underworld and the evocation of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in ‘Songs I’, ‘(thee will i praise between those rivers whose’. These two Cummings poems, ‘(thee will i praise’ and ‘them which despair’, are linked not only by their underworld imagery and relationship to the Orpheus myth, but also by the inverted, Latinate word order in their opening lines.10 The two poems seem to reflect a similar creative seam in Cummings’ work. Considering the influence of Odes I.24 on ‘(thee will i praise’, it may be that Horace’s reference to Orpheus in I.24 also influences Cummings’ reference to Eurydice in ‘them which despair’.11 Odes I.24 addresses Virgil in his grief for 9

Within the classical reception community, Vandiver 1999 (cf. Vandiver 2010) has focused attention on katabasis in war poetry. Mills, Jr. 1959: 435 describes Cummings’ own imprisonment as a kind of personal katabasis, but this seems stretched, since Cummings himself chose the metaphorical structure of Pilgrim’s Progress to express his prison experience in The Enormous Room. Gill 2007: 111 suggests that Cummings (in his letters and in The Enormous Room) ‘avoids . . . the “war is hell” theme’: ‘Perhaps Cummings feels that concentrating on war’s suffering and horror is too tendentious and propagandistic . . .’. I think Gill underestimates in some ways Cummings’ presentation of the horrors of war, especially in the poetry (which Gill is not here discussing), but it is indeed true that Cummings aims for a dryness and an obliqueness which could be read as an avoidance of over-used imagery or of any cheap presentation of war’s horrors. 10 See also above, Chapter 2.4; Arthos 1943: 378. 11 quid, si Threicio blandius Orpheo / auditam moderere arboribus fidem? (Odes I. 24.13–14). On Ode 1. 24, see Putnam 1992. Putnam’s translation: ‘What? Were you

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his friend Quintilius Varus. Horace’s poem about mourning and the limits of mourning would have resonance for Cummings’ poem about moving on in a post-war world. Cummings plays merry havoc with the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. In the classical story, it is Orpheus who turns at the threshold out of the Underworld and looks behind, thus losing Eurydice forever. Cummings chooses a twisted classical reference to distil the conflict between looking backwards and living in the ‘Now’. Perhaps the past is always twisted; perhaps our relationship with the classical past is always convoluted and in tension with the straightforwardness of Now. Or the text might, on the other hand, evoke a different glance altogether. The speaker enjoins his companion to take one last glance, like Eurydice near the gates of Hell; he does not say in which direction Eurydice glances. H.D.’s ‘Eurydice’, (from The God, 1913–17), takes Eurydice’s perspective at the moment when Orpheus’ betraying glance backwards snatches her return away from her: ‘flowers, / if I could have taken once my breath of them / . . . / I have lost the earth / and the flowers of the earth’. In Cummings’ text, is Eurydice’s last ‘brief look behind’ in fact her last glimpse of the overworld? Cummings’ seduction is poised against death, but there is ambiguity as to whose death it is poised against. On one reading, the speaker urges his amie to reject the hellish past of the war. On another reading, he urges her to embrace the present as the merest instant before her own life is snatched away. The poem explores aspects of living within time, and it is in flux for the reader whilst the reader reads.12 The poem pushes the reader to look back, revising readings of earlier lines and enacting the last glance of Eurydice, without even knowing in which direction she glances— behind to a hellish war or behind to the vibrant, living overworld nearly regained but now lost forever. The Platonic implications of cave and fire, and of ‘our’ scorn for those who despair, suggest that some

to master more seductively than Thracian Orpheus the lyre heard by the trees, would blood return to the empty image, which once Mercury, not prone to undo the fates by prayer, with his dread wand has herded in the black flock?’ 12 Cf. McGann 2004 on Swinburne as a quantum poet. Vance 2011: 596 observes in passing, vis-à-vis mediated reception of the Classics, that ‘the classically-nurtured Swinburne is an under-acknowledged influence on Great War poetry’.

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philosophical insight lurks in the poem.13 However, any attempt to take hold of this philosophical insight is undermined, since the pivotal existential claim made within the poem is in flux as well. Nothing is better than this except which has not happened,thence i bid you(as very deeply you near the gates of Hell)cast like Euridyce one brief look behind yourself.

6 7 8 9 (10)

On first reading, the reader expects the thought of lines 6–7 to continue: ‘which has not happened’ should be a mental parenthesis which will turn out to qualify the object of ‘except’. ‘Nothing is better than this, except whatever it is (we are waiting to learn), which has not happened.’ The reader is waiting for the postponed object of ‘except’ when the thought abruptly ends. It turns out that ‘which has not happened’ is itself the object of ‘except’, as a collapsed version of the thought ‘except [that] which has not happened’. Cummings has created this twisted syntax partly under a classical influence, by analogy with the option to omit antecedents of relative clauses in Latin or Greek. The thought remains ambiguous. Is this a claim about the future? Does the best lie in the future, just beyond reach? ‘Nothing is better than this / except which has not [yet] happened’? ‘Yet’ is so obviously missing that the reader feels incited to supply it in order to grab hold of the meaning; at the same time, the reader’s own desire to supply the word highlights its absence and destabilizes the line, because another reading is also possible. That ‘which has not happened’ may also be that ‘which did not happen’. In this sense, the claim is not about the future, but about the past and what might have been. ‘Nothing is better than this, except what could have been and was not.’ This slippage between verbal tenses is heightened by the altered syntax of the poem: ‘them which despair’ instead of ‘those who despair’ (perhaps under the influence of Shakespearean usage) and the unexpected position of ‘which has not happened’ as the object of

13

There may also be echoes of Dante, activated by the idea of despair. However, nothing in the poem suggests Hell until lines 8–9, and with these lines, Hell is pinpointed by allusion to Eurydice as a classical underworld, so Dante remains in the background.

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‘except’. Throughout the poem, the reader is being bumped onto adjacent meanings, onto adjacent languages (cave, commander), and onto adjacent syntactical forms. This bumping of syntax onto adjacent tracks reinforces the reading ‘except which did not happen’. It reminds the reader of the constant existence of alternative paths, including alternative paths which lie discarded in the past. In the shattered post-war world, there are lingering questions for survivors about the courses which history did not take: would another world have been better? It was a question which troubled other war poets, such as Edward Thomas in ‘As the team’s head brass’: One of my mates is dead. The second day In France they killed him. It was back in March, The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.’ ‘And I should not have sat here. Everything Would have been different. For it would have been Another world.’ ‘Ay, and a better, though If we could see all, all might seem good.’ [ . . . ]

Thomas is direct. Cummings is oblique, but—writing some years after Thomas, with the idea of lost futures embedded in the postwar experience—that is all that is required. In a post-war world, the blurring of settings (Platonic cave, gates of Hell, Parisian cellar bar) itself makes room for the hovering and unstated memory of the Great War. The war’s still disturbing presence is felt in the confusion of the language and of the images. The setting for Cummings’ carpe diem plea is the French café/bar (which stands in a relationship to the classical symposium/feast), where the speaker and his companion drink calvados (in a relationship to Horatian wine). Cummings’ speaker urges his companion to embrace the ‘Now’, to throw away care and to grasp the ‘hurrying . . . instant’, echoing the fleeting moment of Horace’s I.11: ‘dum loquimur, fugerit invida / aetas’ (‘while we speak, envious time will have flown’). As Steele Commager shows, in a classic article about the role of wine in Horace’s Odes, the drinking of wine represents abandonment of the past and freedom from anxiety for the future.14 ‘To accept death’s unpredictability along with its inevitability is to free ourselves 14

Commager 1957: 69–71.

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for commitment to the present, and wine becomes a token of that freedom and of that commitment.’15 Concerning the present and the future, Cummings is more direct than Horace. While Horace (as Commager argues) uses the uncertainty of the future to validate the claims of the present, Cummings more straightforwardly targets the present. His text elevates the present to an eternal absolute, an ‘Is’ and ‘Now’ which can be capitalized, secured in a garret, and protected by lock and key. How far can Cummings’ garret, lock, and key be pushed? These lines may contain a joke deliberately misprizing the prison key and ‘O swallow swallow’ near the end of The Waste Land.16 Eliot’s phrase may have seemed all the richer to Cummings for its indebtedness to Swinburne’s ‘Itylus’.17 I have suggested earlier (Chapter 7.3) that the refrains of ‘Itylus’ influenced the diction of ‘Songs V’, and I also suspect that the lines from ‘Itylus’, ‘And fair the feet of thy lover the spring: / But what wilt thou say to the spring thy lover?’, influenced Cummings’ lines, ‘death thy / rhythmic / lover’ in ‘O sweet spontaneous’ (see above, Chapter 6.4). Cummings’ own debts to ‘Itylus’ may well have sensitized him to Eliot’s swallow and its allusive history. Given The Waste Land’s own relationship to the Great War and to post-war Europe, a joke about Eliot’s swallow sits easily within the post-war reading of ‘them which despair’ proposed in this chapter. There may also be another layer of Horatian inversion in Cummings’ locked garret. As Commager observes—with particular reference to Odes II.14, which is among the Odes translated by Cummings—‘Since the banquet has such associations for Horace, we may better understand why wine locked into cellars should be a favorite symbol for the failure to fulfill oneself in the present. . . . Avarice is the most pernicious of vices (S. 2.3.82) in that it systematically denies man’s mortality’.18 Cummings’ French cave activates these Horatian cellars. Perhaps Cummings’ suggestion that ‘we’ should ‘shut ourselves into the garret’ to embrace the ‘Now’ can even be read as a humorous inversion of Horace’s wine locked in cellars to deny the now. The directness of Cummings’ focus on the ‘Now’ distils and simplifies Horace’s relationship with present and future. However, Cummings 15 16 17 18

Commager 1957: 73. I am very grateful to Miranda Hickman for the suggestion. See Laity 2004: 430 on the swallow in Swinburne, H.D., and Eliot. Commager 1957: 74.

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brings a deeper complexity and nuance about the past. This nuance is created largely through syntactical ambiguities, which also serve to ironize the manipulative power-dynamics of Horace’s carpe diem ode. Cummings’ speaker urges his female companion: ‘i bid you’. The words which jump out for the reader seem to form a main clause, ‘i bid you . . . cast’. But what is ‘thence’? It might be a logical connective—a loose substitute for ‘thus’. However, with its proper sense of ‘to there’, it must be the completion of ‘i bid you’. In this sense, the speaker’s ‘i bid you’ is completed by a ‘thence’ which in fact precedes ‘i bid you’. His thought has to be unpicked backwards, when the reader expects to be reading forwards, and when the speaker urges his companion into the present, the ‘Is’, the ‘Now’. The man’s backward word order and the woman’s backward glance establish a kind of parallel between the two. The confusions and ambiguities of the syntax, creating such multiple and slippery meanings throughout the poem, make the relationship between the speaker and the woman more fluid and permeable. The woman of Cummings’ poem has more agency than Horace’s manipulated Leuconoë. Moreover, Cummings’ speaker garbles his version of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which undercuts—even, perhaps, satirizes—his attempt to draw argumentative power from his command of the prestigious classical tradition. In Cummings’ poem, there is a kind of parallelism or even equality between the speaker and his companion; it is the reader who is deceived and manipulated by the twisting and elusive language. In sum, ‘them which despair’ enacts the connection between the Great War, the classical tradition, and Cummings’ poetry of seduction. Set in post-war Paris, it evokes Plato’s cave, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the classical underworld; it draws on Horace, and it presents a scene of seduction as a process of moving on from the trauma of the past. The military language and the wavering, often backwards-looking syntax of the speaker enact the difficulties and ambivalences of the task of moving on.

2. CARPE DIEM IN A POST-WAR WORLD The connections between the Great War, the classical tradition, and the poetry of seduction also play out elsewhere in Cummings’ corpus. In Chapter 6, we looked at Cummings’ war experience and war

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poetry, and at the connections which he drew between war, women, and sex, informed partly by his relationship with Marie Louise Lallemand. One of Cummings’ notebooks from his time in France in 1917 includes an abandoned poem in which he likens Marie Louise to Cleopatra, at point of death as she awaits the bite of the snake against her breast.19 Mimi habite seule, dans la Rue des Martyrs, devant la guerre chanteuse. Mimi maintenant vend, avec une amie qui s’appelle Marion, le long des soirs énormes, son petit sourir. l’amie de Mimi, d’une mine toujours neigeuse, ressemble un peu à Cléopatra, en ce moment quand son sein a trouvé le serpent et ses prunelles sont larges de la Mort ennuyeuse Elle a les cheveux

. Mimi au contraire,20

(Mimi lives alone, in the Rue des Martyrs, singer in the face of the war. Mimi now sells, with a friend called Marion, the breadth of enormous evenings, her little smile. The friend of Mimi, with a face always snowy, a little resembles Cleopatra, in that moment when her breast found the snake and her eyes are large with troubling Death. She has hair. Mimi, on the contrary,)

19 The poem refers also to Mimi, a close friend of Marie Louise. Mimi dated Cummings’ friend William Slater Brown when Marie Louise dated Cummings. Cummings consistently described Marie Louise as having a snowy neck or complexion. In this poem, she is referred to as ‘Marion’ for the sake of the rhyme (a, b, b, a), but the poem is clearly about her. 20 Houghton MS Am 1823.7 (7). In the last line before the fragment breaks off, there is a space left by Cummings to think later of a word. (This is common in Cummings’ drafts.) In a set of notes from France which Cummings typed up later (Houghton MS Am 1892.7 (78)), an overlapping fragment appears. As typed, i.e. without accents and mis-spelling ‘paresseuses’, it runs: l’amie de Mimi,d’une mine toujours neigeuse ressemble un peu a Cleopatre en ce moment quand son sein ennuye a trouve le serpent, et de la Mort boivent ses prunelles parasseuses. elle a les levres aigues,la chevelure chataine. elle ne marche pas,elle nage. Mimi,au contraire, (sa mere (une) juive,on dit (qu)un espagnol son pere) elastiquement bond sans grace et sans haleine

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Although Cummings never finished this poem, the ‘Portraits’ section of Tulips & Chimneys contains a one hundred and twenty line poem, ‘Cleopatra built’ (CP 91–4), which is another carpe diem poem of seduction.21 The poem is written in unrhymed quatrains. It begins with a series of incongruities: Cleopatra built like a smooth arrow or a fleet pillar is eaten by yesterday

A person (Cleopatra) is built. Having been built, she is then eaten. The eating, it transpires, is done by time. Each term is disjunctive to the previous.22 We saw above (Chapter 3.1) that Cummings’ translations from Horace as well as his relationship to Catullus foreground all-consuming Time. The more figurative the language in which it is expressed, the smoother and more familiar the idea of omnivorous Time seems. Cummings’ reworking from Catullus 3 in ‘PUELLA MEA’—‘Eater of all things lovely—Time!’—tries to re-inject some strangeness through its blunt diction. ‘Cleopatra built’ goes further than this, giving force back to the idea of omnivorous Time through the materialities and incongruities of the opening quatrain. Cleopatra was once real and alive: Cleopatra had a body it was thick slim warm moist

The speaker turns this sense of loss into seduction: O i tell you out of the minute incessant Was irrevocably emanates a dignity of papyruscoloured

21 Horace writes of Cleopatra’s death in Odes I.37 ‘Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero’, but the tone and imagery of that ode is very different from the direction taken by Cummings. 22 ‘built’ has to be a participle, not a finite verb. Cummings reworks the formula later in the poem: ‘,built like a fleet / pillar or a smooth / arrow / Cleopatra is eaten by // yester- / day)’ (lines 45–50).

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faces superbly limp the ostensible centuries therefore let us be a little uncouth and amorous in memory of Cleopatra and of Antony

The poem concludes with a paradoxically joyful fatalism: put your ear to the ground there is music Lady the noiseless truth of swirling worms is tomorrow

‘Cleopatra built’ varies the relationship to the future which is constructed by Horace in Odes I.11. Horace emphasizes its uncertainty: seu plures hiemes, seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam (‘whether Jupiter allocates many winters or this the last’). Knowledge is withheld: scire nefas (‘to know is violation’). Cummings, on the other hand, puts his emphasis on the certainty of death itself and not on the uncertainties of its timing. For him, death is ‘tomorrow’. Cummings crafts a different kind of fatalism to that of Horace, but the decision to end his poem on the resonant ‘tomorrow’ pays tribute to the final word, postero, of Odes I.11. Military language and imagery pervade ‘Cleopatra built’. The opening simile—‘Cleopatra built / like a smooth arrow or / a fleet pillar’— establishes this military note at the outset, not just through ‘smooth arrow’ but also through ‘fleet’. Although ‘fleet’ proves to modify ‘pillar’, it registers first in its naval sense—especially given the natural association of Cleopatra with naval warfare (the defeat at Actium). The word ‘fleet’ follows the image of an arrow, and it cannot be fully reconciled as an adjective: what is a swift pillar? or is it a fleet[ing] pillar, since it is consumed by time? This is true to Cummings’ poetic technique which persistently multiplies the meanings of words through syntax which cannot be fully resolved.

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The military notes signalled in the opening lines pervade the poem, with its echoes of Roman glory: of [...]

the leaneyed

Caesars borne neatly through enormous twilight surrounded by their triumphs

But this glory is gone: (all is eaten by yesterday between the nibbling timid teethful hours wilts the stern texture of Now

The image of ‘Now’, wilting ‘between the nibbling timid teethful hours’, anticipates Pound’s later response to Horace’s image of winter wearing out the Tyrrhenian sea against the rock (seu plures hiemes, seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam, / quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare / Tyrrhenum). Pound translated these lines: Better to take whatever, Several, or last, Jove sends us. Winter is winter, Gnawing the Tyrrhene cliffs with the sea’s tooth.

Cummings’ ‘nibbling teethful hours’ (or his poetic language more generally) may even have influenced Pound’s interpretation.23 However, although ‘Cleopatra built’ is a carpe diem poem, it is not as Horatian as ‘them which despair’. Its classicism is changed by mediation through Shakespeare. Shakespeare exerts a broad mediating influence on Cummings’ classicism, and we have already seen specific points at which this influence can be felt, such as Cummings’ translation from Sophocles’ Electra (Chapter 3.1) or the Greek/Shakespearean chorus in the play Him (Chapter 3.2). The prominence of Shakespeare’s mediation is, naturally, variable. Cummings’ fascination with 23 Pound’s translation: Carne-Ross and Haynes (eds) 1996: 252–3. Originally published in 1963, which is to say, the year after Cummings’ death. If there are echoes of Cummings’ language on time in Pound’s ruminations on death, the year after death took Cummings, it is tempting to see more than coincidence. The importance of Cummings to Pound in Pound’s later years is not to be underestimated. A photo of Cummings sat in Pound’s room: see photograph of Pound with Cummings’ photo in the background, reproduced in Sawyer-Lauçanno, second centrefold; discussed Webster 2012: 64; Sawyer-Lauçanno and Webster assign different dates to the photograph of Pound. On Cummings and Pound see Webster 2012, and my own thoughts, Rosenblitt 2013.

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the figure of Cleopatra is one point at which Shakespearean mediation is particularly powerful. Antony and Cleopatra was one of the Shakespearean plays which stood out for Cummings, as is clear inter alia from his personal notes on Shakespeare, his lecture notes for his abandoned California lecture series, and his nonlectures, during which he read out a portion of the play.24 Three times in ‘Cleopatra built’, as a kind of refrain, Cleopatra is said to be ‘eaten / by yesterday’. At another point, the speaker avers that ‘all is eaten by yester- / day’, and the poem nears its close with the ‘noiseless truth of swirling / worms’. This language is tempered with that of Antony and Cleopatra, where we also find eating by worms. In the drawn-out-for-laughs interaction between Cleopatra and the Clown who supplies her with the serpent (Act V, Scene 2), Cleopatra asks, ‘Will it eat me?’, while the Clown more than once encourages her: ‘I wish you joy o’th’ worm.’25 The mingling of Cummings’ Horatian carpe diem aesthetic with his Shakespearean engagements alters the carpe diem tone. Cummings imports a Shakespearean sense of performance into his celebration of the present moment, and this sense of performance turns the seized moment into a kind of eternity. Cummings’ absorption of Shakespeare as theatre can be felt in the whirling theatricality of ‘Cleopatra built’: [ . . . ] while the infinite processions move like moths and like boys and like incense and like sunlight and like ships and like young girls and like butterflies and like money and like laughter and like elephants through our single brain in memory of Cleopatra [ . . . ]

24 Houghton MS Am 1823.7 (67); Houghton MS Am 1892.7 (90); Cummings 1967: 92–6. Another intertext for ‘Cleopatra built’ is the Jack Shargel sketch of ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, performed regularly at the burlesque and comedy venue, the National Winter Garden (New York). This is the sketch which included the shattered rose (see above, p. 147, n. 17; Norman 1972: 129) and it was one of Cummings’ favourites. 25 Cummings had certainly noticed Shakespeare’s ‘worm’: he refers to it in his notes on Shakespeare: Houghton MS Am 1823.7 (67), Folder 1 of 2.

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(Cummings ‘processions’ moving ‘like boys’ recollects, perhaps, Cleopatra’s own dread of display in a Roman triumph: ‘I shall see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness’, V. 2.) As well as the theatricality, the musicality of Shakespeare’s play also resurfaces in Cummings’ poem. Cleopatra’s call for music—‘Give me some music’ (II. 5)—is answered by Cummings’ speaker: ‘put your ear / to the ground / there is music / Lady’. These luxuriant performance aspects inherited from Shakespeare allow Cummings an expansiveness in space and time. That expansiveness has origins in Shakespeare’s language and is reflected in Cummings’ language. CLEOPATRA (to Antony) I’ll set a bourn how far to be beloved. ANTONY Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.

(I. 1)

Or, as Cummings puts it, ‘a crumbling flight into the absolute stars’ (l. 83). This expansiveness of Now is at the heart of Cummings’ carpe diem aesthetic in ‘Cleopatra built’. The incongruous and soft ‘wilt’ in Cummings’ lines—‘between the nibbling timid teethful hours / wilts the stern texture of Now’— recollects the equally soft and incongruous verb in Antony’s dismissal of the concerns of Rome: ‘Let Rome in Tiber melt’ (I.1). The softness of consuming time is another change from the Horatian tone. It brings a dissolving vividness to the synaesthetic melting of desire, triumphs, ‘infinite processions’, ‘sharp languid perfumes’, and ‘a sinuous problem of colour / floating’ in Cummings’ poem. By incorporating Shakespeare into his Horatian inheritance, Cummings creates a version of carpe diem which focuses, meltingly, on the expansive eternity of the moment. The passage of time is still felt, even in this all-embracing present. With ‘Cleopatra built’, the opening line evokes the ruins of antiquity, through the reader’s immediate knowledge that the ‘built’ Cleopatra is passed into memory. The distance conjured by ‘superbly limp / the ostensible centuries’ is reminiscent of the ‘smoking centuries of hecatombs’ in Cummings’ translation of Horace, Odes II.14 (above, Chapter 3). In a notebook from France, 1917, Cummings has written a series of notes under various headings. One of the headings is ‘Civ.’ (for Civilization), under which he wrote: ‘destroyed Time, could not

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destroy symbol of time.’26 This somewhat cryptic idea is played out in Cummings’ carpe diem poetry. The seductions of the past become indestructible symbols of time. Thus, ‘out of / the minute incessant Was’, come brightnesses, ‘like sunlight’, ‘in the bright shouting street of time’, consumed by Now: the gods are swallowed even Nile the kind black great god)

Time is eaten by yesterday; worms are tomorrow. And yet, in the moment of pure poetry, in Cummings’ carpe diem invocation, everything comes alive in ‘the fragrant / unspeaking ignorant darkness of New’, where time becomes timeless.27

3. ‘FIELDS SLOWLY ELYSIAN’ Cummings’ poetry of seduction offers the intensity which can compete with the sexual aliveness of war. But as well as seduction, the post-war world also encompasses loneliness. In ‘them which despair’, we saw a man and woman seated together, drinking in a bar in Paris. In the following poem, also (like ‘Cleopatra built’) from the ‘Portraits’ section of Tulips & Chimneys (CP 87), we see a woman at a café alone.

26 Houghton MS Am 1823.7 (17). This is the same notebook which includes a draft of ‘Songs I’ (see above, Chapter 7.2). Cf. (in context of Cummings’ idea that the essence of art is to be alive): ‘Whoever says that the creator of Antony & cleopatra is dead,& we are not,states a merely measurable & therefore comfortable fact:but I speak the challenging & immeasurable truth if I assure you that William Shakespeare was,& is,incomparably more alive than we.’ Houghton MS Am 1892.7 (90): ‘Notes for a nonexisting lecture (California)’. (Folder 2 of 44). 27 Tal-Mason 1968 surveys aspects of time and timelessness in Cummings, in connection with Cummings’ depiction of the role of love, his use of Platonic models, his relationship to Romantic notions of the eternal, and ‘the fin de siecle obsession with the moment (time’s crystallization)’.

184

E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics inthe,exquisite; morning sure lyHer eye s exactly sit,ata little roundtable among otherlittle roundtables Her,eyes count slow(ly obstre peroustimidi ties surElyfl)oat iNg,the ofpieces ofof sunligh tof fa l l in gof throughof treesOf. (Fields Elysian the like,a)slEEping neck a breathing a (slo wlythe wom an pa)ris her flesh:wakes in little streets

,lies

while exactlygir lisHlegs;play;ing;nake;D and chairs wait under the trees Fields slowly Elysian in a firmcool-Ness taxis, s.QuirM and, b etw ee nch air st ott er s thesillyold WomanSellingBalloonS In theex qui site morning, her sureLyeye s sit-ex actly her sitsat a surely!little, roundtable amongother;littleexactly round. tables, Her .eyes

Here we have a young woman sitting outdoors at a Parisian café in the Champs-Élysées—which Cummings renders as the ‘Fields Elysian’. The post-war context is implicit. The image of a woman sitting alone in a Parisian café is evocative of the immediately post-war world—both the greater independence of women and the dearth of young men. The French Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was erected in 1920 under the Arc de Triomphe, at one end of the Champs Élysées, and that tomb features in another of Cummings’ poems.28 It might be suggested that the decision to refer to the Champs-Élysées as the Fields Elysian brings the tomb into play.

‘the // extremely artistic nevertobeextinguished fla / -me’ (from ‘opening of the chambers close’, CP 266). The poem puns on the French paix / ‘Pay’: the French pun makes clear that this is the French Tomb of the Unknown Soldier: see note 2, the editor’s (i.e. Michael Webster’s) note, to Sychterz 2007. 28

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Cohen discusses the Cubist effects in the poem: ‘the intrusive of ’s suggest the pieces of sunlight themselves, filtering irregularly through the trees’.29 The same repetitive ‘of ’s, including the refrain ‘of sunlight’, feature in an unpublished poem, also set in post-war Paris.30 This unpublished piece reflects the same setting and poetic mood as ‘inthe,exquisite;’, and highlights more explicitly the postwar angle: Myself carefully was watching always picture(my)of sunlight carefully framed by door of always(self)this little restaurant in(my) which carefully watching(my)always brittle(self my)was. At a white (this sat at always)table to me sitting(carefully)came(into always this picture of watching)a small cry of music cruelly floating from (carefully of sunlight of)my(of watching of)self. Came la(proudly) marseillaise. Children form a(staringly)picture lane of(to stare with stares of)sunlight(bodies through)of whom a(comes dark different a partly)body partly(what cruelly now seriously coming very why). Along the sidewalk a what allowed(sometimes between starings of sunlight)itself to be perceived(not man and not thing)but a mutilated (solemnly within the tinsel cloud of tune strutting gradually)silence Not silence(a negro a soldier a person)a partly(cruelly)thingman. (Walking on halflegs)with two each on protruding each(from a soldier’s stomach)drums one smaller says N.Y.Band bigger one says Good Bye to City the he(black face dark glasses)solemn gradually the)cripple the(stumps marching)musicing la cruelly(of) marseillaise (of children sunlight of)picture.

Sitting in the sunlight at a ‘little restaurant’ in an atmosphere of postwar patriotism—‘la(proudly) / marseillaise’—the speaker watches a disabled veteran, ‘a negro a soldier a person’ on ‘halflegs’ under ‘a / soldier’s stomach’. The sight of the ‘cripple the(stumps marching)’ undercuts the initial patriotism, and the mood changes: ‘la cruelly(of) / marseillaise)’. Children stare. The isolation and cruelty of the postwar world which is evident in the experience of the crippled veteran

29

Cohen 1987: 141. MS Am 1892.7 (197). This poem found its way into the folders of material restricted until 1991. It would therefore not have been available to Kennedy and Firmage when they made their selection for Etcetera: the Unpublished Poems (1983). If it had been available, I suspect they might have included it: it certainly illuminates the moods of Cummings’ Parisian post-war poetry. There are two typescript drafts; I have given the text of the page which is clearly second, since it incorporates revisions noted on the first page. 30

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draws our attention to the more subtle loneliness of the young woman sitting at a table in the Fields Elysian.31 The spaces and idiosyncratic capitalization which break up words in ‘inthe,exquisite;’ create a blurring of languages. There is a suggestion of the French ‘sur’ (on/above) in the ‘surEly’ which precedes ‘fl) oat iNg’. The suggestion of sur enhances the impression of ‘floating’, and the ‘Ely’ of ‘surely’ seems to start the word ‘Elysian’, so that while we read ‘surely floating’ we might also read the implication of floating—as the souls of the dead would float—sur Elysian fields. In the line ‘In theex qui site’, the ‘ex’ and the ‘qui’ of ‘exquisite’ are Latinate and reinforce the Elysian setting. Other Latin or French words could be picked out, depending on the reader’s eye. The setting blurs the Parisian Champs-Élysées and the classical Fields Elysian. Scholars of classical receptions have adopted a variety of metaphors to try to express the intimacies or ruptures which poetry can create between classical time and other time(s). Poetry may ‘collapse’ the distance, ‘erode’ it, or create a ‘simultaneity’ of past and present.32 Cummings’ ‘inthe,exquisite;’ is best described as slippage, with no attempt made at resolution. The classical underworld is embedded, coterminous with the Parisian setting, and it is possible to find oneself in either location or both at once. The poem goes as far as language can go in locating the woman fully in both places. Neither setting is ‘actual’ as opposed to the other being ‘metaphorical’. Our natural assumption as realist readers is to privilege the ChampsÉlysées and understand the Fields Elysian as a metaphor. However, the poem balances our prejudices by stating the location simply and literally as the Fields Elysian: ‘chairs wait under the trees // Fields slowly Elysian in / a firmcool-Ness’. In keeping with the poem’s Cubist aesthetic, different planes (the Champs-Élysées and the Fields Elysian) are presented with complete simultaneity. The slippage enhances the lostness of the classical world, but it also means that the figures within the poem have more of an in-and-out 31 For the appearance of soldiers marking the post-war context in Cummings’ poems from 1920s Paris, see also ‘Whereupon i seize a train and suddenly i am in Paris towards night,in Mai.’ (= ‘THE RAIN IS A HANDSOME ANIMAL’, CP 994) and ‘Perfectly a year,we watched Together les enfants jumping and’ (CP 1000). 32 Hunt 2014: 385 on Jamie McKendrick: ‘collapses distinctions between past and present’. Hardwick 2007: 70: ‘. . . erosion of that temporal distance between past and present that is a feature of most approaches to classical receptions.’ Hardwick 2011: 52–6 on Michael Longley’s ‘disruptions’, ‘realignments’, and ‘simultaneities’.

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feel, which amplifies their multivalent possibilities. The poem’s multivalency creates further possibilities with respect to the marked image of an old woman selling balloons. As noted already, ‘inthe,exquisite;’ comes from the ‘Portraits’ section of Tulips & Chimneys. Earlier in Tulips & Chimneys (as we saw in Chapter 4.2), the reader has encountered the goat-footed balloonman who appears as a Pan or satyrfigure in what is now probably Cummings’ most famous poem, ‘in Just-/ spring’. The reappearance here of a balloon-seller, also old, altered in gender, a ‘silly old WomanSellingBalloonS’, picks up on ‘the queer old balloonman’ from that earlier poem. It approaches the idea of different avatars of one type seen in Eliot’s The Waste Land, and later used by Cummings in other contexts, especially in Him and EIMI. The ‘queer old balloonman’ is a Pan-figure and a bringer of spring. The ‘silly old woman’ may also hint at spring and at rejuvenation. Part of Cummings’ interest in spring in this first collection of poetry is an interest in healing, rejuvenation, and moving on. As we saw in Chapter 6.4, the section of Tulips & Chimneys which is titled ‘La Guerre’ ends with an ambivalent poem about the regenerative capacities of spring. Finally, the silly old woman evokes a world of spinsters and widows, women doing men’s jobs, a post-war scene with two women and no men. The foil to Cummings’ poetry of seduction is this poem of loneliness and vulnerability. The appealing ‘firmcool-Ness’ of these sunlit Elysian Fields captures the ambiguity inherent in moving on, in a living and sunlit post-war world whose meaning inherently contains death.

4. SUICIDE Seduction and death, war, time, and ruin are all instabilities. Cummings’ relationship to the classical world brought a kind of stability within these unstable terms of existence. The carpe diem poetry channels and structures the intensity of war into an intensity of seduction and of the Now. Even the slippage of ‘inthe,exquisite;’ offers a kind of emotional stability. The setting is unresolved, but it is also suffused with peace and sunlight.

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The stability which is brought into Cummings’ poetry through his relationship with the classical world can be seen in sharper relief by following, briefly, a non-classical thread. In this last section, I look at themes familiar from the previous two chapters and from this chapter so far: the speaker and his love, exquisite annihilation, death and its inevitability (eheu fugaces . . . ). However, I follow these themes this time through the Chimneys section of Tulips & Chimneys. The poems in Chimneys are all sonnets (mostly in very stretched forms). Chimneys is far less classically engaged than Tulips. Following threads of love and death handled outside of Cummings’ relationship with the classical world, we find a more tortured and unstable relationship between the speaker and his lady love, culminating in fantasies of suicide. I make no value judgement as to which is the better poetry; there is brilliance in both. For present purposes, the nonclassical material is included because of the light which it sheds, by contrast, on the nature of Cummings’ relationship to the Classics and the effect of that relationship on his poetry. Chimneys is divided into three sections: ‘Sonnets–Realities’, ‘Sonnets–Unrealities’, and ‘Sonnets–Actualities’. Each section has its own distinctive tone, but all three sections explore male and female sexuality in intrinsic juxtaposition to death. The twenty-one sonnets of ‘Sonnets–Realities’ pursue an aesthetic of the coarse, of the restaurant dive, of the whorehouse, ‘of this wilting wall the colour drub / souring sunbeams’ (CP 131). [...] But i am interested more intricately in the delicate scorn with which in a putrid window every day almost leans a lady whose still-born smile involves the comedy of decay,

The sonnet closes on the comma. These lines illustrate the ambiguous power relationship between woman and death which is thematic in ‘Realities’. The lady has a victory in her ‘delicate scorn’ and her appearance day after day—although the reader must know that ‘every day’ cannot last forever. She is already marked by death, in her ‘still-born / smile’. And while what she scorns ‘involves the comedy of decay’, the comedic aspect diminishes her as well as death. A victory over the comedy of decay has no tragic grandeur, and decay (as in the poem) will always have the last word. Ultimately the joke will be on her.

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The women of ‘Realities’ are victims of decay: ‘ladies with whom time // feeds especially his immense lips // On whose nakedness death most believes,’ (CP 122). But there is poetry in death: ‘the poetic carcass of a girl’ (CP 123). And occasionally, if only for a moment, the love of a woman has the upper hand: ‘with mystic lips take twilight where i know: / proving to Death that Love is so and so.’ (CP 117). There is even alliance with death. The prostitute Kitty is ‘Death’s littlest pal’: not, perhaps, a freely sought alliance, since she is only ‘sixteen’, a mere ‘twice eight’ (CP 126). Even so, alliance with death is a kind of sexual power. Another prostitute whose ‘thickish flesh’ is ‘superior to the genuine daze of unmarketable excitation’ is free to ‘scatter’ among the men ‘pink propaganda of annihilation’ (CP 130).33 The second section of Chimneys, ‘Sonnets–Unrealities’, offers a sharp change in register. The first of its eighteen poems opens on notes of roses, perfume, and music: ‘and what were roses. Perfume? for i do / forget . . . .or mere Music mounting unsurely // twilight’ (CP 136). In ‘Unrealities’, there is a more spiritual intimacy between lover and lady, which may result in bowing graciously to time—‘i do excuse me,love,to Death and Time’ (CP 137)—or in dreaming beyond it, of ‘a connotation of infinity’ (CP 138). In ‘Unrealities’, the death of beloved and of self is confronted most directly in a sonnet which abides by Shelley’s dictum, ‘No more let Life divide what Death can join together’.34 who’s most afraid of death?thou art of him utterly afraid,i love of thee (beloved)this and truly i would be near when his scythe takes crisply the whim of thy smoothness.

33

On this poem, compare Fallon 2012 [2013]: 77–9. CP 149. Shelley’s line is from Adonais. Adonais was an important poem for Cummings (see also above, Chapter 3.1). It is one of two poems (the other being Keats’ ‘Lamia’) on which he took detailed notes in his Harvard-era notebooks, writing out lines which struck him together with exposition of the poetic effects which were achieved. (HRC 6.8; for the notes on ‘Lamia’, HRC 6.9.) Note also that Cummings’ ‘come,gaze with me upon this dome’ (CP 272) alludes to the ‘dome of many-coloured glass’ from Adonais, as Cummings himself informed one of his translators. See Michael Webster, http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/cummings/notes.htm#is5. Accessed 7 July 2014. 34

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While his lady may fear death, the lover’s concern is only that they should cleave together, to ‘steer our lost bodies carefully downward)’. The final section of Chimneys is ‘Sonnets–Actualities’. ‘Actualities’ for Cummings went beyond realities in their quality of embodying a heightened, immediate experience.35 This sonnet section includes a range of tones and poses which defy summary. It is in ‘Actualities’ that we have an explicit suicide (CP 157): the mind is its own beautiful prisoner. Mine looked long at the sticky moon opening in dusk her new wings then decently hanged himself,one afternoon. The last thing he saw was you naked amid unnaked things, your flesh,a succinct wandlike animal, a little strolling with the futile purr of blood;your sex squeaked like a billiard-cue chalking itself,as not to make an error, with twists spontaneously methodical. He suddenly tasted worms windows and roses he laughed,and closed his eyes as a girl closes her left hand upon a mirror.

There are some echoes here of the deaths in ‘The Young Faun’ and in ‘Songs’. We witness male self-annihilation in a moment of his own supreme desire. His last sight ‘was you / naked’. However, the beloved is not the idealized beloved of ‘Songs’ or the embodiment of unobtainable and untouchable purity (a ‘loneliness’) of ‘The Young Faun’. She embodies the powerful physical allure of the female lover, with a more physical and particularized female sexuality. Death in this sonnet is not as exquisite as the deaths in ‘The Young Faun’ or ‘Songs’, though there is still ecstasy in the escape: ‘He suddenly tasted worms windows and roses // he laughed.’ Male suicide, here, is an aspect of a man’s response to female sexuality. His suicide is parallel to her sexual sense of self: he ‘closed his eyes as a girl closes / her left hand upon a mirror’. ‘Sonnets–Actualities’ gives a complex account of male sexuality and the attraction of self-annihilation. It is an attraction which can be laced 35 Webster 2005/2006a. At 129, he suggests that the ‘actual’ for Cummings is comparable to Guillaume Apollinaire’s idea of a heightened realism, ‘sur-réalisme’.

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with repulsion: it carries the ambivalence of ‘death’s big rotten particular kiss’ (CP 164). It is framed in relation to the beloved, whose own mortality is a troubling thought. There is disbelieving recognition: ‘it is funny,you will be dead some day.’ (CP 155). Accompanying the recognition, there is the fantasy that a man’s love can protect his beloved from death. In ‘my love is building a building / around you’ (CP 165), the building is ‘a discrete / tower of magic’. And when Farmer Death(whom fairies hate)shall crumble the mouth-flower fleet He’ll not my tower, laborious,casual where the surrounded smile hangs breathless

The fairies draw attention to the element of fantasy. So does the missing verb—‘He’ll not [crumble] my tower’. The more straightforward the statement, the more it would have to be recognized as untrue; no love nor tower can keep Farmer Death from any beloved. The claim that ‘He’ll not my tower’ uses an incomplete syntax—a kind of zeugma, since the verb has to be resupplied from the previous line—to deflect the statement. The omission averts self-knowledge and protects the fantasy. Thus male self-annihilation in ‘Actualities’ is twinned with a struggle to accept the mortality of the beloved. The realization of her inevitable physical death is one of the consequences of the move from an adolescent imagination, which prizes a woman who is ‘a whiteness in the water’ and ‘a great loneliness’, to an appreciation of female sexuality which is intensely physical, which ‘squeak[s] like a billiard-cue / chalking itself ’. Cummings’ interest in suicide resurfaces in subsequent volumes of poetry. In these later poems, it loses any remaining connotations of an aestheticized and eroticized self-annihilation, and it becomes instead a crisis of self. A prose-poem from the 1926 collection is 5 talks the reader through the memory of a near suicide (CP 260). This fairly lengthy poem opens: Will i ever forget that precarious moment? As i was standing on the third rail waiting for the next train to grind me into lifeless atoms various absurd thoughts slyly crept into my highly sexed mind.

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Although the speaker describes himself as ‘highly sexed’, this suicide is not in a relationship with female sexuality. The sexual desire is stifled and there is no beloved. Indeed, part of the problem for the unhappy near-suicide is ‘that i was wifeless and only half awake, cursed with pimples’. The paralysis of an aborted suicide and elements of internal monologue make this one of Cummings’ most Joycean poems. Cummings had read Ulysses within a year or so of its publication.36 The absurd thoughts of the speaker of this prose-poem drift in a Joycean language: ‘a religious cult based on consubstantial intangibility’ (Cummings); ‘Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son are consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring his life long on the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality’ (Joyce).37 The voice of the speaker also shifts in Joycean fashion, referring to himself in a mix of first and third person: ‘Let us perhaps excuse me if i repeat himself ’. The blend of first and third person, as well as seeming Joycean, echoes the earlier suicide poem from ‘Sonnets–Actualities’ (Chimneys). There, the blend of first and third person was less startling because it was achieved through externalising the mind, rather than directly blending pronouns: ‘the mind is its own beautiful prisoner. / Mine [ . . . .] decently hanged himself ’. But even this softer blend of first and third person expresses an aspect of suicide. The fact that a suicide is the object of his own violence—the victim of his own act of self-murder—creates a complexity of first and third person, subject and object. Merely hinted at in the sonnet from Chimneys, this unravelling of the self is dominant in ‘Will i ever forget that precarious moment?’ The anticipated death is not exquisite or aesthetic, even if there are moments in the poem where the banality is heightened: ‘It seemed too beautiful.’ Here, suicide is not an embodiment of erotic perfection; it is a crisis. Finally, in the collection W [ViVa] (1931) (CP 339): in a middle of a room stands a suicide sniffing a Paper rose smiling to a self

36 37

Evidenced by notes: Houghton MS Am 1823.7 (25), Folder 1 of 11. 1993 [1922]: 38.

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If the near-suicide of ‘Will i ever forget that precarious moment?’ is Joycean, this suicide of ‘in a middle of a room’ has Eliotic resonances. It echoes, lightly, the moon in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, whose hand ‘twists a paper rose / That smells of dust and eau de Cologne’. In what follows (Chapter 9.2), we will see more of Eliot’s influence on issues of sterility (sexual and poetic) and alienation in Cummings’ poetry. ‘in a middle of a room’ hints at a lost love: ‘even remembering the way who / looked at whom first’ suggests an attempt to recollect the beginnings of a love affair. But the suicide is self-involved: ‘smiling to a self ’. Although it occurs in relation to a lady, it is—like the abortive suicide in ‘Will i ever forget that precarious moment’—more essentially a crisis of selfhood. The poem closes: (a moon swims out of a cloud a clock strikes midnight a finger pulls a trigger a bird flies into a mirror)

The mirror motif echoes the end of the earlier Chimneys suicide sonnet: ‘he laughed,and closed his eyes as a girl closes / her left hand upon a mirror’. However, in the Chimneys sonnet, the image is a simile, and thus implies a parallel between male annihilation and female desire. The mirror in the later poem, by contrast, evokes the breaking of self.38 38 There is a painting titled ‘Suicide’ in CIOPW (1931: 79): an oil-painting in dark tones and large, impressionistic strokes, depicting a crowd gathered round a body. CIOPW abbreviates ‘Charcoal Ink Oil Pencil & Watercolours’, and reproduces some of Cummings’ artwork in those media. Cummings felt suicidal impulses after the break-up of his marriage to Elaine Orr. He had bought a gun, and the language in his notes fantasizing about suicide has some similarities to ‘in a middle of a room’. See Sawyer-Lauçanno 2006: 247–8 (quoting from the notes); 336 (drawing a connection with the poem). ‘Will i ever forget that precarious moment?’, which imagines a suicide jumping in front of a train, is from is 5 (1926), the same year in which Cummings’ father, the Reverend Edward Cummings, died when his car was hit by a train. This is coincidence. is 5 was assembled by February (Sawyer-Lauçanno 2006: 290) and the Rev. Cummings died on 2 November (Kennedy 1994a: 293). There is a very brief discussion of Cummings and the theme of suicide in Tal-Mason 1968: 93–4. She reads ‘in a middle of a room’ as a metaphorical suicide—a man who shoots his reflection in the mirror—and she compares it to the scene in Him in which Him threatens his mirror reflection with a gun. The ambiguity in the poem as to whether the speaker shoots himself or his reflection highlights the focus on breaking of self, rather than on physical death.

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Cummings’ work pushes language to the edge of stability. His defiant syntax, disrupted words, and aberrant punctuation test the limits of communication between poet and reader. In Chapter 2, we saw that the ancient languages played a role in pushing Cummings towards a destabilization of English. Here, we see that Cumming’ relationship to the classical world also brought stability. It anchored him within a (constructed) tradition, the limits of which he constantly pushed. His classical carpe diem self—for better or for worse—is more stable than the self-shattering lover of Chimneys (and beyond).39 Classical time and ruin provided a language in which to explore the shifting and elusive experience of moving on in a post-war world. The shifting and slippage in Cummings’ relationship to the classical world in ‘them which despair’, ‘Cleopatra built’, and ‘inthe,exquisite;’ mirrors a shifting time. The success of this mimesis—the fact that a shifting language could be found for a shifting world—brought a core of stability which Cummings used in order to push language to its unstable limits.

39 I borrow the term ‘self-shattering’ from Laity 2004, who discusses the erotic selfshattering predicated on Swinburnian visual imagery in H.D. and Eliot. Cummings’ imagery in Chimneys is less Swinburnian than at some points in Tulips, but we have already seen (in Chapter 7) that the Swinburnian background is a component of Cummings’ ideas of self-annihilation.

Cummings, Classics, and Modernism

9 Modernity and Antiquity ‘smite the sounding bollox’

Cummings wished for his art to be alive: to feel, to move, to grow. In this chapter, I look at Cummings’ response to antiquity and modernity framed in terms of aliveness and deadness. The material here partially overlaps with and partially extends the time frame which has been the primary focus of the book so far. I have looked thus far mainly at Cummings’ Harvard years; at his response to the Great War; at his first poetry collection, Tulips & Chimneys (1922); and—in the preceding chapter—at the post-war period in Paris in the early 1920s. I now look at the period 1917–26. I begin in Section 1 with Cummings’ theories of art, drawing on notes made in France in 1917 and further notes made during his 1921–23 return to Paris. Section 2 turns to the poems of Cummings’ fourth poetry collection, is 5, which was published in 1926. (His second published collection, XLI Poems (1925) and most of his third published collection, & [AND] (1925), consist of poems excluded from Tulips and Chimneys (1923). Thus is 5 represents Cummings’ second freshly conceived collection.) In some of the poetry of is 5, Cummings becomes more Eliotic in his diction and in his construction of poetic speakers. I draw out, briefly, some aspects of this Eliotic tone before turning finally, in Section 3, to a previously unpublished and unknown parody of The Waste Land. The parody is undated, but most likely composed as a fairly immediate response, circa late 1922–23, to The Waste Land’s publication in the November 1922 issue of The Dial.1 The Eliotic side of Cummings’ relationship to modernity reveals also a different 1

For the date, see discussion in ‘Editing the Unpublished Work’, below.

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relationship to classical material. Here, Cummings shows how attempts to control and manipulate the classical tradition carry the danger of sterility.

1. FROM PLATO TO CÉZANNE: MOVEMENT AND BULGE In a notebook kept during Cummings’ imprisonment in France at La Ferté-Macé (1917), Cummings jotted down the following antithesis: Life - chaos, feeling, κινεσις, vibration Death - cosmos, thinking, στασις, solidity2

It is typical of Cummings’ thinking. His notes map his attempts to find an artistic aliveness and, in that search, he consistently reached for Greek terms—here, κινησις (movement, slightly misspelled as ‘κινεσις’ in Cummings’ note) versus στασις (a position or state).3 For Cummings, στασις connotes stagnation or the static. Aliveness was a quality which Cummings sought and praised in the work of others, including early Eliot: ‘before an Eliot we become alive or intense as we become intense or alive before a Cézanne or a Lachaise’. Cummings proffers this endorsement in a review of Eliot’s early poetry for The Dial, June 1920.4 In general, however, Cummings did not publish as much in the way of literary criticism, essays, or theory as some modernist contemporaries, especially Eliot and Pound. This was not a retreat—an accusation which, for example, Rainey has levelled against H.D., whose small critical output Rainey attributes to her ‘coterie’ status.5 Whatever is made of Rainey’s 2

Houghton MS Am 1823.7 (9). See Olsen 1996 on futurism, motion, kinēsis; Everson 1979 on death versus dying, raising issues of the static versus the verbal. More thoughts on chaos and art, with clear Greek resonances: see Cummings 2007b (letter to Thayer) with Gill 2007: 110– 11. On Cummings and aliveness, see Webster 2004a. Cummings and an aesthetics of movement is a topic touched on by many scholars. See, in particular, Kidder 1976b: 474–7; Cohen 1987: passim, esp. 71–2; 74, 151–94. 4 ‘T.S. Eliot’, rpt. Cummings 1965: 25–9; quote at 26. 5 Rainey 1998: 146–68. Rainey argues (as he puts it at 155) that H.D. ‘felt little impetus to engage in an active or genuine dialogue with her contemporaries’. Note, however, Laity’s response (1996: 30–1, responding to the position incorporated into Rainey 1998 but already voiced in Rainey 1991). Laity argues that H.D. was excluded 3

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distaste for H.D., Cummings’ avoidance of critical writing—he frequently turned down requests for critical essays or reviews—seems likely to be connected to his real struggles in structuring longer, more analytical prose.6 If Cummings was mildly dyslexic (see Foreword), this may have affected his ability to structure conventional prose writing. Cummings did write reams and reams of personal notes concerning poetic theory, musical theory, artistic theory, Cubism, and more. Since very little of this thinking was ever published, it did not have an impact on modernist literary debates in the manner of Eliot’s criticism or Pound’s polemics. However, Cummings’ aesthetic theorizing directly shaped his own poetry and his visual art.7 The challenge and the paradox, for Cummings, was this: since ‘Life’ is movement and chaos, how can chaos be expressed in art without freezing it in a static order which is death? Hence: Paradox: chaos only way to get (instantaneity) is by orderly expression —— Cézanne8

Cummings’ notes from the nineteen ’teens and early twenties continue this search to understand artistic motion in what is necessarily an ordered representation. These notes express a combination of appreciation for Greek art and criticism of it. In another notebook from France (1917), Cummings suggests that, unlike Cézanne, the Greeks never achieved true ‘roundness’ because they never put it into a proper tension with ‘flatness’. The heading ‘Grk’ here is short for ‘Greek’. A photograph of the notebook page is reproduced below as Fig. 12. A few words are illegible. Square brackets are mine.9 from the theoretical discourse of the male modernists by their gendered constructions of modernism and their gender prejudice. 6 Kennedy 1994a: 53, 209, 440–1. Most of the little criticism and theory which Cummings did publish has been collected in A Miscellany Revised, ed. George J. Firmage (1965). Cummings’ lack of interest in critical theory output also discussed by Fallon 2002. 7 A case made most extensively by Cohen 1987. On Cummings as a visual artist: Tucker 1975; Reutlinger 1975; Kidder 1975; Kidder 1976b; Kidder 1979b (emphasizing connections between the visual and poetic art); Cohen 1987; Cohen 1992; McGuigan 2005/2006 for a Cubist reading of the prose style of The Enormous Room. 8 Houghton MS Am 1823.7 (9). 9 Houghton MS Am 1823.7 (17). Cummings’ own square brackets around ‘Bulge’ and ‘= overrunning w. forces’ changed to parentheses for clarity.

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Grk the interpretation of softness requires hardness exists insofar as mutilation has failed its original purpose created tow! [toward] def. [definite] end = satisfaction Satisfaction translated into geometry = the Sphere (or Circle) ○ —Grks loved & dwelt on rounding contours of body because nature is comparatively flat = They did not even know that { smoothness rounding[?sity] (Bulge) can only be attained by roughness } flatness (e.g. Cézanne) i.e. never analyzed their “roundness” ! planes ○ Roundness as a Form does not exist | It took the Grks to prove that = for same reasons, they isolated their statues from background (vicinities) i.e. did not know that a form (= [?overrunning] w. forces) { can only be expressed { in its environment. That taking away Vicinity { kills Forces, i.e. other [???] and form ! object. Grk friezes better. Bec[ause] rounding moving objects have oblong flat foil (e.g. Parthenon * they were the most ignorant of laws of art who have ever existed { when they broke this rule, the environment was { always Merely Included, generally to { present a contrast of surface, but sometimes { actually lugged to hold up the statue the Grks then dealt w. two illusions: { the ○ [circle] \ light / both facts (of life) — are not Truths (of Existence)

These condensed notes illustrate Cummings’ connections to his own era—not only in terms of his interest in Cézanne and planes, but also in terms of his attitudes to Greek art. He prefers Greek friezes to free-standing statues: ‘Grk friezes better. Bec[ause] rounding moving objects have oblong flat foil (e.g. Parthenon’. The artistic elevation of the Greek frieze reflects a latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century attitude brought about, as Elizabeth Prettejohn argues, by changes in approaches to Greek art over the course of the nineteenth century. Prettejohn’s recent and

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major reconsideration of classical art and modernity emphasizes the role played by responses to the Parthenon friezes in changing attitudes to classical art.10 She points to the challenge raised by the friezes to the previously established preference for complete and freestanding sculpture, and she traces the processes by which the aesthetics of the frieze came out victorious in the artistic discourses of Britain and Europe.11 She argues that, in the course of this aesthetic shift, the Parthenon friezes came to be celebrated for their perceived virtues of aliveness and expression of movement.12 Aliveness and movement are pivotal concepts in Cummings’ own aesthetics. His celebration of the ‘moving objects’ of the frieze over (what he saw as) the lesser merits of free-standing Greek statues shows how fully he had imbibed the aesthetic shift traced by Prettejohn. Cummings’ ideas about ‘roundness’ and ‘bulge’ are connected to the idea, expressed by him elsewhere, of ‘seeing-around’. The aim was ‘Form (seeing all of a vase, the Behind)’.13 He was inspired by Cézanne’s attempts to see more of the objects he painted.14 He was also influenced by Freudian duality: the conscious and the unconscious mind, and the idea that a word might mean itself but evoke its antithesis.15 Thus ‘seeing-around’ meant (as Cohen summarizes) capturing both ‘the seen front and the unseen (but felt) back of an object’ so that they become ‘fused in the viewer’s consciousness’.16 The ability to ‘see around’ (in visual art and in poetry) means that it is possible to freeze movement. The result is verbal (as in, related to verbs) and has ‘bulge’: *art is The Verb Cold ——— [translated] ——— The Bulge*17

10

Prettejohn 2012: 38–103. Prettejohn 2012: esp. 48–9, 52, 58, 65. 12 Aliveness, Prettejohn 2012: esp. 45–7, 49, 63; cf. 193–4; movement, see esp. 47, 61, 63. Prettejohn’s discussion of the influence of the Parthenon friezes on the combination of texture and movement in the work of George Frederic Watts (2012: 69) would be an interesting point of comparison, especially given the significance of ‘texture’ to Cummings (below). 13 Quoted in Cohen 1987: 65. 14 For his still lifes, Cézanne propped up fruit using coins so that the fruit tipped forward, thus exposing more of its roundness: Danchev 2013: 361. Cummings’ debt to Cézanne: Cohen 1987: 41–5 and passim. 15 Cohen 1987: 69; see also fuller discussion above, Chapter 5. 16 Cohen 1987: quote at 69, ‘seeing around’ discussed at 117–49. For Cummings’ own words, see ‘You Aren’t Mad, Am I?’ (Vanity Fair 1925), rpt. Cummings 1965: 126–31. For ‘seeing-around’, also Kidder 1976b: 478, 487. 17 Houghton MS Am 1823.7 (17). Cummings’ own square brackets and asterisks. 11

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Compare Cummings’ poem on Picasso (CP 95): Picasso you give us Things which bulge [...]

It is perhaps not coincidence that the poem on Picasso immediately follows, in Tulips & Chimneys, the poem ‘Cleopatra built’ (CP 91–4). ‘Cleopatra built’ summons a powerful memory of the physicality of the classical world—its bodies, its pageantry, its smells, colours, and musics. The three-dimensional aliveness and movement of ‘Cleopatra built’ can be juxtaposed to Picasso’s genius as ‘Lumberman of The Distinct’ to ‘hew form truly’. Cummings’ theories continually work with these two poles: the classical and the modern, especially the Cubist, idea of Form. Cummings’ notes on music show the same inclination to begin with the Greeks. Musical notation, for example, develops from the Greek: 1st notation by grk letters 2nd neumes(pneumata)signs over or under the syllables to indicate rising & falling of voice,But not to define its extent--& like modern punctuation,To show where breath shd be taken 3rd roman letters rise 4th staff,spaces only(¬ lines)used --extent of of syl’s denoted fall

And so on, through another four stages of development in notation.18 Cummings never systematized his many ideas and his hundreds of pages of notes, but his various ideas are (mostly) consistent, interrelated, and mutually reinforcing. He was searching for a holistic approach to art, and his love of modernist synaesthesia encouraged him to apply theories across the boundaries of artistic media. The following notes, which once again take up the question of roundness and form, show how Cummings could link visual art, music, aesthetic 18

Notes c.1921–3. Houghton MS Am 1823.7 (25). More generally on Cummings and melopoeia, see Antretter 2001. Compare Cummings’ interest in the notation of movement and his experiments with Tom, his ballet adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. On Tom, see Raker 2003; Chaney 2011.

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values, ethical values, and then arrive again at the dominant antithesis in his art between life (here, ‘warmth’) and ‘Death’.19 These notes start with ‘The Idea of Roundness’. They suggest that ‘i.e. - Forms + -------------------------------------------------correlative (Ideal) => Objects’: ex. of Correlation: “Vertebrate” — Grk. Art (Symmetry) Grk Art is the exploitation of the differences between individual bodies in roles to realize their underlying sameness (correlative) | a melodic | exercise | climactic

Cummings continues on the subject of melody and fugue; then: III Now there exist 2 kinds of Internals (products of [?war]) In so far as they are pleasant or (a) Consonance } unpleasant (b) Dissonance } The Child does not feel them, .·. ˄ they are Ideas Moreover, the Chinese harp satisfies the Chinese ear at the moment it outrages the Xian [Christian]. The Greeks carried consonance to its legit. conclusion a in sculpture (symmetry) b " civics (a man’s 1st duty = 2 the state Xianity [i.e. Christianity] inherited from the Grks thru Romans —turned consonance —> [Mirror ?] (self-abasement) In both cases, God = superior perfectly symmetrical human being Is warmth a property of Bodies OR (manifestation) Are bodies a property of Warmth N- Death is Cold, Flat, Punctual, Perpendicular, [90 - Gray

In these summative notes, everything from Form to music to sculpture to civic duty and Christianity is linked and, ultimately, tied into the antithesis of Warmth versus Death. The starting place for this page of notes—‘Forms + correlative (Ideal) => Objects’—taps into a sub-Platonic fascination with ‘the Form’. Cummings’ theorizing about perspective, form, and perception 19 Houghton MS Am 1823.7 (18). Notebook from France, 1917. Square brackets are mine.

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is articulated, at times, in Socratic fashion. In the following excerpt, for example, Cummings explores perception through a Socratic dialogue: What do you see? A vase on a table. Your reply has five words. Do you see five things? I see two things or objects, indicated by the nouns “vase” and “table”. You see two things. Which do you see first? I see both at the same time. The vase, as you see it, is connected with the table, is it not? The vase does not float in the air? There is no space between bottom of the vase and the top of the table? When you asked me what I saw, I replied that I saw a vase on a table. I did not say that I saw a vase and a table.20

The text continues in this vein for a while, although the rest has been scored through. Passages like this one—which have been drafted and redrafted, and whose tone is didactic—were presumably either intended by Cummings for publication, or at least designed as experiments in articulating his ideas with a possible readership in mind. Indeed, the dialogue is a form which Cummings repeatedly favoured when he chose to (or felt compelled to) explicate his artistic vision for his audience.21 In conclusion, Cummings’ notes in the 1910s and 1920s show a mixture of admiration for and criticism of Greek art. Later in life, his position remained similar in substance—it still revolved around ideas 20

MS Am 1823.7 (25); c.1921–3. Webster 2010: 44 notes four published dialogues: the Him dust jacket, introduction to the second edition of The Enormous Room, ‘Knot for Morons’, and the ‘Forward to an Exhibit’ (1945). See Cummings 2010a, 2010b, 2010c, with Webster 2010 on the dust jacket blurb for Him. For the introduction to The Enormous Room, see Cummings 1934; also online at http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/cummings/ ERoom.html. ‘Knot for Morons’ was published (according to Webster 2010: 56) in Jewish Community Press 23 September 1938. Cummings’ foreword to the 1945 exhibition catalogue: Cummings 1965: 316–17; see also Kidder 1975. Cummings’ ‘A Book without a Title’ also begins with a dialogue (Cummings 1965: 215–16). Reference to another unpublished dialogue, Cohen 1987: 70. Cohen 1987: 21 observes that Cummings’ thinking and note-taking style is ‘Socratic’ and ‘dialectic’, though note also 1987: 79: ‘Cummings’s earlier subjectivity was more earthbound and enjoyed feeling and sensation as ends in themselves, rather than as Platonic emblems of “higher forms” in nature.’ 21

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of movement and aliveness. However, it tended towards a more sentimentalized expression: My idea of precision creating movement will seem perfectly natural to anyone even superficially acquainted with “le miracle grec” in its sculptural manifestation;as opposed to certain well known examples of Egyptian art, which show us the human figure as a sum of separate conventions. I am remembering a particularly effective figure whose head is seen in profile, but whose eye is the eye of someone looking straight at you:the chest of the figure confronts you flatly,but the hips are turned slightly sideways,in a three-quarter view;& this partial twist is completed in the legs,which are the legs of a walking figure seen from the side. Thanks to these various stances,the figure as a whole is aesthetically locked & anatomically immobile. If its creator had deliberately tried to prevent it from moving he couldn’t conceivably have been more successful. Greek sculpture breaks this rigidity as a spring freshet breaks the ice of winter. When convention yields to precision,immobility vanishes:the hieratic image becomes alive--&(for better or for worse)a human being is born. Aesthetically,this human being is an organic whole: anatomically,this organic whole results from the body’s division into three regions--thoracic,pelvic,& abdominal--the first & second,of themselves immoveable,moving with relation to each other through the third intermediate region. Here is indeed a miracle. A noun has become a verb. The fact that nowadays,with an unworld’s frantic regression to aboriginal values,the cult of primitivism flourishes & Hellenic art has gone out of fashion,doesn’t make a particle of difference so far as my metaphor is concerned. What concerns me is the immeasurable difference between a collectivity’s idée fixe & the self-expression of individuals,the difference between undeath & living.22

The sentimentality of this passage exposes some of the more problematic aspects of the admiration of Greek art which had always lurked in the attitudes of Cummings (and of many others). Primitivism brought into the Western aesthetic tradition a much greater respect for non-Western, especially African, art forms. Primitivism is by no means free from its own racially uncomfortable constructions. However, that hardly excuses Cummings’ expression of chagrin 22 1892.7 (90): ‘Notes for a nonexisting lecture (California)’. Folder 11 (of 44), with a few corrections: ‘realtion’ corrected to ‘relation’; deletion of ‘I’ in ‘what I concerns me’; deletion of doublet ‘&’.

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that the love of Hellenic art should be swamped by ‘the cult of primitivism’.

2. WHITE MARBLE AND BUSTED STATUES Prettejohn argues that the nineteenth century saw a shift in the constructed canon of Greek art, connected with the response of major thinkers to the discovery of the Venus de Milo in 1820 (and other early nineteenth-century discoveries and disseminations) and followed by a rise in veneration for specific, stylistically identifiable Greek sculptors including Lysippos, Myron, Polykleitos, and Praxiteles.23 As with his admiration for the Parthenon friezes, here, too, Cummings was a child of the nineteenth century. He read or heard Harvard lectures on the views of those thinkers, especially Walter Pater, who had been instrumental (as Prettejohn shows) in this reformulation of the Greek artistic canon. He studied the statues of this new canon. One scrap among his notes reads: Satyr of Praxiteles.--

Lasy, good-humored, sensual, joly-faced, straight-limbed Fair-moulded A creature of the forest fair, Like a skilfully wrought goblet, with joy & pleasure brimmed, Ignorant alike of nobleness and care.

And on the flip side of the paper, Cummings has written: Venus of Milo.

23

A tall, majestic, woman-goddess to the hips undraped Full-limbed, big-breasted, graceful-trunked, large-framed; Wound o’er broad thighs--straight-falling draperies, crudly shape The woman nude; the goddess unashamed.24

Prettejohn 2012: 29–31 (for the full argument, see 2012: 1–37). Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (760), Folder 18. Spelling is Cummings’ own. Undated but in among school and Harvard notes. Of general relevance on the erotic dimension to loss of the classical world: Billings 2010. 24

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Cummings’ idea of the Venus de Milo —‘The woman nude; the goddess unashamed’—points to the sexual liberation which Cummings found in classical poetry and which was such a needed escape for him from his sexually repressive upbringing. However, the role of classical marble statues in Cummings’ struggles for sexual liberation also powerfully reinforced the broader Western heritage of whiteness.25 Whiteness is central to Cummings’ early erotic sensibility. In ‘The Young Faun’, the woman’s beauty and allure is characterized principally in terms of its whiteness. The faun’s ‘trembling poem’ brings forth ‘a whiteness in the water’, which is likened to ‘a white moth’ or ‘white flower’; when the woman finally appears, she is ‘holding out her arms which were whiter than starlight’. In ‘Cleopatra built’ (CP 91–4), Cleopatra’s body is ‘a silver tube of wise / lust’ and her limbs ‘like white squirming pipes / wiggle’. In ‘through the tasteless minute efficient room’ (CP 945), the reference to ‘white Latin flesh’ evokes marble statuary. It signals an ideal which the prostitute’s body at once is and isn’t. The erotics of whiteness can also be displaced from the body, as in the reference to Antony and Cleopatra in ‘PUELLA MEA’: ‘nor he / when swooned the white egyptian day / who with Egypt’s body lay.’ This whiteness is neither unique to Cummings nor traceable solely to the idealized beauty of white marble statues. But it is a troubling legacy. It is confronted directly in Derek Walcott’s Omeros: Change burns at the beach’s end. She has to decide to enter the smoke or to skirt it. In that pause that divides the smoke with a sword, white Helen died; in that space between the lines of two lifted oars, her shadow ambles, filly of Menelaus, while black piglets root the midden of Gros Îlet, but smoke leaves no signature on its page of sand. ‘Yesterday, all my troubles seem so far away,’ she croons, her clear plastic sandals swung by one hand.26

Walcott’s confrontation with the legacy of whiteness emerges as a challenge to the value ascribed to permanence. The radical claim in 25

See Laity 1996: esp. 63–83; Gregory 1997: 90–107 for whiteness and Greek statues in the discourses of Pater and of the Decadents. 26 Walcott 1990: VI. 2 (p. 34). Generally on the Classics and postcolonialism, see Goff (ed.) 2005; Hardwick and Gillespie (eds) 2007.

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this passage is not that ‘Change burns’, but that ‘smoke leaves no signature on its page of sand’. Walcott engages lines from Dante’s Inferno, translated by Clive James as: A swansdown seat and a soft blanket just Keep you from fame, without which no one who Consumes his life leaves more trace in the world Than smoke in air and foam on water do.

(XXIV. 46–9)27

At this moment in Omeros, Walcott’s lines deny any role for enduring traces in the measure of significance and value. He competes with Dante for literary fame, but he ironizes his own search for fame when he returns later in Book Six to the image of Helen in the smoke on the beach.28 This later passage openly embraces the woman, Helen, singular and alive: [...] There, in her head of ebony, there was no real need for the historian’s remorse, nor for literature’s. Why not see Helen as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow, swinging her plastic sandals on that beach alone, as fresh as the sea-wind? Why make the smoke a door?29

There is no need for classical baggage to qualify the aliveness of Helen. Walcott’s work connects ideals of whiteness and ideals of permanence in the Western tradition, and he writes his Helen in a way which suggests that to challenge the one is also to challenge the other. Cummings participates in the aesthetic of whiteness, and he also at times participates in the aesthetic of permanence. In Chapter 5, for example, we saw the elevation of the Classics into an ‘[ . . . ] immortal / world–that noblest realm,of Pindar & of Aeschylus,whose values are & were / & will remain man’s true spiritual home’.30 On the other hand, the poems of is 5 challenge the permanence of the classical tradition. Cummings himself brings no postcolonial awareness to that challenge.

27 Dante, Inferno, XXIV. 48–51: ‘in fama non si vien, ne’ sotto coltre; / sanza la qual chi sua vita consuma, / cotal vestigio in terra di se’ lascia, / qual fummo in aere e in acqua la schiuma.’ 28 LIV. 2 (p. 271); see also, just earlier, LIII. 1 (p. 264). See also Kaufmann 2006 on Helen; Greenwood 2007; Prince 2007; Hardwick 2007 (inter alia) on Walcott’s approach to the past. 29 McConnell 2013: 130 briefly discusses this passage; see also 2013: 109 and n. 6. 30 ‘John Finley’, from Adventures in Value (1962); see above, Chapter 5.1.

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However, reading Cummings back through Walcott, our own response to Cummings will be informed by Walcott’s explorations of whiteness and permanence. Walcott is now the major living interpreter of the classical tradition in Anglophone literature, and reading earlier poetry through Walcott means acceding to what he demands of us as readers, as we receive earlier receptions of the Classics. In is 5 (1926), classical permanence plays out as an ambivalent legacy. It does not have the joyful, physical aliveness of the classical past in Tulips & Chimneys, where Cummings points to the actual, mortal existence of women and men who might now seem like mere ideas: ‘Cleopatra had a / body / it was // thick slim warm moist’ (CP 91–4); ‘somebody knew Lincoln somebody Xerxes’ (CP 101–2). In Tulips & Chimneys, the aliveness of the past can be summoned best by its very ephemeralities, whether these are women and men who lived once, or ephemeralities such as music: the syrinx in ‘of evident invisibles’; the ‘chords’, ‘purple trumpets’ and music of ‘Cleopatra built’. Indeed, in an era where music still primarily connoted live performance, the musics of ‘Cleopatra built’ are as fleeting as its ‘sharp languid perfumes’. But in these poems, the ephemerality of the classical world is raised to a kind of transcendent permanence, so that the more ephemeral it is, the more eternal. Within the sardonic perspective of is 5 (1926), however, we meet the deadness of the classical world. Here Cummings also wrestles with ideas of sexual impotence—a theme which links his poetry to the early poetry of Eliot. The collection is 5 is divided into five sections. The first section—in which all of the following poems are found—takes the post-war condition of America and Europe as its implicit subject matter. (The second section contains poems dealing explicitly with the war and its political aftermath, and therefore underlines, retrospectively, the specifically post-war condition of the first section.) Cummings has a scathing tone about modernity adrift, as in ‘this young question mark man’: as far as his picture goes he’s a wet dream by Cézanne.31

31 CP 244; previous discussion of the poem: Cohen 1987: 96. There is, however, also warmth in the poems of is 5, e.g. towards the prostitutes of ‘FIVE AMERICANS’ or towards the unlucky Uncle Sol of ‘nobody loses all the time’ (CP 237).

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In this post-war world of troubled modernity, the Classics are clichéd or misunderstood, dead or worthless, and in general cut down to size. The speaker of ‘POEM, OR BEAUTY HURTS MR.VINAL’ (CP 228–9) complains of cliché: [...] certain ideas gestures rhymes,like Gillette Razor Blades having been used and reused to the mystical moment of dullness emphatically are Not To Be Resharpened.

‘Case in point’ being that ‘Helen & Cleopatra were Just Too Lovely’.32 In ‘even if all desires things moments be’ (CP 235), a man unimpressed with the modernity of ‘Lundun Burlin an gay Paree’ or the great American cities, ‘Nooer Leans Shikahgo Sain / Looey Noo York an San Fran’ prefers the world as it used to be: in dem daze kid Christmas meant sumpn youse knows wot i refers ter Satter Nailyuh [...]

i.e. Saturnalia. The principal attraction of old times, in the speaker’s vivid but unreliable imagination, was to run around naked. The passage of time brings artistic impotence, as in ‘workingman with hand so hairy-sturdy’ (CP 231). In this poem, we are warned that the passage of time cannot be reversed: ‘but when will turn backward O backward Time’. Cummings then undercuts the nobility of Time’s losses, abusing the rhythm of Edgar Allan Poe’s resonant phrase ‘To the glory that was Greece / And the grandeur that was Rome’: what’s become of(if you please) all the glory that or which was Greece all the grandja that was dada?

As well as suffering artistic impotence, modernity suffers sexual impotence. In another poem, a man, ‘(having dreamed of a corkscrew) / studied with Freud a year or two’.33 At the end of which, he [...] could do nothing which you 32 33

1975.

Previous discussion of the poem: Kennedy 1994a: 283–5. ‘listen my children and you’ (CP 234). Previous discussion of the poem: Haule

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and i are accustomed to accomplish two or three times,and even a few more depending on the remunerativeness of the stimulus(eheu fu -gaces Postume boo who)

Nothing in Freud will change the fact that time flies: hence the tag from Horace, ‘eheu fugaces, Postume’. The speakers in these poems may yearn for the nakedness of Saturnalia or the potency of the past. But that yearning represents an inability to capitalize on the present and it misplaces value. The ‘mister’ who is upbraided in ‘mr youse needn’t be so spry / concernin questions arty’ (245) would do better to see that ‘a pretty girl who naked is / is worth a million statues’.34 With his collection of poems on dried-up modernity, Cummings is not afraid to take on Eliot. Cummings targets Eliot most directly in ‘MEMORABILIA’ (CP 254–5), a satirical portrait of American tourists in Venice.35 He cuts Eliot’s obscurity down to size by choosing to interpret his own allusion to Dante: pause elevator nel mezzo del cammin’ that means halfway up the Campanile [...]

‘MEMORABILIA’ shows Cummings at his most Eliotic. Compare, e.g. [...] What will the spider do, Suspend its operations, will the weevil

34

Previous discussion of the poem: Yablon 1998: 46. Discussions of ‘MEMORABILIA’: Kilby 1953/4; Griffith 1954; Barton 1963; Finn 1971; Lane 1976: 81–5. Barton 1963 points out that ‘nel mezzo del cammin’ is an allusion to Dante; Lane 1976: 84 points out that it has been mistranslated or, at least, altered. On Cummings and Dante, see Metcalf 1970; Finn 1971; Kennedy 1976: 279–81. Finn 1971 argues that ‘MEMORABILIA’ contains a response to ‘Prufrock’. He writes: ‘In particular, the lines “In the room women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” lie behind Cummings’ “Memorabilia”.’ Both poems investigate ‘spiritual emptiness and sexual sterility’. 35

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear In fractured atoms. (‘Gerontion’)

and [...] particularly the brand of marriageable nymph which is armed with large legs rancid voices Baedekers Mothers and kodaks —by night upon the Riva Schiavoni or in the felicitous vicinity of the de l’Europe Grand and Royal Danielli their numbers are like unto the stars of Heaven . . . (‘MEMORABILIA’)

Cummings’ Eliotic style includes the insertion of lists into the middle of lyrical passages and the abrupt shifts between lines or part-lines which do not scan at all and lines of surprisingly beautiful lyrical rhythm. Here, a section which falls mostly into trochees and dactyls— leaving the impression of a prose rhythm with an aggressive tone—is interrupted by the iambic rhythm of ‘by night upon the Riva Schiavoni or in’—a line whose rhythm is made even more musical by the stronger rhythms of the Italian language in ‘Riva Schiavoni’. Cummings’ Eliotic technique in ‘MEMORABILIA’ also extends to parody of The Waste Land’s interpolated sounds: Carried down stream The peal of bells White towers Weialala leia Wallala leialala (The Waste Land)

and i do signore affirm that all gondola signore day below me gondola signore gondola and above me pass loudly and gondola (‘MEMORABILIA’)

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where ‘gondola’ becomes a recurring cry heard within the lines. (The Baedekers of ‘voices Baedekers Mothers and kodaks’ and the gondola of this passage also echo the Baedeker and gondola of Eliot’s ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’.) Cummings closes with a play on Robert Browning’s ‘Oh, to be in England / Now that April’s there,’ (the opening lines of Browning’s ‘Home-Thoughts, from Abroad’). Cummings quips: (O to be a metope now that triglyph’s here)

The tone of this closing couplet is ambivalent.36 Like the image of the mermaids which closes ‘Prufrock’, the longing expressed at the end of ‘MEMORABILIA’ is a longing to reach for beauty. But the escape from inanity offered in ‘MEMORABILIA’ is to be frozen in architecture, as Prufrock is to be yanked back by ‘human voices’ and to drown.37 The treatment in is 5 of the legacy of classical architecture and classical statues comes to a head with another carpe diem poem of seduction.38 (ponder,darling,these busted statues of yon motheaten forum be aware notice what hath remained —the stone cringes clinging to the stone,how obsolete lips utter their extant smile . . . . remark a few deleted of texture or meaning monuments and dolls resist Them Greediest Paws of careful time all of which is extremely unimportant)whereas Life

36 Finn 1971: ‘at once bemoaning and mocking his condition’. Finn suggests that ‘metope’, as well as being a classical joke, is also a joke on Eliot’s lines ‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas’, ‘for the metope is, incidentally, also the middle anterior portion of a crab, the segment from which the pincers extend.’ The scholarship above (n. 418) offers various readings of the allusion to Browning. 37 On the tone of the end of ‘Prufrock’, see Laity 2004: 436–9. 38 CP 258. Previous discussion of the poem: Wilson 1972.

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In the sardonic setting of is 5, the poem is rather more mordant and cold than it might seem to be in isolation. It is also more radical. When Walcott writes that ‘smoke leaves no signature on its page of sand’, he challenges the value of permanence—and permanence is a (or perhaps the) central value in claims about the ‘Classic’. As Gregory puts it, ‘the word as we use it, as synonymous with the authority of the ancients, dates from the Renaissance, whose scholars imagined themselves as snatching learning from oblivion. Thus in the Renaissance the “classical” is homologous with “the enduring,” and the recovery of ancient texts is thereby a sign of one’s participation in the conquest of time.’39 In Cummings’ ‘motheaten forum’, however, a smile may remain ‘extant’ and yet meaningless: ‘remark // a few deleted of texture / or meaning monuments’. To lose texture is to lose three-dimensionality, movement, feeling—those qualities which determined “aliveness” for Cummings in ancient or in modern art. To be ‘deleted of texture / or meaning’ by ‘Them Greediest Paws of careful / time’ is to be fully dead. Cummings reverses the role of time in selecting, preserving, and guaranteeing the Classics. Here, he offers the greatest threat to classical standing that can be offered: time can render meaning ‘obsolete’, ‘deleted’, ‘unimportant’, and irrelevant. Modernity and the classical world are mutually implicated in the artistic crisis of is 5. The loss of both ‘the glory that or which was Greece’ and the ‘grandja / that was dada’ piles up losses of meaning. Greece has lost its meaning, and dada’s attempts to create artistic

39 Gregory 1997: 53. Cf. (adjacently) Martindale 2008; Prettejohn 2012: 171–256, esp. 174–8.

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meaninglessness have lost their meaning. Modernity has its impotences: the man seeking help from Freud has talked himself into impotence. But the ruined aqueduct is also impotent. It only ‘used to lead’ (in a clear double-entendre) ‘into somewhere’. The voices of is 5 are shifting. The influence of Eliot extends to the construction of poetic speakers who, like the speakers in Eliot’s early poetry, occupy ambiguous and complicated positions vis-à-vis the sympathies invited by the poetic texts. The ambiguity about the targets of satire and about the focalization of sympathy or endorsement leaves room yet, in the poems of is 5, for affection for the Classics. In some ways, we, as readers, ought perhaps to take the attitudes to the Classics voiced by the speakers of is 5 as a sign of those speakers’ own limitations. It would be a mistake, therefore, to read is 5 as any kind of manifesto of rejection of the classical world. But this collection does offer a far more ambivalent treatment of the pull of the Classics than Tulips & Chimneys. In is 5, Cummings returns to the all-consuming time of his Horatian translations, but he finds in time a mere glutton. In the carpe diem context of ‘(ponder,darling,these busted statues’, time has the ‘Greediest Paws’. The ruined forum is unimportant except as a spur to the realization that ‘Life // matters’. Similarly on the theme of gluttonous time, in another of the poems from is 5, ‘this man is o so’ (CP 241), we meet a couple to whom life clearly no longer ‘matters’. In this poem, a man and a woman—who were perhaps in love once but are in love no longer—sit in a restaurant where the woman eats her lobster. In their pursuit of lives which aren’t mattering, this couple have no reason to be conscious of all-consuming time as they consume their meal. Their restaurant surrounding evokes irony: their table is set with ‘interminable pyramidal,napkins’. The pyramidal napkins are interminable in the boredom of the restaurant: monumentality has become triviality, and the eternal is lampooned as the endless.

3. TEARS ELIOT When Firmage and Kennedy selected poems from Cummings’ papers for the posthumous Etcetera: the Unpublished Poems, they included two parodic texts, which they represented as separate poems: ‘“out of

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the pants which cover me’ (CP 986) and ‘pound pound pound’ (CP 987). They give no indication that these two poems bear any special relationship to each other. In fact, based on inspection of the archival originals, Cummings was clearly composing a five-part poem, of which these two texts formed two of the five parts.40 There are other poems interspersed with these five texts. There is a different poem on the back of one sheet and another poem typed on a different orientation (i.e. upside-down). But that is entirely typical of Cummings’ papers, in which a single sheet of paper may be used and reused, on the same or different orientation, for related or unrelated purposes, and often with pen or pencil drawings over or under the text (as on one of these pages). These five texts stand apart from the other material on these manuscript pages. Each one is headed with a Roman numeral (‘I’, ‘II’, ‘III’, ‘IV’, ‘V’) in every draft and redraft. Cummings sometimes numbered material in this way when he was shifting around the order of stanzas within a single poem, scribbling numerals to indicate a revised order. It would be completely atypical, on the other hand, to find independent poems numbered in this fashion. Numbering indicates order within a compositional whole. The way in which notes about one section of the poem are, at points, scribbled onto other sections makes it additionally clear that these five texts form five sections of a unified composition. The five sections are: ‘pound pound pound’, ‘Odysseus is winking’, ‘“out of the Pants which cover me’, ‘at a very little at’, and ‘VENITE ADOREMUS’. The text was never finalized. In particular, ‘at a very little at’ is not represented in anything near fair copy. Its last form is still that of an in-progress draft including handwritten revisions to the text. Since it was Cummings’ habit to produce fair copies of his work, the absence of a fair copy suggests at least incompletion and usually probably a deeper dissatisfaction. The order of the sections remained in flux and each outline is partial. The first discernible plan indicates ‘pound pound pound’ as I (‘III’ is struck through), ‘at a very little at’ as II, and ‘“out of the Pants which cover me’ as III.

40

Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (736).

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At the next stage, ‘pound pound pound’ is retained at I and ‘at a very little at’ is moved to III. ‘Odysseus is winking’ appears as II (‘IV’ is struck through). ‘VENITE ADOREMUS’ appears as IV. A subsequent plan returns ‘“out of the pants which cover me’ to III and moves ‘VENITE ADOREMUS’ to V. From this information, the sections can be ordered by inference at the last stage before abandonment, but with the proviso that this order probably did not satisfy Cummings. The intention to open with ‘pound pound pound’ seems stable. The last plan does not contradict the previous placement of ‘Odysseus is winking’ at II. It places ‘“out of the pants which cover me’ at III and ‘VENITE ADOREMUS’ at V. That leaves ‘at a little at’ as IV by default. Here the manuscript revisions and reorderings cease. It is probably not coincidence that ‘at a little at’ is the furthest from fair copy and also the section which finds its final place by default: Cummings seems to be treating it as the weak link. Even though the text was never finished—and admitting indications that Cummings was dissatisfied with the poem—the excerption of ‘pound pound pound’ and ‘“out of the Pants which cover me’, and their presentation as two independent poems in Etcetera, represents an undesirable distortion of Cummings’ text. I would suggest that what we have here is a parody of The Waste Land, and I present the full text below, in the edition of Cummings’ work. This wide-ranging, allusive parody focuses on Pound, Eliot, and Joyce, but also includes references to Wilde (‘all men kill the thing they love’; ‘go wilde afterwards’), Henry James (‘what daisy knew’, ‘a turn of the screw’), Longfellow (‘come my shortfellows’), and many others.41 Cummings’ poem could be read as a general satire on his poetic contemporaries and predecessors. However, the five-section format is so marked that I feel justified in identifying the poem as a Waste Land parody. It clearly post-dates Cummings’ knowledge of The Waste Land, to which it makes specific textual allusions: ‘A little Porter tingaling / is pleasant even for Sweeney in the Spring.”’ and ‘you are always smoothing your hair with an automatic hand’.42 Its wide-ranging allusiveness parodies Eliot’s own allusiveness in The 41 I have not attempted here an exhaustive list of Cummings’ allusions and jokes. For the two sections published in Etcetera, a number of the allusions are listed by Michael Webster at: http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/cummings/notes.htm#etc. 42 The Waste Land: ‘The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring / Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.’ (ll. 198–9) and ‘She smooths her hair with automatic hand,’ (l. 255).

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Waste Land, and its range of targets is, in fact, one of its chief points of interest. In his study of the circumstances surrounding publication of The Waste Land, Lawrence Rainey argues that Pound (and others) actively sought from the first to make The Waste Land into a climactic justification of the modernist movement. Rainey quotes Pound: ‘Eliot’s Waste Land is I think the justification of the “movement,” of our modern experiment, since 1900.’ As Rainey shows, Pound conceived this aim before The Waste Land was published and he hyped the poem so effectively that potential publishers were sold on its tobe-canonical status without having read it and with little or no idea what it was even about.43 This deliberately contrived, advance iconization has the double effect of embedding The Waste Land within modernism—as the epitome of the modernist movement—and at the same time, by virtue of iconicity, setting it apart as unique, above, and a perfecting of modernist goals. Cummings’ parody is a fascinating reflection of this doubled effect. On the one hand, he elevates The Waste Land by canonizing it as a form. Although there are jokes in the parody about specific lines from The Waste Land, the focus of interaction is structure, style, and the relationship between structure and style. Cummings’ parody divides into five parts. As in The Waste Land, it is left to the reader to grapple with the sense in which those five sections constitute one poetic whole. The allusive style is combined with marked shifts in lyric register. Speakers appear within the poem abruptly, unexpectedly, and without clear identification. At one point, a speaker raises the register of the poem with the lament ‘I grow old,I grow old’ (referencing Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’). Another speaker, on the other hand, provides the poem’s lowest register: the short-tempered man who interjects his views at a restaurant on the way to the Turkish baths. (He is described as ‘shortwaisted’, which is slang for ‘irritable’.)44 This speaker’s colloquial diction and strong opinions are reminiscent of the speaker in the pub scene in ‘A Game of Chess’. The social, publicspace settings of restaurant/baths and pub reinforce the analogy. (This might also be connected to the initial position of ‘at a little at’ 43

Rainey 1998: 77–106; quote at 81. ‘Shortwaisted’ for ‘irritable’, ‘touchy’: Partridge, Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English 1984: 1060, s.v. ‘short-waisted’. Listed as c.1870; dropped from the latest edition of the dictionary. 44

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as section II of the parody, since ‘A Game of Chess’ is the second section of The Waste Land.) Thus Cummings responds to The Waste Land as if it were itself a form (the five-part poem) with formal characteristics governing structure, style, register, and voice. A waste land shall have disjointed parts, abrupt shifts in register, and both high and colloquial speakers, as a Petrarchan sonnet shall have an idealized beloved and a turn at the sestet. Of course, once a form is established, its conventions can be undercut. The success of Cummings’ parody lies in his ability to elevate The Waste Land to a form, as if it had already been one— and one so established that its recognizable formal requirements and conventions can already be mocked and subverted qua requirements and conventions. He turns Eliot into (as he puts it in section V) ‘theman-with-a-great-future-behind-him’: the man whose cutting-edge prosody mythologizes itself so effectively that it subverts its own freshness. Cummings embraces the iconicity of The Waste Land by raising it to the status of poetic form, even while he mocks it. However, in another sense, he rejects Eliot’s singularity. Other famous parodies of The Waste Land tend to focus their parodic energies on that poem itself. Clive James’ (pseudonym Edward Pygge’s) parody of The Waste Land—which, incidentally, is not divided into sections—signals its intent in its title, ‘The Wasted Land by T.S. Tambiguiti’, and in its opening line: ‘April is a very unkind month, I am telling you.’45 By contrast, Cummings’ parody of The Waste Land includes a large number of jokes about Eliot’s other early poetry, and he parodies Eliot in amongst Pound, Joyce, and many others. He reintegrates Eliot and The Waste Land into the larger modernist context, seeing The Waste Land as part of—and not apart from—Eliot’s earlier work and the work of Eliot’s peers and contemporaries. He rejects not only Eliot’s singularity, but even his pre-eminence. Joyce, not Eliot, is the god of modernism: ‘Joyce moves in a mysterious way [ . . . ]’. Cummings focuses in particular on the relationship between Eliot and Pound. His first section hinges on this relationship, referring directly to Pound’s Cantos and alluding to Eliot’s ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’. About Eliot and Pound, Cummings asks the pointed— 45 ‘The Wasted Land’: republished Brett (ed.) 1984: 151–2; James 2003: 123–4. Incidentally, Clive James also penned a parody of Cummings, ‘Edward Estlin Cummings Dead’; James 2003: 115.

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indeed, remarkably barbed—question: who is the organ grinder and who is the monkey? (Is Eliot nothing without Pound’s hand? Or is Pound merely a fixer for poets whose talents exceed his own?)46 He pursues the joke in Section 3, where allusions to The Waste Land and ‘Prufrock’ bracket a ‘sullen murmur’ which runs ‘out of the University of Pennsylvania’—Pound’s (not Eliot’s) alma mater. Cummings’ parody insinuates that Eliot’s self-conscious futurity— as in ‘the-man-with-a-great-future-behind-him’—renders him dry and dead. Similar sentiments recur in Cummings’ letters. A letter of 13 December 1922, from Cummings to John Peale Bishop and his wife, mocks the assumed futurity. It concludes with a parodic ditty signed: ‘copyright 2987 A.D. by Tears Eliot’.47 And a much later letter (1 June 1947, to Sir Solly Zuckerman) complains that ‘after entertaining that hombre [Eliot] for 15 minutes you feel like taking out a patent for manipulating the dead’.48 Cummings’ parody makes the point that if classical allusion is a currency, Cummings can allude with the best of them. But if the power of allusion comes from its capacity to deepen meaning, the risk of allusion lies in stylistic superficiality. It might have to be conceded that Joyce pulls it off—that ‘across the winedark years’, he can summon Odysseus’ wink, while he ‘rides upon his iota subscript’. But mere mortals at least are best advised to ‘beware of the supine in You’. The voice of the common man in IV sees a tangle of ‘rhododactylosdendrons’ and ‘youses periphrastic conjugation’. He recognizes the intellect: ‘youses / has got one swell aurora borealis’. (That this refers to ‘a swell brain’ is more clear in the earlier draft line which it replaces:

46 Cummings’ parody probably pre-dates the addition of the dedication of The Waste Land to Pound in 1925 (see Miller, Jr. 2005: 388), but Cummings would have been well informed concerning Pound’s role in selling The Waste Land to The Dial (see above, Chapter 1). If Cummings’ parody is later than I have supposed, then the dedication is all the more grist to the mill. 47 Cummings 1972: no. 70, pp. 92–3. 48 Cummings 1972: no. 145, p. 178. I saw Webster 2015 after this chapter (and indeed book) had been written. Webster 2015: 82–3 offers another perspective on Cummings’ attitude to Eliot’s allusive relationship with the past, which chimes in some ways with what I say here. Webster also refers (2015: 84) to Malcolm Cowley’s complaints about The Waste Land as a poem which elevates the past at the expense of the present. My thanks to Michael Webster for sharing the proof-copy of his article with me in advance of its publication.

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‘youses aint no kewpie above de ears’.)49 The cleverness of the style is not in dispute. What is in dispute is its potency. I have argued in the previous section that is 5 explores versions of classicizing and modernist impotence. Cummings’ parody toys in a similar manner with sexual and literary inferiorities. The speaker complains about Eliot’s verse: ‘I know not what you mean. . . . ’ (Cummings’ ellipsis). After the reader’s attention is drawn so directly to the question of doubled or hidden meanings, Cummings turns to Eliot’s referencing of Agamemnon in ‘Sweeney and the Nightingales’. He turns Eliot’s ‘stiff dishonoured shroud’ into ‘the stiff dishonoured nightingales’—a change of phrase which sounds particularly euphemistic when it comes two lines after ‘I know not what you mean . . . .’. A readership with sufficient classical background to digest Eliot’s classical references is also sufficiently classically informed to have encountered the question of whether Catullus’ sparrow is a euphemism for his penis.50 The colloquial speaker in IV is more potent than the versifiers: ‘the eleventh muse erect,candid,standing by my fibula unashamed’. The versifiers, on the other hand, are at risk of failing in a tradition which they venerate: ‘--I fear,my poundlings,you will disappoint your Penates’. The problem is that classical allusiveness can turn into a very selfindulgent game. The poem closes with allusion to Eliot’s lines, ‘Or clasped the yellow soles of feet / In the palms of both soiled hands’ (from ‘Preludes’), and allusions to Pound and to Catullus. (In the following, I take tiddledewinks to be a reference to a popular ragtime tune for the piano, ‘Tiddle-De-Winks’ (1916), by Melville Morris, playable by piano roll.)51 [...] But I,oh shindig,arising from my stale smells clasping my yellow feet initiate orgasm:

49

Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (736). According to Pomeroy 2003: 50, the euphemistic reading of Catullus’ passer can be traced back to 1498, so there is no reason for it to be out of reach c.1922. 51 http://ragpiano.com/comps/mmorris.shtml; accessed 8 July 2015. I think that makes more sense than construing the line as a reference to the game of tiddlywinks. Cummings would no doubt have recognized Eliot’s own habit of allusion to popular songs, on which see Chinitz 2003 and Chinitz 2004. 50

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In one of the typescripts, ‘arunkyoulayah!’ is glossed by hand ‘ἀρυνκυλεία!’ The ejaculatory exclamation summons both Pound’s Canto IV (one of the Dial Cantos, referenced in part I of the parody) and Catullus 61. But in Catullus 61—Catullus’ epithalamion— Aurunculeia is a bride, and Manlius is on the way to his wedding night. Cummings’ ‘stale’ speaker has initiated his orgasm on his own. He is happy enough to ‘smite / the sounding bollox’ and churn out the classical ejaculations, but ultimately, ‘That Tired Feeling’ is merely masturbatory.

10 A Homeric Affair Reflections on the Ambitions of Modernism

In the 1910s and 1920s, Cummings was embedded in the world of modernism, both as a person and as a poet. At Harvard, he read the work of Amy Lowell and knew her personally. She wrote a job reference for him when he graduated from Harvard and moved to New York, although around the same time she bet Scofield Thayer that Cummings would never find any great success as a poet.1 Also at Harvard, Cummings kept up with the latest developments in poetry and poetic theory from Europe. He was fascinated by Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. He received a copy of Blast.2 In Paris in 1917, Cummings bought prints of the work of Matisse and Cézanne, and attended the premiere of Satie’s Parade.3 When he returned home after release from detention in France, he kept up his intimate friendship with Thayer and with James Sibley Watson, co-owners of The Dial. He was present at one of the key meetings about the publication in The Dial of The Waste Land.4 He returned to Paris in the spring of 1921, travelling together with his lifelong friend, John Dos Passos. He remained in Paris for two and a half years, socializing with other expatriates among the Paris literary scene. In 1921 he met Ezra Pound, who became another intimate, but complicated, lifetime

1 HRC 11.3; Dempsey 2014: 67, 154. For Cummings’ connections to modernism, see the fuller discussion above, Chapter 1. 2 There are issues of Blast in Cummings’ personal library, held at the HRC. 3 Cummings 1972, no. 22, pp. 25–6 (letter to his parents May 1917); Wickes 1969: 70–1. 4 Rainey 1998: 88.

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friend.5 The modernist world shaped Cummings’ work as well as his life. His earliest poetry was influenced by Imagism. He developed, self-consciously, his own uniquely ‘new’ style: ‘while Pound is angling for new atmospheres, I am pumping in a vacuum’.6 His painting was influenced by Cubism, Synchromism, and other early modernist styles. He acquired these techniques by studying the work of Cézanne, Gaston Lachaise, Picasso, and others, and through systematic personal drawing exercises in linearity, planes, and angles.7 He turned his own hand to absurdist, avant-garde theatre, with Him (1927). I have suggested already (Chapter 5) that the last decade of Cummings’ life, up to his death in 1962, saw him returning to some of the poetic influences and preoccupations of his youth. This same final decade also sees Cummings reflecting, both explicitly and implicitly, on 1920s modernism and on his own place within the modernist movement. One of the most nuanced reflections on modernism is embodied, implicitly, in the poem ‘in heavenly realms of hellas dwelt’ (CP 799). This rewriting of the bard’s tale of Hephaistos, Ares, and Aphrodite from the Odyssey (8.266–366) comes from Cummings’ final collection, 73 Poems (1963). It constitutes a return not only to Homer but also, more obliquely, to Milton and to Blake. Through this masterpiece of classical rewriting, Cummings comments on genre and epic, on modernism and the ambitions of modernism, and on what it means to be a major poet. In this chapter, I examine ‘in heavenly realms of hellas dwelt’ as a lens which refracts Cummings’ modernist identity, Romantic sympathies, and negotiation of epic ambition.

1. THE ROMANTIC POET-LOVER By the 1950s, Cummings had organized his early life into a selfmythology which acknowledged the formative impact of modernism on his own poetry, but shaped the narrative of his relationship with 5 Their introduction, which took place in Paris, is recounted by Cummings in a letter to his parents of 23 July 1921; see Cummings 1972, no. 61, pp. 78–80; also no. 248, p. 259. 6 Houghton MS Am 1823.7 (17). See above, Chapter 2. 7 Cohen 1987; see also above, Chapter 9.1.

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modernism to suit his later purposes. As I have observed already (Chapters 4.2 and 6.4), Cummings’ autobiographical i: six nonlectures refashioned some of his most famous texts, especially ‘in Just-’ and ‘O sweet spontaneous’. The nonlectures turn these poems into stories which revolve around Cummings’ own childhood and his awakening sense of wonder at nature. By the time of the nonlectures, Cummings had established a reputation as a poet of childhood, spring, love, and transcendence. Cummings’ reputation drew huge crowds for his public readings. He relied on readings for his livelihood: they were a necessary means of supplementing his literary income.8 During such readings and lectures (both the nonlectures and others which were planned, but never delivered), Cummings built on his reputation as a poet of spring and of transcendent love in order to fashion a successful persona as the quintessential romantic poet-lover.9 The persona of romantic poet-lover captures one aspect of Cummings’ life and work. It is certainly true that Cummings was deeply influenced by the Romantics, by the sonnet tradition, and by ideas of transcendent love which amalgamate a wide variety of influences, from Plato to the American Transcendentalist thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. However, the romantic poet-lover is a selective persona which expresses a public self, formulated for and through public readings and lectures. It is a partial, and not an all-embracing, truth. Notes towards the undelivered California lectures, dating from the 1950s, include an anecdote which captures this absorption of Cummings’ relationship to modernism into the persona of the romantic/ Romantic self.10 The anecdote is presumably factual, but it is chosen and told in a way which supports a specific, 1950s self-construction. It concerns Cummings’ initial response to The Waste Land and a recollected conversation with Scofield Thayer: For the finances, see Kennedy 1994a: 435–7; 445–9. I am very grateful for a casual chat which I had with Craig Raine, who remembers stories of the kinds of crowds which Cummings’ readings pulled at the height of his success. It was this chat which brought home to me the practical advantages and market value of Cummings’ pose of ‘quintessential romantic poetlover’. (Craig Raine’s phrase or something like it, if I remember correctly, although I couldn’t say whether he intended a small or capital ‘r’.) From a very different perspective, Cohen 1987: 23–4 also challenges Cummings’ romantic persona. 10 This story now resides among unpublished, private papers, but it was intended for public consumption (although the lecture series in the end fell through). These lecture notes create a persona very similar to the public persona of the nonlectures. 8 9

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One day,shortly after “The Waste Land” by TSEliot had made its first appearance, Thayer asked me in his pointblank way what I thought of it. “I don’t” was my answer. Thayer’s eyes narrowed: what (he wanted to know) were my objections to the poem? “I have only one objection” I assured him. “May I hear the one objection?” he asked politely & coldly. “Certainly” I replied. “The socalled poem isn’t a poem.” “You mean:isn’t a poem from your point of view” he suggested almost fatally. “Quite right” I agreed. “From my point of view it’s bad enough to feel that way without telling the world.” For a moment I had no idea what would happen either to the world or to me:then he smiled. “My taste” he stated grandly “is more catholic than yours.”11

Cummings displays his romantic sensibilities in his rejection of the perverse tone of The Waste Land: ‘“. . . it’s bad enough to feel that way without telling the world.”’ Thayer’s reported response, on the other hand, casts Thayer in the role of champion of modernist literary values. ‘“You mean:isn’t a poem from your point of view” he suggested almost fatally.’ Thayer throws back at Cummings a modernist rejection of the purely personal perspective (‘your point of view’) in favour of a literary aesthetic of impersonality. Thayer describes his own taste as ‘catholic’. Although Cummings’ capitalization does not always indicate semantic content, in this case, he clearly does mean ‘catholic’ with a small ‘c’, i.e. an all-embracing literary taste (not Roman Catholicism). Thayer’s literary ‘catholicism’ frames Cummings, by contrast, in the pose of the outsider, the rebellious individual, the romantic rebel. Of all the ways in which Cummings might have chosen, in the 1950s, to remember his own, various and varying, reactions to Eliot or to The Waste Land, he chooses this bit of repartee between himself and Thayer. It is a highly selective representation of Cummings’ initial responses to The Waste Land. His parody of The Waste Land, for example, is of similar date to the occurrence of this reported conversation with Thayer, and it shows how engaged with the poem Cummings truly was. Whatever he did think of The Waste Land, it is disingenuous to say, simply, that he didn’t.12 11 Houghton MS Am 1892.7 (90): ‘Notes for a nonexisting lecture (California)’ (Folder 1 of 44). There is an illegible superscript addition after ‘Thayer’s eyes narrowed:’, which looks like ‘cc’, and might be meant as quotation marks. But the text has been left by Cummings as indirect speech and there are no closing quotation marks. 12 Cummings’ parody, above Chapter 9.3; below in the Cummings edition; for the date of the parody, see ‘Editing the Unpublished Work’, section 3. The anecdote also

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This prioritizing of a particular, romantic persona in Cummings’ 1950s self-construction in public lectures and autobiographical writing is the simplified backdrop against which we can see a far more nuanced and complex version of Cummings’ attitudes to modernism articulated, implicitly, in his poetry.

2. EPIC AMBITIONS From The Waste Land and Ulysses to Pound’s Cantos, the ambitions of the high modernists turned towards epic in varying registers.13 Cummings’ EIMI (1933), the narrative of his travels in Soviet Russia, also participated in this modernist epic ambition. EIMI evokes both ancient epic and Dante’s Divine Comedy, and includes a katabasis (down to the mausoleum housing Lenin’s tomb and then up back into the outside air) and a nostos, in the form of the train journey home which closes the narrative.14 Epic ambitions are implicitly renounced, however, by a poem from the volume 95 Poems (1958), which pronounces a four-line judgement on the ambition of Milton. The poem is built around Milton’s ‘And justify the ways of God to men’.15 It reads (in its entirety): when any mortal(even the most odd) can justify the ways of man to God i’ll think it strange that normal mortals can not justify the ways of God to man

Cummings’ assessment of Milton’s disconnect from humanity (‘normal mortals’) is, consciously or not, similar to Eliot’s view of Milton’s approach to Adam and Eve: ‘[t]hey have ordinary humanity to the right degree, and yet are not, and should not be, ordinary mortals.’ Eliot continues, ‘Were they more particularized they would be false, does not give a full sense of Thayer’s response to The Waste Land. Dempsey 2014: 107 finds a reference among the papers of Alyse Gregory (editor of The Dial) to Thayer’s assessment of The Waste Land as ‘disappointing’. 13 The Waste Land is often described as ‘urban epic’. Witemeyer 1999 makes it clear how early Pound conceived his own epic ambitions and how central those ambitions were to his entire self-conception as a poet. 14 Kinra 1999 discusses EIMI and epic. 15 Paradise Lost, Book I, l. 26; CP 731.

Figure 6. Garden of Eden. Temptation scene. Eve reaches up to take the apple from the mouth of the snake, while Adam crouches. Pencil sketch by E.E. Cummings. Houghton MS Am 1892.8 (1) Box 113. Sheet number 3198. From SKETCHES by E.E. Cummings. Copyright © by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust.

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and if Milton had been more interested in humanity, he could not have created them.’16 (Cummings also imagined the scene with a visual specificity which contrasts with Eliot’s reading of Milton: see Fig. 6). Cummings offers his own version of the Fall in ‘devil crept in eden wood’, written in the 1950s to serve as song lyrics for a comic musical (a project which remained unrealized).17 Cummings’ rude lyric ends wickedly with an unsubtle double-entendre, when Eve is summoned to account by the Lord: ‘lord he called [ . . . ] -o my god i’m coming’. If Cummings’ Romantic self were really the whole story—that is, if the Romantic self had been as all-embracing as his public selfpresentation in the 1950s implied—then rebuffing Miltonian ambition in a witty quatrain and turning the grand narrative of the Fall into an obscene song lyric would stand as the apposite response to Romantic ‘anxiety’ over Milton’s influence.18 But Cummings’ ambitions were not truly dominated by the Romantic influence on his own work. He is at ease with Milton. His erotic retelling of the central episode from Milton’s Paradise Lost is bold and witty, but it does not come out of the central battle with his own poetic creativity. His real anxieties are elsewhere, because his ambitions were, in truth, those of 1910s and 1920s modernism. The masterpiece, therefore, is his retelling of a peripheral story, fragmented from the Odyssey. This retelling also evokes Milton—but in the context of confrontation with modernist epic ambition.

Eliot regarded Milton’s writing as completely non-visual: ‘Indeed, I find, in reading Paradise Lost, that I am happiest where there is least to visualize. The eye is not shocked in his twilit Hell as it is in the Garden of Eden, where I for one can get pleasure from the verse only by the deliberate effort not to visualize Adam and Eve and their surroundings.’ ‘Milton I’, Eliot 1957: 143; Eliot was more generous in ‘Milton II’, Eliot 1957: 157: ‘Just as a higher degree of characterization of Adam and Eve would have been unsuitable, so a more vivid picture of the earthly Paradise would have been less paradisiacal. For a greater definiteness, a more detailed account of flora and fauna, could only have assimilated Eden to the landscapes of earth with which we are familiar.’ Cummings’ visual imagination, on the other hand, is ever vivid.

‘Milton II’; Eliot 1957: 156. CP 1025. Plans for musical: see the editors’ explanation in Cummings 1983: 126. 18 ‘anxiety of influence’: Bloom 1997. Bloom argues for the centrality of Milton in Romantic anxiety. 16 17

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The 41 lines in which he retold the story of the affair between Ares and Aphrodite and their discovery in flagrante by Hephaistos make for one of Cummings’ longer poems. But long for Cummings does not amount to ‘long poems’ in the sense invoked in critical debates over major and minor poets. Cummings was often taken less seriously by critics because he did not write long poems. Even R. S. Kennedy, Cummings’ major biographer, lays out ‘our awareness of his limitations’, beginning with this issue in prime of place: ‘First of all, he wrote only short poems.’ His poems, as a result, lack development and ‘real structural complexity’.19 Michael Webster maintains that the small ‘i’/child’s eye voice which speaks in many of Cummings’ poems inherently pulls in a different direction from aspirations to the standing of a ‘major poet’. He argues that ‘[q]uite a bit of the evidence suggests that Cummings was—at the very least—ambivalent about aspiring to major poet status’.20 Ambivalent is indeed the right word, provided it is used not as a softened version of ‘hostile’ but meaning what it does mean: a powerful attraction to the idea of major poetry in tension with a rejection of it. The positive desire to write major poetry appears in a selfcastigating note among Cummings’ papers. These reflections emerge from Cummings’ reunion with his daughter Nancy, from whom he was separated after the breakdown of his marriage to his first wife, Elaine Orr (“EO” in his notes; “N” is Nancy). The separation occurred in 1924; the reunion in 1946.21 since Nancy’s latest visit,am feeling: O,for such a love! The lack of it is what makes me write merely short poems;keeps me from achieving great works:when the EO-N thread broke,I broke too. Since then,have been lost in a fragmentary world(my “unworld)!of abstractions & generalities,of hatreds & scorns & satires,of la vie politique et pratique et toujours banale.’

19 Kennedy 1992: 38–9. Further back-and-forth about Cummings’ standing as a poet: von Abele 1955; Friedman 1957; Friedman 1964; Webster 1995b; Chinitz 1996; Cowen 1996; Fallon 2002; Cohen 2010: 82–113. 20 Webster 1995b: 77. 21 See Kennedy 1994a: 266–80; 413–30. Nancy’s response to this separation and reunion is central to her own volume of poems, Charon’s Daughter, published under the pen-name Nancy Cummings de Forêt (1977). As the title indicates, Charon’s Daughter is also a very classically engaged work. For Nancy, see Webster 2005/2006b.

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All this has been anaesthetic–a way of not suffering,of avoiding pain . . . i.e. Life yes,to Live is to Suffer;(ergo):& to Enjoy22

It is surprising to see Cummings, who elevated the fragmentary Sappho to the noblest place among poets, speak so negatively about fragments. But the poetic weakness which Cummings describes here as ‘a fragmentary world . . . of abstractions’ takes ‘fragmentary’ in a different sense. His anxiety in these notes seems more like Eliot’s disdain for the incompleteness (as he saw it) of the Romantic poets and his scorn for an abstract language which had lost its connection to the object, a failing epitomized (in Eliot’s view) by the language of Swinburne.23 If these Eliotic anxieties represent Cummings at an ebb of selfconfidence, then ‘in heavenly realms of hellas dwelt’ represents the poetic triumph which answers them. By taking on a reworking excerpted from classical epic, Cummings takes on the central modernist ambition to write definitive epic. He writes in a modernist style, with a mixing of high and low registers and and a teasing slant in his signalling of subject matter. The language of his reworking activates Milton and Blake, as well as Homer, and thus serves implicitly as a summative comment on the epic tradition.

3. HOMER, MILTON, BLAKE ‘in heavenly realms of hellas dwelt’ tells an immediately recognizable story without, in fact, referring to any of the three main protagonists by name. in heavenly realms of hellas dwelt two very different sons of zeus: one,handsome strong and born to dare –a fighter to his eyelashes– the other,cunning ugly lame; but as you’ll shortly comprehend a marvellous artificer 22 Houghton MS Am 1892.7 (196). (Folder 1); I have corrected ‘abstraftions’ to ‘abstractions’. Also quoted by Kennedy 1994a: 428. 23 See Perry 2008, esp. 227–8, on Eliot’s criticism of the Romantics and Swinburne.

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The classical myth is signalled in the first two lines of the poem, which give us the ‘heavenly realms of hellas’ for a setting and introduce two of the protagonists as ‘sons of zeus’. The story also plays out, however, in the everyday of human experience: ‘(as happens every now and then / upon a merely human plane)’. The human level is activated in the punning final couplet, which suggests that this might be the story of any soldier and any straying wife, any Mrs Smith or Mrs Jones—

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the joke being that Hephaistos, god of the forge, is a smith, which makes his wife Aphrodite a ‘mrs smith’. The shift between the mythological and the human levels is lubricated by the Freudianinfluenced idea that Greek stories are universal and function as archetypes for the ordinary human experience.24 The poem also creates an allegorical reading as the tale of ‘Ugly’, ‘Beautiful’, ‘Fearless’, ‘Cunning’, and so on. The allegorical level triumphantly embraces the ‘abstractions’ which Cummings feared when writing his self-loathing note on ‘short poems’ and his failure to achieve ‘great works’. The subversive moral lesson created with these abstractions is unabashedly Romantic. The poem’s sympathies lie clearly with the losing line-up: ‘generosity’, ‘instinct’, ‘matter’, ‘vice’, ‘beauty’, and ‘life’. The Miltonian sound of ‘heavenly realms’ and ‘celestial host’ is reinforced with the distinctive paradox of ‘shining’ and ‘dark’ in ‘shining realms of regions dark’, which recollects Milton’s famous ‘darkness visible’. While Cummings’ earlier quatrain, ‘when any mortal(even the most odd)’, offers a condensed, epigrammatic response to Milton, the response to Milton offered by ‘in heavenly realms of hellas dwelt’ is layered and nuanced. For a start, Cummings’ response is layered through Blake. Eliot read Milton through Samuel Johnson’s reading; Cummings, through Blake’s reading.25 Eliot had little time either for Milton’s excessive reliance on sound or for Blake’s prophetic texts. ‘. . . I cannot feel that my appreciation of Milton leads anywhere outside of the mazes of sound. That, I feel, would be the matter for a separate study, like that of Blake’s prophetic books; it might be well worth the trouble, but would have little to do with my interest in the poetry.’26 Cummings, on the other hand, had recently returned to Blake and had been (re-)reading the seminal Blake scholarship published by his old Harvard friend, S. Foster Damon. Blake’s Milton: a Poem in 2 Books, mediates Cummings’ relationship with Homer and Milton, while Damon mediates Cummings’ relationship with Blake. Like Cummings’ earlier quatrain, Blake’s Milton also prioritized the line ‘To Justify the Ways of God to Men’, which appears immediately ‘Oedipal complex’, etc. See above, Chapter 4.2. Eliot’s ‘Milton II’ for his reading through Johnson; see Deane 1992 on Eliot, The Waste Land, classicism, and Johnson. 26 ‘Milton I’ (Eliot 1957: 144). 24 25

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underneath the title and by-line of Milton. Blake’s preface begins with the anti-classical cry: ‘The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all Men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible . . .’. Blake’s ‘Book the First’ opens with a vision of ‘immortal Milton’ wandering through the ‘Realms / of terror & mild moony lustre in soft sexual delusions / of varied beauty’. While Blake has Milton, elevated among the immortals, journeying through ‘Realms’ conducive to ‘sexual delusions’, Cummings resurrects a story from (as Blake would have it) the ‘Stolen and Perverted . . . Homer’ and repeats with frank delight a tale set in ‘heavenly realms’ of the sexual immorality of Beautiful and Fearless. While this might seem a riposte to Blake, there is also a tribute to Blake. The poet sides with the adulterous couple over ‘our illustrious scientist’. In Cummings’ world, ‘scientist’ is readily pejorative, and in Cummings’ late work, the pejorative tone hanging over ‘science’ has a Blakean tenor. In another one of the 73 Poems—the same, last volume of poetry which contains ‘in heavenly realms of hellas dwelt’—Cummings teases Blake’s ‘One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression’ into ‘1 law for the lions & / oxen is science)’.27 Behind this is a deeper affiliation to Blake’s mystical spirituality. In a letter of 5 March 1959, Cummings quotes from Damon’s work on Blake: nature(wholeness innocence eachness beauty the transcending of time&space)awakened. “Metaphor” of what? Perhaps of whatever one frequently meets via my old friend S.FosterDamon’s William Blake/His Philosophy and Symbols;e.g.(p 225)“They” the angels “descend on the material side . . . and ascend on the spiritual;this is . . . a representation of the greatest Christian mystery,a statement of the secret which every mystic tries to tell”.28

27 Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Cummings, ‘everybody happy?’ (CP 791). Cf. letter to Matti Meged, 13 May 1962, Cummings 1972: no. 265, p. 275. Reference to the same line from Blake also appears in Adventures in Value (1962); see above, Chapter 5.2. 28 Cummings’ own ellipses. Letter to Francis Steegmuller, Cummings 1972: no. 252, p. 261. Cf. letter to Howard Nelson, 25 November 1959, Cummings 1972: no. 255, pp. 263–5. The letter to Nelson includes various comments on poets, inter alia, ‘I, too . . . stand up for Swinburne: & I particularly enjoy the quotation re Rossetti(p 37), the reference to Blake(p 142) [ . . . ].’ Cummings’ reading of Damon’s book on Blake: see also above, Chapter 5.2.

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Indeed, Cummings’ moral programme of ‘generosity’, ‘instinct’, ‘matter’, ‘vice’, ‘beauty’, and ‘life’ may betray the influence of Damon’s reading of Blake’s Milton. It is not, of course, a repeat of Blake’s moral priorities, which do not include endorsement of ‘soft sexual delusions’. However, Cummings’ ‘reason vanquished instinct’ echoes Damon’s version of Blake’s identification of the failings of Milton: ‘He opposed Reason and Restraint to Impulse and Indulgence.’29 Thus Cummings’ approach to Milton is read both through and against Blake’s own epic Milton, with admiration for a Blakean spirituality over materialism, but with a classical subject matter and celebration of sexual licence which runs directly counter to it.

4. CALLIMACHEAN DEFIANCE While Cummings’ ‘when any mortal(even the most odd)’ rebuffs Milton’s epic ambition with a direct statement, ‘in heavenly realms of hellas dwelt’ rebuffs epic ambition in part through generic confusion. It is a reworking of Homer—but specifically of the bard’s tale, which it treats as a self-contained story. Cummings uses the epic marker ‘truth to sing’, alluding pointedly to the opening words of the Iliad (‘The anger sing, goddess . . .’) and the Aeneid (‘I sing of arms and the man’). His ‘truth to sing’ might also be construed as an allusion to Blake’s lines: The Bard replied: “I am Inspired! I know it is Truth! for I Sing // “According to the inspiration of the Poetic Genius . . . 30

These lines from Blake highlight the presence of a bard’s song within the Milton. Damon’s discussion of Blake’s bard’s song raises the chances that Cummings picked these lines out of the middle of Blake’s bewildering text.31 An implicit reference to the inclusion of a bard’s song within Blake’s Milton is a neat allusion in the context of Cummings’ excerption of the bard’s tale in the Odyssey. Cummings’ poem displays a confident epic marker and excerpts its subject matter from epic. However, Cummings throws generic allegiance wide open. He refers to the poem as ‘my tragic tale’. But the 29 31

Damon 1969: 174–5. Damon 1969: 175–6.

30

Milton I.13.51–I.14.1.

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poem is hardly structured as Tragedy. If it is a tale, it is a morality tale, with moral principles extracted in the final stanza. Yet the poem is interrupted at the very point when moral principles reach their summa: ‘and logic thwarted life:and thus- / but look around you, friends and foes // my tragic tale concludes herewith’.32 The poem’s metre is iambic tetrameter; not classical hexameter or Milton’s serious and weighty pentameter. Iambic tetrameter was a metre much favoured by Tennyson, whose influence on Cummings we observed earlier (Chapter 7).33 Cummings’ choice of iambic tetrameter suits the sublime subject matter of classical myth, as it suited Tennyson for the subject of Arthurian legend. The metre also suits the Romantic agenda indicated by the programmatic sympathies with ‘generosity’, ‘instinct’, ‘matter’, ‘vice’, ‘beauty’, and ‘life’. It is a lyrical metre and the poem, in genre terms, is perhaps closer to lyric than to any other clear genre identity. Much earlier in his career, in a poem from W [ViVa] (1931), Cummings had also used iambic tetrameter and a similar epic marker (‘i sing of Olaf . . .’) in a poem of protest against the treatment of conscientious objectors in the American army: ‘i sing of Olaf glad and big’ (CP 340). Cummings clearly found iambic tetrameter conducive to formulating his ambivalent relationship with epic.34

32 It might be interesting that the morality tale structure was more prominent in an earlier draft (Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (619)). The poem at this point in its evolution concluded with the lines: and logic thwarted life; and thus (somewhat contemporaneous -ly speaking,via the industrial as pundits call it rev -olution)hatred vanquished love the moral of our tragic myth? soldier,beware of mrs smith 33 e.g. ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’ and ‘The Lady of Shalott’. To be clear, Chapter 7 focuses its consideration of Cummings and Tennyson on the influence of Maud, and I do not mean that Maud is in iambic tetrameter (though the poem uses that rhythm among many others). For the complicated metrics of Maud, see Stokes 1964. 34 Cf. Collins 1976: 8–9. Cummings’ liking for iambic tetrameter: Peterson 1997: 158. Since Cummings had so recently been reading Damon’s Blake, he may have noticed Damon’s comments on Blake’s Milton and classical hexameter: ‘Such lines as the following from Milton (20: 50–2) are unmistakably, if accidentally, reminiscent of the classical metre . . .’. (Damon 1969: 53).

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The generic jumbling is enhanced by Cummings’ jumbled registers. The classical world collides with a Christian language: ‘heavenly’, ‘celestial host’. The lyrical iambic tetrameter gives an elevated form to a chatty address to the reader: ‘but as you’ll shortly comprehend’. The poem uses a storytelling style with markers suitable to prose narrative: ‘now’, ‘then’, ‘next’, ‘thus’ open the second, third, fourth, and fifth stanzas. In the final couplet, the grandly ‘tragic tale’ is juxtaposed to the mundane ‘mrs smith’.35 Eliot was uncertain what to do with Milton: ‘something of a puzzle’.36 Since Milton, Eliot observed, epic had been ‘fallow’ in Anglophone literature (‘What is a Classic’).37 ‘Milton made a great epic impossible for succeeding generations’ (Milton II).38 Cummings’ incongruous registers and jumbled genres are one way to deal with this question—what can a poet write after Milton? Eliot sees Milton as a ‘bad influence’, and ‘an influence against which we still have to struggle’ (‘Milton I’).39 Cummings’ poem implicitly recognizes, however, that the struggle has moved on. Eliot himself compared Milton and Joyce (‘Milton I’).40 For Cummings, the ‘anxiety of influence’ has already refocused as anxiety about the giants of modernism who were his literary contemporaries—Joyce above all. Thus, Cummings’ reworking of the Fall in ‘devil crept in eden wood’ is free enough from Milton to be easy and unburdened. His real struggle is against his predecessor-contemporaries, and thus his richest reflections on the nature of modernist ambition are focused through a retelling from Homer’s Odyssey, in an inevitable relationship with Joyce’s Ulysses.

35 Cummings and genre: cf. Webster 2010: 44–5. On genre and the reception of Homer: Hardwick 2007: 55–6, 70; Hardwick 2008: 349–50 on Michael Longley and lyric reception of Homeric epic; Perris 2011. In discussions of genre and lyric, the issue of ‘major’ and ‘minor’ persistently hovers. Hardwick 2007: 56 quotes Longley as having said of Irish lyrics: ‘They remind us that miniature is not the same as minor’— a position which may betray either confidence or anxiety. 36 The opening gambit of ‘Milton I’: ‘While it must be admitted that Milton is a very great poet indeed, it is something of a puzzle to decide in what his greatness consists.’ Eliot 1957: 138. 37 Eliot 1957: 64. 38 Eliot 1957: 150. 39 Eliot 1957: 139. Eliot somewhat revises his position in ‘Milton II’. 40 Eliot 1957: 142–5.

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In Cummings’ world, Joyce was the god of modernism. In the parody of The Waste Land (above, Chapter 9.2; text below), it is Joyce who takes the divine role. Joyce moves in a mysterious way his Flaubert to perform he throws his gerund to the winds, and rides upon his iota subscript.

As in Cowper’s hymn: God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform He plants His footsteps in the sea And rides upon the storm.

In Section V of the parody, Joyce is connected to the revolution of the worlds. The Rorlds Wevolve: wipe your Joyce across your James and laugh (the worlds revolve like lovely women stooping to folly in vacant lots,

The lines allude to Eliot’s ‘Preludes’: Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; The worlds revolve like ancient women Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

Cummings’ lines may puncture Eliot, but they cannot fail to elevate Joyce. Indeed, Cummings never mastered his own tone about Joyce. In a 1950 letter to Ezra Pound, he referred to Aristotle along with ‘Jimmie J’s ‘Hamlet scene from U’ in such an impenetrable fashion that even Pound found it too obscure to follow and wrote back to ask for clarification.41 Somehow Cummings could never quite get the glove on ‘Joymes Jace’ (‘Jimmie J’) that he got on ‘Tears Eliot’ or indeed on Pound, who is the subject of some of Cummings’ most vicious satire. (The close and genuine friendship between Cummings and Pound put a strain on Cummings, who was not oblivious to Pound’s poisonous side.)42 41

Cummings 1972: no. 179, p. 204; no. 180, pp. 204–5. ‘Joymes Jace’: letter to Pound, 3 October 1935. Cummings 1972: no. 109, pp. 144–5. I have argued elsewhere (Rosenblitt 2013) that Cummings vents some of 42

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Cummings once said of Pound, ‘he sometimes gives me a Father Complex’.43 Joyce clearly went one better, from mere father-figure to God-figure. ‘in heavenly realms of hellas dwelt’ is staged under the felt weight of the immortal father-figure. The two male protagonists are introduced in the second line as ‘two very different sons of zeus’. Indeed the father Zeus is the only god who is given his Greek name. His children are identified by their qualities (‘Beautiful’, ‘Brave’) or occupations (‘scientist’, ‘soldier’). The reader will know that it was Zeus who arranged the marriage between Hephaistos and Aphrodite, against which Aphrodite and Ares stage their profitless rebellion. The poem conjures the world of the paternal rule of Zeus and the Olympian misbehaviour of his children. Cummings’ efforts to channel an epic modernist ambition result, as we have seen, in an assertion of his Romantic self through a lyric poem which draws on Blake and on a Romantic set of values (‘instinct’, ‘beauty’, etc.). But ‘in heavenly realms of hellas dwelt’ is not simply a reactionary appeal to the voice of Romantic poetry. Cummings was not so unsophisticated as to attempt a simplistic reversion to Romanticism (or, as Bloom would put it, to ‘dwindle merely into a latecomer’).44 Modernist literature repeatedly drew authority from its own assertion of ownership of the classical tradition (and nowhere more so than with Ulysses). This is what Cummings takes on, and it reshapes the Romantic agenda of his poem as a comment on modernism. The essential move made by ‘in heavenly realms of hellas dwelt’ is not Romantic; it is Callimachean. Cummings’ Romantic comment on modernist ambition ultimately resorts to a kind of repositioning which is borrowed from the classical canon, and it is the classical status of this move which allows Cummings to outflank high modernism. If bowing to Bloom’s taxonomy, Cummings’ response to his predecessors would be nearest, among Bloom’s categories, to askesis. his feelings about Pound’s fascism by lampooning Pound’s own sense of inferiority to Joyce. I suggest there that the Sapphic poem ‘the phonograph may(if it likes)be prophe’ (CP 1016) gives Pound a father-complex for ‘His Master’s Voice’, the voice of the great Joyce. See Bloom 1997: 152 on the Father/God-figure. 43 Letter to his mother, 24 October 1923. Cummings 1972: no. 77, p. 104. Cf. Webster 2012: 49, 53. 44 Bloom 1997: 8.

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Cummings could be described as purging himself of the epic ambitions of the tradition he inherits and catharsing his Romantic self, so as to achieve a curtailed, but focused, poetic wit. Indeed, the selfinterruption in the ante-penultimate line is a kind of enactment of curtailment. However, the classical Callimachean template expresses the status of Cummings’ move, and it is this status—rather than anything expressed by Bloom’s taxonomy—which is essential to success. By returning to the canonized classical move, Cummings circumvents the intervening tradition and finds a way to compete with his modernist contemporaries—Joyce, Pound, Eliot—who themselves drew such authority from the classical tradition. Ironically, Cummings’ Callimachean moment takes him furthest from the classical poets with whom he had the deepest engagement throughout his life (Catullus, Horace, Virgil; in other senses, perhaps Greek drama). It takes him closest to the rejection of epic and to the self-conscious tussles with poetic authority which we find when Ovid and Propertius looked to ground their poetic authority in their wit and to claim a Callimachean inheritance. Both Ovid and Propertius are otherwise more at the outskirts of Cummings’ classicism. It is not that Ovid is entirely absent from Cummings’ work. Cummings gave one of the sub-sections of Tulips & Chimneys the Ovidian title, ‘Amores’. But school lessons had perhaps put Cummings off from Ovid. (‘Ah, wicked Ovid! how thy wretched Latin order has confused / My mind’.)45 He owned no text of Ovid.46 Overall, he just never found quite as much in Ovid as he found in most of the other major classical poets. And by and large, Propertius is less present than Ovid. Yet ‘in heavenly realms of hellas dwelt’ is an Ovidian and Propertian poem. It is Ovid who proposes reading Homeric epic as a matter of love trysts and sexual desires.47 Among these love trysts, Ovid himself includes the bard’s tale from the Odyssey: quis nisi Maeonides, Venerem Martemque ligatos narrat, in obsceno corpora prensa toro? Who but the Maeonian tells of Venus and Mars caught in bonds of unseemly love?48

45 46 47 48

See above, Chapter 2. See below, Appendix. Ovid, Tristia II. 371–80. Cf. Comber 1998: n. 7. Tristia II. 377–8. Trans. Arthur Leslie Wheeler.

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Cummings’ Ovidian spin on Homeric epic takes a Propertian turn when it extracts a subversive set of moral principles, interrupted by a final piece of socially useful advice: ‘soldier,beware of mrs smith’. This is a trick used in Propertius 3.3, the poem in which Propertius himself renounces the epic genre. Propertius represents himself on the receiving end of the advice of Apollo and Calliope to steer clear of epic. As Comber describes it: . . . Apollo concentrates on form, Calliope concentrates on content. Propertius must avoid the martial themes of Roman epic and write love poetry instead. But, in a teasing twist for Roman morality, his love poetry too will have a socially useful purpose: ut per te clausas sciat excantare puellas, qui volet austeros arte ferire viros. (3. 3. 49–50) So those who wish to steal a march on strict husbands May learn from you to charm girls from internment.49

Thus, in sum, both Propertius and Cummings offer useful poetic advice for would-be adulterers. Or, as Pound put it in the Homage to Sextus Propertius, Propertius’ subject matter, under Calliope’s instruction, was to be: “ [...] Obviously crowned lovers at unknown doors, Night dogs, the marks of a drunken scurry, These are your images, and from you the sorcerizing of shut-in young ladies, The wounding of austere men by chicane.”

It was Pound’s Homage which brought Propertius to modernism, and, presumptively, Pound who made Propertius a part of Cummings’ literary context. Cummings—who, as I have said, did not own a copy of any Ovid—also did not own any copy of Propertius’ Elegies. However, he did own no fewer than thirty books by Pound; among them is Poems 1918-21: including three portraits and four cantos (1921), in which the Homage appears.50 Thus Cummings asserts himself in the face of the epic ambitions of the high modernists, especially Pound and Joyce, who had already 49 50

Comber 1998: 45. Comber’s translation. See Appendix.

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become a father-figure and a god-figure, respectively, in his imagination. But his act of self-assertion cannot escape the father-figure Pound, whose Homage to Sextus Propertius begins: ‘Shades of Callimachus [ . . . ]’ and who mediates the Propertian influence which shapes Cummings’ Callimachean lyric. In spite of the incompleteness of rebellion, ‘in heavenly realms of hellas dwelt’ is still a Callimachean masterpiece. It has the playfulness and self-reflexivity of Callimachean work and the irreverent Callimachean approach to form and metre. The ‘mismatching’ of metre to subject manifests itself here as material drawn from epic rewritten in tetrameter. Cummings also slips in perfect classical touches with a sharp Callimachean wit. It is done so artfully that the acuteness of Cummings’ language and word-games can slide by unnoticed: ‘then Cunning forged a web so subtle’ sneaks in the verb to match Hephaistos, god of the forge.

5. MAJOR POETRY The weight of epic, the pressure to write ‘long’ poems, and a jostling over what is major or minor are all aspects of the classical and Anglophone poetic traditions which cast long shadows. The jumbling of genre as a means for asserting oneself against the epic tradition is a strategy employed in Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990).51 Lyric used as protest against epic appears in Alice Oswald’s Memorial (2011). In the preface to Memorial, Oswald argues that a recovery of the lyric which is buried within epic restores a female voice, lamenting the death of soldiers in war.52 Like Cummings, Oswald works through ‘reckless’ (her word) excerption from the epic original.53

51 Omeros and its relationship to epic form (especially its postcolonial ‘hybridity’) is discussed by Burkitt 2007; McConnell 2013: 110–34. See also McConnell 2013: 133 for brief comments by Walcott on the idea of the fragment. Generally for Omeros and classical reception, see bibliographic references in Hardwick 1997: 326 n. 1 and extensive bibliography given by McConnell 2013. 52 Work on Oswald’s Memorial: Harrop 2013; Hahnemann 2014; Minchin 2015. See also Perris 2011 on genre and the reception of Homer. 53 ‘I think this method, as well as my reckless dismissal of seven-eighths of the poem, is compatible with the spirit of oral poetry . . .’, Oswald 2011: 2.

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Excerption offers opportunities for refocusing and realignment. It also shortens. Eliot observed: ‘The difference between major and minor poets has nothing to do with whether they wrote long poems, or only short poems—though the very greatest poets, who are few in number, have all had something to say which could only be said in a long poem.’54 The claim which lyric makes, in response to the pressure to be lengthy, is instead to be alive. Oswald seeks for a language which is ‘alive and kicking’.55 Cummings—for whom ‘aliveness’ is an omnipresent theme throughout his corpus of poetry and prose—laments the thought that ‘logic thwarted life’ in the misadventures of ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Brave’. He tells that story in a poem whose jumbled genres and registers defy logic but unmistakably celebrate life. Cummings’ story is ‘irrepressibly’ alive. As Gregory suggests, assessing H.D.’s lyric forms, ‘lyric poetry is potentially the most radical and subversive of literary genres . . . because it concerns dimensions of experience that make irrepressible claims . . .’.56 Cummings’ irrepressible claim concerns the sexual aliveness of an adulterous tryst and celebrates a fruitless union. From a Freudian perspective—which Cummings’ own lifetime allegiance to Freudian theory invites—it is a marked choice. The celebration of an adulterous sexual love which led to no offspring is both rejection and resolution, if it is in any way true that Cummings’ enforced alienation 54 Eliot 1957: 49; Eliot’s italics. This opinion, taken from Eliot’s ‘What is Minor Poetry’ (1944), is discussed with reference to Cummings’ major/minor status by Webster 1995b: 79–80. 55 2011: 2. 56 Gregory 2003: 21–2 writes: ‘. . . lyric poetry is potentially the most radical and subversive of literary genres. This assertion goes against common wisdom: the lyric has consistently been described in critical terms that stress its divorce from the public sphere. The fictions we have of lyric, coming essentially from German romanticism— the lyric as solitary speech, overheard song—effectively confine it to the sphere of the irrelevant and marginal. . . . the lyric is potentially subversive because it concerns dimensions of experience that make irrepressible claims, and those claims almost inevitably challenge a conventional, collective sense of order. For this reason, lyric poetry is basically heterodox . . . .’ On H.D. and lyric genre, cf. Kozak and Hickman 2014. For a much earlier discussion in Cummings’ letters of Milton, aliveness, and science (in the context of New York’s Natural History Museum), see the 1935 letter to Pound, Cummings 1972: no. 99, pp. 129–32, about the cross-section of a felled tree displaying the growth rings: ‘Of course if that tree hadn’t been murdered,& murdered crosswise,that tree would have remained a mute inglorious milton. Naturally this milton would have been alive,but science doesn’t care for this.’ (And further, for outrage at the cross-section of a felled tree as an affront to living nature, cf. the discussion of ‘ΜΟΙΡΑ’, above, Chapter 5.2.)

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from his first wife and his only child, Nancy, cut off ambitions to reach for longer poems or for a more clearly ‘major’ status. In sum, Cummings faced pressure to be a ‘major’ poet both from his environment and from his own internal struggles. To be ‘major’ implies recognition and canonicity. Cummings responded to this pressure with a nuanced reflection on the ambitions of modernism, producing a poem whose implied reach takes in—as subjects for comment—Milton, Blake, Joyce, Eliot, and Pound. In his battle with epic and with the ambitions of modernism, Cummings ultimately reaches for a classical solution. His rejection of epic resorts to a canonized classical move. He produced a poem which falls far from the Horatian and Virgilian centre of his life-long engagement with Latin literature, but which is truly a Callimachean masterpiece.

Afterword This study is long enough as it stands. It was never my intention to exhaust the subject of Cummings and the Classics. It has been a privilege to examine and to be permitted to publish Cummings’ own Harvard translations from the Classics and his classically engaged prose. My response to that material has naturally focused on the early period in Cummings’ literary career, when his classical engagements were most closely intertwined with his Harvard work. The resurfacing of themes from his earliest poetry in Cummings’ late writing has provided occasion to look also at the last decade of his life and work. I am well aware how much material escaped this book—especially material which belongs to Cummings’ middle period, from the play Him (1927) to the poetry collection titled from the Greek, XAIPE (1950). There is so much that could be done with this period of Cummings’ work. It would be possible to trace, through different settings, Cummings’ use of particular poems from antiquity. (The obvious candidates would be Horace, Odes II.14, ‘Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume’ or Catullus 3, ‘Lugete, o Veneres Cupidinesque’.)1 Cummings’ relationship with particular classical writers (perhaps with Plato) would also repay scrutiny. There is certainly more to say about Cummings, the Classics, and genre—from epic, to lyric, to satire. And Dante’s role in mediating the Classics for Cummings is a rich topic with potential for detailed study. 1 On Catullus 3, there is a basis for discussion to build on: Baker 1959 and Webster 2012 [2013]. See also Friedman 1960: 51–2 and Webster 1998: 27–8 on ‘flotsam and jetsam’ (CP 492), which was described as ‘Catullan’ by Pound and which references Horace Odes II.14. For Odes II.14, see (not exhaustively) Cummings 1972: no. 87, p. 116 (letter to John Dos Passos); no. 191, pp. 211–12 (letter to Hildegarde Watson); Cummings 2007a [1933]: 20 (EIMI); Cummings 2013: 83 (Him, Act III, Scene 1).

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What perhaps stands out most to me, at this time, is Cummings’ engagement with questions of identity in his work from 1927 to 1950. Even a brief selection of classical interactions from this middle period will serve to show how Cummings’ relationship to the Classics became a part of this exploration of identity. Cummings’ middle period begins with Him (1927), which is a play in the tradition of the theatre of the absurd. The two central characters, ‘Me’, and ‘Him’, find it difficult to be open with each other about their relationship or about Me’s pregnancy. Him is an artist, whose struggle for an artistic identity stands in the way of his identity as lover or father. Act I, Scene 1 opens with a conversation among three ‘withered female FIGURES’, who evoke both the Greek Fates and Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters (Witches) of Macbeth. Their presence frames the play’s absurdist exploration of artistic and human identity within a joint Greek and Shakespearean tradition.2 The short play Anthropos, or the Future of Art (1930) continues the exploration of artistic and human identity in Cummings’ theatre. Anthropos is a direct reworking of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Its cast are three ‘infrahuman creatures’, squatting around the embers of a fire, and one ‘man’, painting. The designation of the characters as ‘man’ and ‘infrahumans’ makes explicit the play’s focus on the nature of human identity. The prose work EIMI (1933) is a narrative of Cummings’ travels in Russia. The book is a protest against the loss of individual identity in Stalin’s collectivist Soviet Union, and its Greek title is specifically chosen to attest to that individualist philosophy.3 EIMI, which is structured as a journey through Hell, draws explicitly on Dante—Cummings refers to his guide as Virgil—and is powerfully influenced by Joyce’s Ulysses. The character of Cummings looks to the Greek for his identity. Characters in EIMI shift their names according to their situation. As Cummings explains in his preface: ‘Last we have tovarich(comrade)peesahtel y 2 See English 2004 on Him and the Classics. Me’s pregnancy and what becomes of it is ambiguous: see (inter alia) Maurer 1956: 10–23; Cohen 1987: 145–7; Kennedy 1994a: 290–3; English 2004: 90. A letter to Nancy (his daughter), dated 20 August 1948 (Cummings 1972: no. 152, pp. 183–4) complains that the director for a revival of Him was ‘quite unable to conceive of any dimension beyond EitherOr:thus,either the play’s about a birth or it’s about an abortion;but which?’ Cummings’ lecture notes for the undelivered California lectures (MS Am 1892.7 (90), Folder 24 of 44) suggest ‘that the play called Him turns on Me’s refusal to have Him’s child . . . ’. 3 See also above, Chapter 5.1.

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hoodoshnik(writer & painter)Kem-min-kz(Russian for Cummings)alias I or C or K,alias Poietes(Greek ποιητης=maker=poet).’4 Finally, in the poetry collected as XAIPE (1950), Cummings chose a Greek greeting which he insisted upon, against the wishes of the publisher (Oxford University Press) who regarded it as obscure.5 The title (obscure or not) is a greeting and signals a new, and more open, relationship with the reader. XAIPE is a collection which also shows changes in Cummings’ relationship to himself. so many selves(so many fiends and gods each greedier than every)is a man (so easily one in another hides; yet man can,being all,escape from none)

In this poem of self-scrutiny and scrutiny of the human condition, the plural ‘gods’ hints at the classical side. And the poem reaches out—‘so never is most lonely man alone’—and recollects the Greek greeting of the volume’s title.6 In all these works, and in others from this middle period, Cummings’ relationship to the Classics forms an essential element in his grappling with his own identity and with human identity. This most cursory sketch of the period 1927–50 indicates the seriousness and importance of the Classics to Cummings’ sense of himself. But such seriousness is no sign that Cummings had lost his sense of humour about the Classics, nor does its importance to him mean an erasure of the ambivalence which complicates and deepens his relationship to the Classics. For humour and ambivalence, it is only necessary to turn to the dedicatory page of Cummings’ 1935 collection of poems, No Thanks. The title runs seamlessly into a dedication to the fourteen publishing

4

Cummings 2007a [1933]: xvi. Skirmish with OUP: letter to Pound, 23 August 1949 (Cummings 1972: no. 167; pp. 193–4); Ordeman and Firmage 2000: 167. Cummings gave this perspective on the title as an introduction to a reading: ‘And now,a few poems from my latest book (published last year)which is called Xaipe--a Greek word meaning “rejoice”. It also means “hello”& “goodbye” ’ (HRC 2.3). Cf. ‘χαίρετε’ used at Cummings 2007a [1933]: 438. 6 CP 609. XAIPE also includes the poem ‘a(ncient)a’ (CP 616), in which the words ‘in an invisible’ are written ‘inani / nvisible’. Webster suggests that this alludes to Virgil’s Aeneid I.164–5, ‘sic ait, atque animum pictura pascit inani / multa gemens . . .’: http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/cummings/notes.htm [accessed 10.08.2014]. 5

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houses who turned the book down. Their names are arranged into the shape of a classical funerary urn: TO Farrar & Rinehart Simon & Schuster Coward-McCann Limited Editions Harcourt, Brace Random House Equinox Press Smith & Haas Viking Press Knopf Dutton Harper’s Scribner’s Covici, Friede Lest anyone should miss the point of the anti-dedication ‘no thanks’, the collection closes with a page reading ‘AND / THANKS / TO / R. H.C.’7 For all the liberation that Cummings found in his own relationship with the classical world, it seems that a classical image could still stand as a shorthand for a galling conservativeness of taste. I savour the thought that there is so much left to say, if I ever have the opportunity. On the other hand, I would not for a moment begrudge ceding the territory should any other scholar care to own it. If this book prompts the researches of others, that would be my very greatest satisfaction.

7 CP 382, 457. R.H.C. is his mother, Rebecca Haswell Cummings, who financed the volume. See Kennedy 1994a: 351. Webster 2002: 13 proposes that the dedication could be understood as funeral urn or possibly as loving cup.

Translations, Further Verse, and Prose by E.E. CUMMINGS

Contents Translations from Horace’s Odes

253

Odes I. 4 Odes I.16 Odes I. 24 Odes I. 28 Odes II.14 Odes IV. 5 Odes IV. 7

254 256 257 258 260 261 263

Odes I. 24: drafts illustrating Cummings’ translation process

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Translations from Sophocles

267

‘Preface’ [to the translations from Sophocles’ Electra] Electra, ll.1–142 ll.1126–1170

268 270 273

Oedipus Tyrannus. Chorus, ll. 464–482

276

Translations from Euripides

277

‘ΜΗΔΕΙΑ ΜΗΤΕΡ’, from Medea, ll.1021–1039

278

Electra, ll. 737–746 ll. 783–794 ll. 839–851 ll. 1062–1079

280 280 280 280

Translation from Aeschylus

283

Prometheus Bound. Chorus, ll. 398–435

284

Translations from the Odyssey Odyssey, VI, 127–144 Odyssey, VIII, 454–468 Odyssey, IX, 378–394 Odyssey, X, 210–223

287 288 288 289 290

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Translation exercise from Euripides’ Hecuba

291

Hecuba, Chorus, ll. 444–483 Chorus, ll. 629–658 Chorus, ll. 906–951 Chorus, ll.1023–1033

292 293 293 294

Further Verse ‘Invocation (Alcaics)’ Untitled Parody of The Waste Land

297 298 299

Prose ‘The Greek Spirit’ (Essay) ‘The Young Faun’ (Short story)

303 304 305

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics I, IV. The fetters of winter are shattered,shattered, And the limbs of the earth are free,-Spring,and the breeze that loveth the leas! And the old keels--gaping and tempest battered-Men roll them down to the sea. Lo,how the sweet new magic bewitcheth The hind with his fire-side dream; The ox in his byre stamps with desire; No more on the meadows the white rime pitcheth His tents of a wintry gleam. The Graces are dancing by mountains and gorges, Like blossoms white in the moon; Love is their light through the spell-bound night. Under the world in Hell’s huge forges Hammers gigantic croon. Open thy door;death knocks,who careth For palace and hut the same. Why wilt thou plan with life but a span? All feel the hand that never spareth, The fingers that know not fame. Tomorrow--who knows?--in her train may bring thee The city of dim renown. There is nought redeems from the House of Dreams-Ne’er again shall the kind dice king thee, Never be Pleasure thy crown.

Notes Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (742). Folder 6. Typescript. Etcetera 198; CP 1074. For this and the other Horatian translations, Cummings’ probable text was The Odes, Epodes and Carmen Saeculare, ed., introd. and commentary Clifford Herschel Moore. 1902. l. 2: ‘limbs of the earth’ revises ‘limits of earth’. l. 3: ms. ‘leas’. Corrected to ‘lea’ by Kennedy 1976: 274 n. 24; cf. Etcetera, but Cummings’ rhyme scheme (a b c a b) does not require the correction. Moreover, it seems inelegant to rhyme ‘a b a a b’ in the first stanza if this sets up the wrong rhyme expectation for the poem: ‘leas’ is better style. l.15: ‘Hammers gigantic croon’ revises ‘Hammers Cyclopean croon’.

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The entire last stanza has been crossed through in the typescript and replaced by a handwritten revision. The first draft read: A moment--black Night hath engulfed thee,and dimly The shadow gloats in the gloom. There is nought redeems from the House of Dreams; But farewell unto pleasure,grimly Closed in an endless tomb. A feature of this typescript is that Cummings has lightly dotted in every space and underdotted the hyphens, e.g. -- receives a double underdot, as it represents two typewriter spaces. This shows that Cummings was already thinking about the spacing and layout of his poems while he was at work on these translations.

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics HORACE Book I,Ode XVI. O lovelier daughter of a lovely mother, Make thou what end shall please thee of my song, Or let the flame consume or ocean smother Those bitter words which did thy beauty wrong. Nor Cybele,nor Pythean Apollo So stirs the priest--haunter of holy ground; Nor Bacchus,and the Corybants that follow, Making the cymbals to their dancing sound. ’Tis said Prometheus took from every creature Some trait to mingle with that primal clay Wherefrom his fingers formed each human feature – Might of mad lions in our breasts hath sway. Anger it was,in terrible disaster Which laid Thyestes prostrate in the dust; Of lofty towns,full many a proud pilaster Hath felt in dying throes that fatal thrust. And on the walls,of insolent battalions The hostile ploughshare hath its impress laid – Calm thee;–in pleasant youth like fleet-foot stallions Coursed through my heart the songs which passion made. Then did I rave;but now is all my longing To barter sadness for a kindlier strain; And since thou hast amends for earlier wronging, I pray thee for thy friendship back again.

Notes Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (742). Folder 4. Typescript.

Translations, Further Verse, and Prose

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HORACE. Book I,Ode 24. Who chides the tears that weep so dear a head? Sorrowful Muse,for whom the father wed The voice of waters to a cithern string, Teach thou my grief to sing. Ye sisters,Right and Honor,and forsooth Unshaken Loyalty,and naked Truth, Quintillius the peerless ye shall weep, Who sleeps unending sleep. Vainly,poor Virgil,rise thy pious prayers To heaven which took him from thee unawares; His memory many a noble friend reveres, Thine were the bitterest tears. What tho’ more sweet thy lyre than his of Thrace, When listening trees joyed in the music’s grace, Would life reclaim the shade from the beyond, Which,with his fearsome wand, The Shepherd,harsh the doors of fate to keep, Has gathered once unto his shadowy sheep? ’Tis hard:but when ’twere impious to rebel, Less grows the load borne well.

Notes Etcetera 201; CP 1076. HRC 6.1. Handwritten and typescript drafts. HRC 2.6. Typescript fair copy. l.16: in the final draft, ‘fearsome’ replaces ‘horrid’ from previous drafts. The last couplet is a late change for: ’Tis hard:but when the gods are most obscure Man shall the most endure! Appended to one draft process is a brief note which reads: ‘Ends on key Patience’ See below for the composition process.

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics I, XXVIII. (Translation of every Latin syllable in the metre with an English metrical equivalent.)

Though thou the seas and lands and the sands that are infinite numb’rest, Cramped in merciful Earth thou slumb’rest By the Apulian shore. O Archytas,high heaven shareth Vainly her wisdom;death never spareth. No,though o’er thy masterful mind,domes of ether dissolving, Loomed the firmament,darkly revolving. Even the offspring of Jove and companion of the immortals Fell;a breath from the heavenly portals Caught up Tithonus;died--for all his sight of things hidden-Minos;to Panthus’ son ’twas forbidden E’er to rise again,--for from off the altar his grooven Buckler he plucked--of Ilium proven, Yea,though sinew and skin alone black death had he given, And--as thou saidst--right worthily striven, Nature’s cause and Truth’s. But the one night lingers,when dreadly Rings the heel on the doom-path deadly. Some of us dance for the God of War to Destiny’s piping, Some lift the sail,-but the sea,she is griping. On the procession of deaths winds ever;stripling,and agéd, Pluto’s dark queen is never assuagéd. Just as the storm-star dipped,from the southward a blast drove under, Sudden--death swallowed me--whelmed in Illyrian thunder. Sailor,grudge not one kindly mite,from the ever unserried Sands of the sea,to a corpse unburied. Give! and if ever the East Wind threaten Hesperian surges, Woods of Venusia,bear ye his scourges. Whilst from Jove and Neptune,Shield of Tarentum,shall treasure Vast--for the Father is kind--in due measure Flow to thy feet,and thou shalt have store;and long be thy living! Wilt not give heed to prevent,by the giving, Guilt that would smite thy white-souled child? It may be,proud errors Bring to their author the curse of terrors; Thou,then,the victim. Not unavenged I miss thine endeavor, Soul-tainted,thou,and accurséd forever. Nay,-hold haste.--Cast dust o’er this body,spirit-possesséd, Thrice,-and go thy ways; thou art blesséd.

Translations, Further Verse, and Prose

Notes Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (742). Folder 5. Typescript.

259

260

E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics HORACE, ODES, Book ii, 14. Ah, Postumus, fleet-footed are the years! And what is Piety’s imploring glance To Age and Death, the dauntless charioteers? My friend, think not to buy deliverance With smoking centuries of hecatombs. It shall not profit thine inheritance. King of the City of Unnumbered Homes, Who doth the monster and the brute compel, Where the blind darkness ever gropes and roams, By that black, languorous stream that winds in Hell, Whereon the noble and the knave must face A common passage—whither, who can tell!— Great Pluto, Postumus, implores thy grace! . . . . . Silence . . . .Did’st think those eyes, which are two stars, Would suffer for thy sake one tear’s embrace? Although thou locked thy portals unto Mars, Nor e’er bestrode,—uncurbed by bit or rein, Old Hadria’s white horses,—’scaped the scars Of the sword-edged sirocco, ’tis in vain. Fate bids thee journey to Cocytus’ stream, And Danaus’ ill-famed race behold again, And Sisyphus, damned unto toil supreme. Fate sunders wife and husband, wedded brass And miser; all and each, as in a dream. How treacherous the treasures we amass! One only hath remembrance of our care, The hated cypress-tree. And so we pass. Riving an hundred locks, and laying bare In its ripe age rich Caecuban divine, Purer than pontiffs quaff, a lordlier heir Shall paint the pavement with thy titled wine!

Notes Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (760). Folder 9. Partial draft, typescript. HRC 3.4. Typescript. Etcetera 199–200; CP 1075. l. 9. ‘Where the blind darkness ever gropes and roams,’ replaces ‘Lord after life, whose treasures are the loam’s,’.

Translations, Further Verse, and Prose [IV, V.] O,blessed of the gods, Shield of the race of Rome, Are Faith and Fame at odds? Thy smile is Spring.--O,too long thou dost roam, From home. As a fond mother stands, Seeking with prayerful eyes O’er sea and sinuous sands Her long-departed son,for whom black skies Arise, So doth this land of ours Yearn for her mighty son; All lapped in fruit and flow’rs, While on her waves the pinioned vessels run, Nor shun The pirate or his kin. The hearths of faith are pure, And tamed is spotted sin. With Caesar safe,where shall the savage boor Endure? The mother loves to trace In baby eyes and brow Gleams of the father’s face. What’s war with Spain? Who fears the Scythian now? O,thou, Upon thy Roman hills Salute the drowsy light, And lead the vine,that fills Thy bowls,to the chaste tree in wedlock rite. Requite The Gods with prayer and wine, And as her heroes-Greece, So,Roman,rank divine Thy Caesar,with a joy which shall increase, Nor cease. ************* To thee the poet drinks-“Long life!”--ere day is done;

261

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics “Peace to thy land!”--when sinks Under the ocean,mellow eve begun, The sun.

Notes Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (742). Folder 6. Typescript. Etcetera 202–203; CP 1077–1078. The manuscript is titled ‘IV, VI.’, but the translation is of Horace, Odes IV.5. Kennedy 1976: 276 identifies it as a translation of IV.6, repeated in Etcetera and CP. Sawyer-Lauçanno 2006: 48 correctly identifies the translation as IV.5.

Translations, Further Verse, and Prose

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IV, VII Farewell,runaway snows! For the meadow is green,and the tree stands Clad in her beautiful hair. New life leavens the land! The river,once where the lea stands, Hideth and huggeth his lair. Beauty with shining limbs ’mid the Graces comes forth,and in glee stands, Ringed with the rhythmical fair. Hope not,mortal,to live forever,the year whispers lowly. Hope not,time murmers,and flies. Soft is the frozen sod to the Zephyr’s sandal,as wholly Summer drives Spring from the skies,— Dying when earth receives the fruits of Autumn,till slowly Forth Winter creeps,and she dies. Yet what escapes from heaven,the fleet moons capture,retrieving; When through Death’s dream we survey Heroes and kings of old,in lands of infinite grieving, What are we? Shadow and clay. Say will rulers above us the fate tomorrow is weaving Add to the sum of today? Hear me:whatever thou giv’st to thine own dear soul,shall not pleasure Hungering fingers of kin. Once in the gloom,when the judge of Shades in pitiless measure Dooms thee to journey within, Birth,nor eloquent speech,nor gift of piety’s treasure Opens the portal of sin. Never,goddess of chasteness,from night infernal thou freest One who for chastity fell. Ever,hero of Athens,him who loved thee thou seest Writhe in the chainings of Hell.

Notes Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (742). Folder 6. Typescript. Etcetera 197; CP 1073. l. 6: ‘rhythmical’, ms. ‘rythmical’, corr. Kennedy & Firmage. l. 9: ‘Zephyr’s’, ms. ‘Zepher’s’, corr. Kennedy & Firmage.

264

E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics Odes I.24 Drafts illustrating Cummings’ translation process

I. Cummings began by writing out, by hand, his own grammatical crib with variant wordings (printed here in grey). Square brackets below are Cummings’ own, except the square brackets indicating an illegible word: What shame or measure is there in longing (grief) for so dear a head? songs of tears Teach [me] sad songs, Melpomene (Songstress), (thou) to whom my lyre to weep harp [the] father gave (hast given) a flowing voice with the cithern limpid continuing the sleep of poppies besets So then perpetual poppied sleep (pressed upon) Quintilius! uninterrrupted the heavy sleep burdens unbroken grew weighs To whom shame, Justice (her) sister, unspoiled unseduced Trustworthiness and naked truth when will come upon any equal? Conscience verity honesty plunged By men good [men] wept alas he fell, by none more lamented than by (to) thee Vergil thou Q. pius alas in vain, dost not entrust him from this [illegible] to the gods alluring smooth of tongue What if, more caressing than Thracian Orpheus, thou fondly come wield a string hear by trees? Will blood go back understood listened to to the empty shadow which idle vain

Translations, Further Verse, and Prose

265

with wand causing tremor once for all, staff horror rod not soft to prayers to unclose the fates Mercury drives the black flock? empels herd Hard thy fate: but patience makes lighter whatever it is contrary to law to set right emend

II. Early version in quatrains, representing the beginnings of the literary translation (handwritten): And shall tears falter for so dear a head? Sorrowful Muse, in whom the father wed The voice of waters to a cithern string, Teach thou my Grief to sing And so Quintilius sleeps the heavy sleep Eternal. When shall not high Honour keep, And Justice, Faith, & naked Truth, revere, His memory without peer! Full many a good man wept above that clay, None, Vergil, more than thou— ah bitter day That gave unto the gods in friendship’s trust Whom now is lifeless dust. What tho’ more sweet thy lyre than his of Thrace That hearkening trees bow to the music’s grace Would the blood seek again the futile shadow Of Mercury afraid? Who, cruel to the souls that seek this doom, Drives on the flocking shadows into gloom. Harsh are the gods!

III. The poem has then been worked over in three drafts, handwritten in a large notebook of poetry compositions. Stanzas 1–2 took shape more quickly than stanzas 3–5. At the bottom of these drafts is a note: ‘Ends

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on key Patience’. These drafts move the composition towards the first typescript copy. First typescript, with pencil corrections (printed here in grey): Who chides the tears that weep so dear a head? Sorrowful Muse,for whom the father wed The voice of waters to a cithern string, Teach thou my grief to sing. Ye sisters,Right and Honor,and forsooth Unshaken Loyalty,and naked Truth, Quintillius the peerless ye shall weep, Who sleeps unending sleep. Vainly,poor Virgil,rise thy pious prayers To heaven which took him from thee unawares; His memory many a noble friend reveres, Thine were the bitterest tears. What tho’ more sweet thy lyre than his of Thrace, y When listening trees joined in the music’s grace, from Would life reclaim the shade of the beyond, Which,with his horrid wand, The Shepherd Mercurius,harsh the doors of fate to keep, Has gathered once unto his shadowy sheep? ’twere impious to rebel, ’Tis hard:but when the gods are most obscure Less grows the load borne well. Man shall the most endure!

‘Joyed’ in the pencil correction restores the wording of the handwritten drafts. Cummings probably typed ‘joined’ unintentionally, it being the more obvious word. All drafts from HRC 6.1, handwritten and typescript. The only change between this and the final typescript (HRC 2.6) is from ‘horrid wand’ to ‘fearsome wand’.

Translations from Sophocles

268

E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics Preface

Lest the brevity of these two fragments of translation be taken as an indication of the sin of the Fourth Terrace, I hasten to make a general statement and point out several details. In the first place, it’s not true. No translator tried to do anything so hard before, nor--probably--will ever try again. This auspicious beginning I proceed to supplement as follows: Reasons why this translation is unique in history, (1) Because it is the first and only literal translation ever devised. This, come to think of it, is the only reason. But it is capable of great elaboration. In fact, what is a literal translation? Obviously neither of two things (1) contorted constructions, innocent of beauty (2) beautiful elaboration of the non-existent. Any prose translation will illustrate the first; Way’s Euripides is a lovely example of the latter. Beyond this point I believe I am an originator. My translation is truly and honestly literal, in that it reproduces (1) emphasis by the word order (nearly always) (2) intentional alliteration and assonance (3) original constructions (except where very idiomatic) (4) primary ideas of the words (as opposed to over-translation) (5) Cesura (always, where noticeable) (6) syllabic substitutions (always, as far as I am aware). Taking these facts into consideration, is it any wonder that my accomplishment is meagre? I think not. Anyone can write a prose paraphrase or bound into the blue with a Gilbert Murrayish flourish. But who can do what I set out to? Certainly not I. However, it seems to me that the novelty of the effort makes it worth while; and should the reader feel amusement, or even scorn, at my poor translation let him consider the Immortal Woman’s song: Φαινεται μοι κηνος ισος θεοισιν, and Mr. W.G. Gladstone’s inimitable, flower-like paraphrase of Catullus’ imitation: “Him rival to the gods I place, Him loftier yet, if loftier be, Who, Lesbia, sits before thy face, Who listens and who looks on thee.”

The present writer hopes that he has avoided sitting before anybody’s face.

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Notes Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (741). Folder 1. Handwritten. ‘Obviously’, ms. ‘Oviously’. This is a draft preface to the translations from Electra. The ‘sin of the Fourth Terrace’ is Sloth, as in the Fourth Terrace of Dante’s Purgatory.

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics Sophocles - Electra

Frag. - ll1–120

Paidagogos

O son of him who sometime led the host in Troy, Agamemnon’s man-child,-now and here ’tis given to thee To look on that thy heart immortally desired. For lo,the ancient Argos thou didst yearn for,here; Glade of the young fly-stricken girl of Inachus; And this,Orestes,the Lycean market-place Of the Wolf Destroyer;but upon the left,behold Hera’s renowned temple,and,from where we came Say that Mycenae,she the much in gold,thou see’st, And much in death,the Palace of Pelops children,here; Whence sometime,from thy father’s fall,I,at her hands Who is thy sister and thy kinsmaid,took thee up, Bore thee away,kept safely,nourished thee,to this: The perfect youth,avenger of a father’s blood. Now then,Orestes,and thou most of strangers loved, Pylades,-what’s to do,must we with speed take thought. For even now,the radiant flaming of the sun Into distinctness moveth morning song of birds, And the Kind Time,night,with her stars,forsaketh heav’n. Ere,therefore,any issue from beneath his roof, Join we in words;for even to that hour we come Where is no longer shrinking,but of deeds high flow’r. O. O dearest of the men that serve,to me how clear A sign thou show’st,who unto us right noble art. For as the horse that is well born,tho’ he be old, If perils come,his temper hath not perishèd, But lo,his ears he pricketh,-e’en in like respect Ourselves thou rousest,following among the first. Accordingly my thoughts I will make plain,and thou To this recital a sharp attention having giv’n, If in the mark mine arrow stand not,true the aim. I say,that on arriving at Apollo’s shrine Of Pytho,for my father seeking in what wise Justice to get me,from those hands which murdered him, Replied in such wise Phoebus as thou soon shalt learn: That I alone,and unequipped,with shields or men, By guile should lay my righteous hand upon their throats. Since,therefore,such an oracle is in our ears, Do thou encroach,whenever time shall lead thee in,

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Upon this household,knowing each and every deed; So being witness,unto us to bring clear word. For,both from age and lengthy time,thee shall no man Know,nor suspect exceeding silver flowering hair. Such shalt thou utter,as that stranger here thou art, From Phanoteus coming,a Phocian,for that man Supreme,among the spear-friends of this race,is held. And tell them,adding oath thereon,to this intent: Dead is Orestes,by the violent hand of fate, In Pythian games;of rapid-circling wheels,steed-drawn, Whirled from the chariot,--so thy story’s basis be. But when the tomb our father’s,we,as is ordained, Have with libations and luxuriant locks of hair Enwreathèd,backward turning we shall come again, Raising an urn of moulded brass within our hands, Which in the copse,-as knowest thou,-is somewhere hid; That so,in word beguiling,we may sweet report Unto them carry,saying:this my frame is not; Given unto flame,and long since dwindled to an ash. How should these things bring sorrow,when,in word being dead, In deeds I live,and carry from the contest fame? My creed is:nothing,spoken with advantage,base. Oft have I seen in former time men,and men wise, Die fraudulent in word;after the which,when home They came again,more honored were they than before. So I exult at heav’nly speech that bids me live, Hating and hated;shining forth at last,a star. But O paternal land,and ye indwelling gods, Take ye my trust propitiously upon these ways; Thou too,O house paternal,for to thee I come In righteous cause,having clean hands,and moved of gods, With unrenown banish me not from out this land; Make me the master of mine own,first of mine house. These are my words at present,but be thou,old man, Forthwith departing,careful in the needful watch. We twain go forth;for time commands,which unto men Supreme of each and every act is president.

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E. Ah me,ah me unhappy. P. And surely of the servant maids methought that one, Making low moan within the house,I heard,my child. O. Electra the unhappy? How,indeed! Dost wish That we remain and hearken to this woman’s wail?

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics

P. By no means;try we nothing before Loxias His word;that so beginning from auspicious source, We pour a father’s cleansing;for these actions bring Victory to our side,and might of doing deeds.

Frag. - ll 86–120

Electra

Light,O thou holy! And sharing alike with earth,thou air-How many strains of dirges, How many blows hast witnessed Dealt straight at breasts bespattered of blood, When was fallen the night,darkling,behind us! But aware of the all-night festival watch Are the hateful beds of this troublous house;For that wretched being what dirge I sing,For my father;whom he,Ares the blood-red, Not in some foreign land welcomed as guest, But mother mine,and he of her bed, Aegisthus,-as oak the cutters of wood,Cleave cleanly the head with the blood-reddened axe; And,for these things,pity hath no one Save only myself,--father!-for thee,so Unseemly,piteous dying. But I will not From dirges hateful and murmurings stay, While on the stars’ all-shining Twinkling I look,and this daylight;Some nightingale I,lost are whose young ones, That with wailing loud unto all beings, ’Fore a father’s doors,utter my crying. O Hades’ house,--Persephone,thine; Hermes the earthling;sovereign Curse; Ye children of gods,awful Erinyes, Who those that unjustly perish behold, And those that into the marriage-bed steal,Come to me;help me;avenge,straining each nerve, Of our father the blood; And unto my side send ye my brother, For longer my strength,lonely,upholds not The weight of counterpoise sorrow.

[Unrevised:]

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Translations, Further Verse, and Prose

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Chorus Child, O child, Electra, of her, [121] wretched’st mother, why dost thou aye melt insatiate tears and cry alas, thus for him long since in treacheries godlessly caught by thy mother the false,-Agamemnon he,betrayed by hand of wickedness? Be she, such in her deeds, destroyed; if this ’tis right I utter.

Electra Offspring of noble parents, unto my troubles ye come as a comforting, this do I know and perceive it, nor ’scapeth me anything, ’nathless I wish not to cease from this; nay, but to groan for my father in misery. But ye bestowing and from every friendliness taking, grace, o let me roam in sorrow, ah, I beseech ye.

[130]

Chorus. Not from Hades all-common mere him thy father shalt thou, forsooth, upraise, nor with the groan, nor with the prayer; but from the middle course, to irremediate pain ever moving, shalt thou be lost utterly, in such that release is none from out of wickednesses. Why, say, to what is hard-borne give thee? [140]

Electra Dumb is his maid, who parents parting in piteous fashion [translation breaks off . . . ] [There is a further unrevised fragment, ll.251–260, which is too preliminary for useful reproduction. Words and phrases have been struck through, but not replaced, leaving the lines incomplete.]

Frag. - ll 1126–1170 Electra O of mankind memorial of the best beloved, Left me the life Orestes’,-how afar from hope, Thee,not that him whom I sent forth,did I receive.

274

E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics For now this nothing I do lift within my hands; But,O boy,house-forth I despatched thee shining,I. Would that thou hadst in former time forsaken life, Ere I to land of strangers sent thee forth,with hands Stealing,these hands,and had preserved on high from blood. That so thou dying,shouldst have lain,then,in the day, Of tomb paternal having gained a common share. But now,far from thy dwelling,fled from other earth, Basely dost perish,she thy sister sundered from; Nor did I,in hands loving,-miserable me!With cleansings make thee cosmic,nor all-flaming fire Raise upon high,as seemly,-weight of wretchedness! But in strange hands attended,miserable one, A little heap thou comest in a little urn. Ah me the wretched,for the nursing mine of old, All without profit;which oft-times I upon thee With pain delightful lavished. For not ever once Thy very mother more than I myself was dear, Nor these within the dwelling;but myself the nurse; And I as “sister” was addressed by thee alway. And now are left behind these in a day, but one, Dying beside thee. For, together snatching all, Like as a storm thou goest. Past my father hath; I am dead with thee; thyself art clean gone, being dead. Laugheth the foeman; maddeneth beneath her joy Mother, no mother, hid from whom thou frequently Didst send-before still-tidings, how thou wouldst appear, Thyself avenger. Nathless these the dour-in-fate, The daemon who is mine and thine, bore quite away; Who hath thus sent thee unto me, for the beloved Comeliness ashes, and a shadow profitless. O me, me! Piteous body, ah,ah! O thou upon ways--O me, me!-Most strange sent onward, how thou, dearest, ruinest me; Ruinest surely, O my very brother head. Wherefore, do thou receive me into this thy roof, The nothing to the nothing, that with thee below I dwell in future. For and when thou wert above With thee I held an equal share, and now I yearn Dying to be not left behind by this thy grave. For that the dead I do not see being vexed in peace.

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Notes Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (741). Folders 1–5, 12–13. Multiple copies, typescript and handwritten. Cummings’ probable text: The Electra of Sophocles, with a Commentary abridged from the larger Edition of Sir Richard C. Jebb. Gilbert A. Davies. 1908. The first fragment is 119 lines in the English, translating (as Cummings’ notes indicate) ll.1–120 in the Greek. Line numbers in square brackets at the side of the translation are my addition. The line numbers of the headings are in Cummings’ manuscript. The middle lines which I have noted as being unrevised exist only in the earliest versions of the translation, whereas the other fragments (ll.1–120 and ll.1126–1170) went through further handwritten and then typewritten versions. l. 20; l.1132: I have emended ‘E’er’ to ‘Ere’. Cummings clearly means ‘ere’ in the sense of ‘before’. His spelling, ‘E’er’, makes the word appear to be a contraction of ‘ever’ and leaves the lines a little difficult to read. l. 31 ‘arrow stand not’, revises ‘arrow stand out’. l. 67, l. 69 ‘paternal’ revises ‘ancestral’. ll.130, 156: ‘Nathless’: OED, archaic and literary, ‘nevertheless, notwithstanding’. The earliest copies include marking out of the Greek scansion, and show how interested Cummings was in engaging with the Greek metre in his own translation.

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics Oedipus Tyrannus. Chorus. Out of the mouth of the Delphian rock hath a God’s voice spoken, Naming a doer of deeds unwhispered,with bloody hand; Of foot more swift than the flight of the wind-fleet stallion unbroken, It is time that he flee from the land. For the son of Heaven in arms,with flame and the lightening’s fire, Leapeth upon him;and follows the Furies’ terrible ire. Out of the snow of Parnassus a shining voice is uplifted, Bidding each man to follow the feet of the doer of ill, Under the tameless trees and the rock of the precipice rifted, Like a bull he wandereth still, Hunted by living,flitting visions;striving in vain To shake the mid-earth’s word of doom from his tortured brain.

Notes Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (742). Folder 1 (typescript) and 5 (handwritten). Kennedy 1976: 274. Cummings’ Greek text for purposes of translation is not clear. The only Greek text of Oedipus Tyrannus in his personal library is Dindorf, but I doubt that he used it. I rather suspect he used the Loeb. (See further below, ‘Editing the Unpublished Work’.) l. 1: Handwritten version, ‘god’s’; typescript, ‘God’s’. The verso of the handwritten version offers a different translation of the same passage: Whom hath the god-tongued rock of Delphi spoken? Whose deeds may no mouth speak? Whose hands are bloody? Be his foot stronger than the storm-swift horses, His hour for flight is come; for armed to conquer In fire and lightening flames the son of Heaven Leapeth upon him; And the dread Fates unerringly pursue him. A shining voice out of the snows arising That robe Parnassus, biddeth all men follow; Who under tameless trees and rocky caverns, Forever hunted, like a wild bull wanders, Earth’s central oracles in living visions Flitting before him, Shaking in vain the string of Heaven from him.

Translations from Euripides

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics ΜΗΔΕΙΑ ΜΗΤΕΡ My sons, my little sons! ye go to dwell In a city of many homes, a city vast, But mother at the gates must say farewell. Into another country am I cast Afar off, never to be reached by ye, Hot-foot with joy from portals unsurpassed. Never one sweet-souled flower on that new lea Shall I, in time to come, pluck from the land, To deck the shadowy marriage bed to be. Never with swelling bosom shall I stand, Rearing my torch against the stars, as down The passage man and maid move, hand in hand. In vain those anguished throes,--with pains that drown Hell’s fiercest anguish,--puny, they and I. All wealth received, and yet of thorns the crown. I reared my temples splendidly on high, Shrines unto hope unworshipped herebefore, Massive, magnificent, to knock the sky! I stood in spirit upon death’s still shore, Fearless and proud. Had I not borne earth men? What gift to men or gods can mortal more? Methought ye wrapped my winding sheet, and then Felt I each tear that wet the ghostly gown, Even while this soul stood penned in Pluto’s den. Dead dreams, once real. White tresses, one time brown, Grey cheeks, once flushed with joyance and renown: All broken -- yet . . . . . I cannot fling it down!

Notes Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (742). Folder 2. Handwritten. Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (363). Handwritten. Kennedy 1976: 271. From Medea, ll. 1021–1039. Cummings had three texts of Medea in his personal library: (1) The Medea. Introd. & notes Frederic D. Allen, rev. Clifford H. Moore. 1901; (2) Euripidis Fabulae, ed. Gilbert Murray, 4 vols. 1902; (3) Poetarum scenicorum graecorum, Aeschyli, Sophoclis, Euripidis et Aristophanis, fabulae superstites et perditarum fragmenta, ed. Wilhelm

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Dindorf. 1851. The three texts do not differ for this passage on any significant point. (They differ in one editorial comma, one accent, and one spelling variant.) l. 20 ‘Fearless’. Kennedy reads ‘Tearless’. Cummings has two slightly differing versions of the translation, and it is not clear which of the two versions should take priority. The text here is from MS Am 1892.5 742. Main variants in the other version are: l.1: ‘My little sons, my sons!--ye go to dwell’ ll.13–14: ‘Purposeless those great anguished throes that drown Hell’s bitterest tortures,--puny, they and I.’ l. 26: ‘Shrunk cheeks, once flushed with joyance and renown:’

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[Untitled translations from Euripides’ Electra.] 737–746 It is said,--but little trust hath the tale from me,-that he turned the warm gold-faced seat of the sun, changing it for disadvantage of mankind, for the sake of mortal punishment. But fearful words by mortals are a gain in the service of the gods. Of which unmindful, thou slayest thy spouse, mother of a famous brother and sister. 783–794 But hearing these things Aegisthus speaks thus: “Now must ye guests unto us be at the feast; I am sacrificing to the Nymphs; but at dawn, risen from your couches, shall ye proceed no less. But let us go into the house,”- -these things he said and at the same time took us by the hands and conducted us,--“nor may ye refuse.” When we were come within, he speaks thus: “Water for washing as soon as maybe unto the strangers let some one fetch, that about the altar, hard by the purifying water, they may stand.” But spake Orestes: “Just now we cleansed us in pure baths of riverly streams.” L 839– But as he bowed down, standing upon very tip-toe thy brother smote upon his back, and shivered the sockets of the spine. And the whole body, upward and downward, panted, shouted, dying hard in slaughter. And the Thralls, seeing this, at once rushed to spear, many to fight with two; but by manliness stood, prow against hostile prow, brandishing their weapons, Pylades and Orestes, and he said: “Not hard-minded come I to this city and to my servants; but did have revenge upon the murderer of my father, I, unhappy Orestes. Do not slay me, ancient thralls of my father.” 1062–1079 For the form both of Helen and of thee is worthy to bear praise, but ye were two sisters, both lewd, and not worthy of Castor.

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For she, being snatched away, went willingly; but thou didst destroy the best man of Ellas, stretching before the screen, that thou slew’st thy husband in thy child’s cause; for they know not thee well, as I do;-thee--who, before the slaughter of thy daughter had taken place, and when thy man had newly set forth from his house, didst bedeck in a mirror thy yellow curls of hair. But a woman, whose man is gone away, who from the house decketh her in beauty, writeth her as being evil. For in naught is need that she show a seemly-fair countenance without-the-doors, if some evil thing she seeketh not. But then alone of all the women of Ellas,--I know,--if the Trojan side fared well, didst rejoice; but if it was o’er come, didst have a cloud in thine eyes; not desiring that from Troy Agamemnon come.

Notes Houghton MS Am 1892.7 (190). Handwritten. Translated from Electra, ll.737–746 (Chorus); 783–794 (Messenger); 839– 851 (Messenger); 1062–1079 (Electra). Cummings’ probable text: Euripidis Fabulae, ed. Gilbert Murray. 4 vols. 1902. Dindorf ’s text is also in Cummings’ personal library. The best evidence that he used Murray’s text rather than Dindorf ’s is l. 842 (Cummings’ English)/l.843 (Greek), where Cummings translates ἠλάλαζε (shouted), with Murray, rather than ἐσφάδαζε (struggled), with Dindorf. (Arthur Way’s Loeb text is also ἐσφάδαζε and therefore also ruled out.) l. 1063, ‘worthy of Castor’; ms. ‘worthy Castor’. l. 1066, Cummings glosses ‘screen’ with ‘pretense’. l. 1072, Cummings glosses ‘from’ as ‘without’. l. 1074, Cummings glosses ‘need’ as ‘propriety’.

Translation from Aeschylus

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics Prometheus Bound. Chorus. I mourn,mourn,O Prometheus,thy lost star. The tides of Grief,uptowering at mine eyes, Break,--surging upon my cheeks in tears. For Zeus,the ruler of these things which are, Hath struck the gods of eld,and o’er the skies His spear terrific to all things appears. Hark to the sighing of the land! The wail For one time honor to the Titan gone; The splendorous rite--whoso of men may dwell In Asia’s neighboring seats of awe shall quail Beneath thy mighty tortures unwithdrawn; The hands that crucify,the pains that quell. The brave-eyed virgin out of Colchis sprung, The Scythian crowd which clusters round and round That lake that laps the limits of the world, The war-flower of Araby,--high hung By the great cliffs of Caucasus,--whence sound The sharp-tongued clashings of the war spear whirled;-All grieve with thee. I have seen in pains of steel One other conquered god,--Atlas the strong, Moaning beneath all Heaven upon his thews. The sea-wave,falling,cries;the dark deeps peal; Hell in her blackness mutters at thy wrong; And the white rivers with their pitying dews.

Notes Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (742). Folder 1. Handwritten and typescript. Based on his handling of the corrupted lines 425–30, for which different texts vary substantively, Cummings’ probable text is Aeschyli Tragoediae: cum fabularum deperditarum fragmentis poetae vita et operum catalogo, ed. Arthur Sidgwick. 1910. (Certainly Sidgwick rather than Dindorf, also in his personal library.) Sidgwick’s text is: μόνον δὲ πρόσθεν [ἄλλον] ἐν πόνοις δαμέντ᾽ [ἀδαμαντοδέτοις Τιτᾶνα λύμαις] εἰσιδόμαν, θεῶν,

Translations, Further Verse, and Prose

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Ἄτλαντος [αἰὲν]; ὑπέροχον σθένος κραταιόν, οὐράνιόν τε πόλον νώτοις ὑποστενάζει. = Cummings: I have seen in pains of steel One other conquered god,--Atlas the strong, Moaning beneath all Heaven upon his thews. Key features are ‘ἀδαμαντοδέτοις’ (‘bound in irons’; Dindorf has ‘ἀκαμαντοδέτοις’) and the absence, in Sidgwick and in Cummings’ translation, of any participle modifying Atlas and meaning ‘holding up [heaven]’ in line 430. (Varying participles are supplied in Dindorf and other editions.) Hence ‘moaning beneath [heaven]’ for ‘ὑποστενάζει’. Alternative texts would generate the sense of ‘makes low moans whilst holding up heaven’.

Translations from the Odyssey

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics Odyssey, VI, 127–144.

Thus he spoke; and under the bushes stooped godlike Odysseus, And from the wood of pine a sapling he broke with hand massive, Leafy, that round his flesh should shield what is naked of manhood. Forth did he start as a lion, a mountain-bred, poem of power, Onward who goeth, tho’ rained on and tempested, but in his two eyes Flame blazeth; yea, and he questeth abroad amid bullocks and foldlings, Or with the nimble-ones now, the wild deer; whom his belly commandeth, Trial making even to reach the strongholded sheepfold,-So was Odysseus even now with well-woven-haired girls just Going to join, all bare tho’ he was; for need had attained him. Awful indeed to them did he seem, being bad-beat with sea-spray; Hither fled they, and here, and now on the sea-shore outpouring; Lone the daughter remained of Alcinuous; for her, Athena Boldness had set in the spirit, and taken her limbs, being goddess. Halting, faced she him then; and beset with doubts was Odysseus, Should he clasp her knees, and pray to the well-beheld maiden, Or, as now, his stand afar off having ta’en, with words soothing Pray her, would she show him the town, and raiment would give him.

Notes Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (741). Folder 4. Typescript. HRC 3.4 includes a worksheet related to this passage, which is part translation crib and part early draft. Cummings’ probable text for all four Odyssey translations: Homer. Odyssey. Books I–XII. Introd. & notes W.W. Merry. 1899. l.133, ‘commandeth’, ms. ‘comandeth’.

Odyssey, VIII, 454–468. Him when the girl-slaves bathed, I say, and ’nointed with olive, Round him a lovely mantle throwing, and likewise a chiton, Forth from the bathing-tub he went, ’mid the men, the wine-drinkers, Entering; yea, and Nausicaa, out of the gods having beauty, Stood by a pillar then, of the roof which was firmly fashioned; Wondered so at Odysseus, within her eyes as she saw him; Spoke with clear-heard tones, and in epics fleet-feathered addressed him:

Translations, Further Verse, and Prose

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“Glad be, friend; and wherever thou art in land of thy fathers, Think upon me; for to me the first thy life’s price thou owest.” Her then bespoke, interchanging their speech, many-minded Odysseus: “Daughter, Nausicaa, child of Alcinuous, of the great hearted, So may Zeus now ’stablish,--the thund’rous husband of Hera,-Home that ourselves return, the homeward day to behold it,-Then and there, as here, unto thee a goddess entreat I All my days and forever; for life was thy deed to me, maiden.”

Notes Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (741). Folder 3. Typescript.

Odyssey, IX, 378–394. But, when at length was the bar of the olive truly to flame just Kindling up,- all green tho’ it was,--and of terrible aspect, Then did I bear it near from the hearth-flame; round me my comrades Standing,--nay, but courage on us there breathed a great daemon,-They then, lifting the bar of the olive, keen at the tip-end, Propped it deep in the eye; and I was, above them uplifted, Twirling it, even as when a man is some ship-tree with borer Boring through, while beneath with a thong men make it to rotate, Grasping from either direction, and runneth it ever unceasing; So, in the very eye of himself,--the bar flame-pointed snatching,-Twirled we it round, and forth on all sides flowed the blood, being heated. Thereabouts singéd both eyelids and eyebrows the breathing of eyeballs Blazing, kindled in fire; and the roots with the flame of them crackled. As when a man, a smith, doth an axe for the slaughter, or wood-adze, Dip into water cold, the while great outcry it maketh Charmed with drink,--for moreover this thing the might is of iron,-So, the eye doth hiss of him round the bar of the olive.

Notes Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (741). Folder 3. Typescript.

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics Odyssey, X, 210–223.

Found they then in glens of the wood the halls which are Circe’s, Built of stones smooth-polished, within a place seen afar-off; And, on all sides round about it, wolves mountainous were, likewise lions; (These she stroked with enchantments, when charms evil-working she gave them.) Yet they rushed not headlong the men upon, mark ye; but truly, Fawning round about with their mighty tails,they stood upright. Even as dogs, round their master and lord from feasting who cometh, Fawned these; yea, and ’feared were the men,when they saw the grim monsters. Stood they now in the porch of the goddess,--fair-woven-haired one; Circe heard they within, who was singing low,with voice lovely, (Traversing meanwhile the great beam ambrosial,) whatso are ever Delicate, graceful, and glorious deeds that be done of immortals.

Notes Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (741). Folder 3. Typescript.

Translation exercise from Euripides’ Hecuba

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics Hecuba. Chorus--444–483-Breeze,breeze of the sea thou who dost conduct sea-treading swift ships (light vessels) over the swell of the mere, whither me,sorrowful,dost thou convey? To whom enslaved,home taken,shall I come? Anchorage of Dorian land or of Pthian,where of most beautiful water the father, they say,-Apidamus,-anoints the plains? Or of islands, by sea-sweeping Oar (-handle ) sent,unhappy, having pitiful life in the house, where first-born palm and bay tree upheld holy shoots (scions),to dear Leto an honor (glory) of divine travailing? And,with Delian maidens, of Artemis goddess the golden head-band (frontlet) and bow (and arrow) shall I praise? Or in the city of Pallas of the-with-beautiful-chariot-Athena in saffron robe shall I yoke to the car the mares (steeds) in cunning-wrought, (worked in various colors) broidered, flower-struck (by the comb, i.e. woven) web, or the race of Titans which Zeus with a-with-fire-at-both-endsflame puts to sleep,-the son of Cronos? O me my children, O me my fathers,and land, which in smoke is thrown down smouldering spear-taken of Argives;but I into strange land have been summoned, a slave,leaving Asia Europe’s handmaid, exchanging (for my former lot) the chambers of Hades.

Translations, Further Verse, and Prose Chorus 629–658For me was ordained misfortune, For me was ordained suffering to be, when first the wood of the fir of Ida Alexander cut,who over the sea-swell was to carry it by sea to Helen’s couch,the most beauteous whom the-with golden-lightSun illumines, For toils and of toils the necessities (still) stronger circle around (us), and a common,from private folly, evil,to the land of the Simoïs, destructive-came, and misfortune from others. And the strife was judged,which in Ida judges the three (fold) of-the-blessed children a man a kine-man, For spear,and slaughter,and of my halls the outrage, Groans also a certain-by the fair-flowing EurotusLaconian maid much-weeping in her home, and upon her gray head a mother for sons dead puts her hand,and tears her cheek (side of the face) putting her blood-stained nail to { tearings { rendings.

Chorus 906/951-Thou,O Troy of my fathers, shalt no longer be called a city of the undestroyed (cities) such a cloud of Greeks about thee veils, wasting with spear on spear. And thou hast been shorn of crowns of towers,and from soot a stain most pitiable hast thou been tinged, (touched) unhappy,no longer thee shall I step upon. (frequent) In the mid-night I perished, at the time when from meals sweet sleep upon the eyes is scattered, and from dance-song and chorus-arranging sacrifices having ceased, my lord in his chamber was lying, and the polished shaft (of the spear) on the peg,

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics no longer seeing a sea-man crowd Ilian Troy treading. But I my lock with binding-up-the-hairhead-bands was rythming of golden mirrors gazing upon the endless lights,(rays) on the bed (clothes) so I fell into bed. But a noise [as of waters rushing] came up the city, and a battle-summons was “{ down with this town of Troy, “{ against children of Greeks, (ever=) at some time the Ilian watch-tower wasting will ye come home?” But my dear couch,I,wearing-the tunic-only, leaving,as a Dorian maid, sitting by august Artemis I did not effect (anything),hapless I, but I am led,having beheld the dead bedfellow mine,over the of-the-sea, ocean and looking to the city,when a yielding-returnfoot the ship moved and me from land divided, of Ilium; unhappy,I spoke in answer to grief, (Upon) The sister to the Dioscori,Helen, and the Idaen kine-man, unlucky paris,a curse laying,when me from land paternal ruined and drove from my home the wedding,no wedding, but of the avenging deity some misery; whom may the of-the-sea ocean not lead back again nor he come to his paternal home.

Chorus 1023–1033 Not yet hast thou rendered,but perhaps thou shalt render, justice As one falling into a (harborless) shelterless hold (of ship) slanting shalt thou { fall from thy dear heart { be deprived of bereft of life. For in whom the liability to human and divine justice coincides, (is) destructive,destructive evil. Hope of this road shall beguile thee,which leads thee

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to deadly Hades,O hapless; but thou shalt pour at an unwarlike hand thy life.

Notes Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (741). Folders 2, 5, and 6. Typescript. Cummings’ probable text: Euripidis Fabulae, ed. Gilbert Murray. Vol. 1. 1902. Cummings’ line numbering can be counted as consistent with Murray (depending on how one counts Murray’s lines) but it is not consistent with Dindorf (whose text was also in Cummings’ personal library). The line numbering is also, however, consistent with Arthur Way’s Loeb Euripides (vol. 1). There are twenty-three Greek glosses in the typescript. E.g. the opening line reads: Breeze,breeze of the sea (=πόντιος) These are apparently vocabulary notes, giving the dictionary form (i.e. the nominative form of nouns or the 1st person, pres. indic. active of verbs). I omit them, and I also omit a few grammatical notes ‘(adv)’, ‘(v)’, and similar. 1.453: Cummings writes ‘Apidamus’, presumably a typo for ‘Apidanus’. l.927: square brackets are Cummings’ own.

Further Verse ‘Invocation (Alcaics)’and Untitled Parody of The Waste Land

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics Invocation —(Alcaics)— O muse, my blessing, source of my confidence, Arise and hasten! Leave thy far native land! Inspire this breast, thou bless’d of ages! Aid thy fond servant,—this once do his will! O muse, thou art as fickle as fickleness! At times, how heartless! Then, O how merciful! Be kind! heed this; my heart’s fond prayer! Grant thou a portion of mercy— to me!

Notes HRC 2.3. Handwritten. ‘Invocation’ is undated. It is written on a type of lined paper that Cummings used at Harvard, and it seems to represent the same phase of experimentation in classical form as his ‘Sapphics’ (CP 873), published in The Harvard Monthly, January 1916.

Translations, Further Verse, and Prose I pound pound pound on thy cold grey corona oh P. but I would that my tongue could utter the silence of Alfred Noise. Speak speak thou Fearful guest;tell me,immediate child of Homer--when you wrote The Dial Cantos did you know of the organ and the monkey? Tears, idle Tears! I know not what you mean . . . . dear little Sweeney,child of fate, how dost thou?—And the stiff dishonoured nightingales: fled is that music. (I perceive a with undubitably clotted hinderparts in obviously compatriot;let us step into this metaphor.)

II Odysseus is winking across the winedark years the Tennyson is sinking the Milton disappears Joyce moves in a mysterious way his Flaubert to perform he throws his gerund to the winds, and rides upon his iota subscript. (And the little Millwyns Observed these things.) But if ever your un(or sub)conscious should find itself having to do with aesthetics,then cheesit my darlings-beware of the supine in You.

III “out of the Pants which cover me frostbitten limbs from pole to pole I thank whatever tailors be for this unconquerable hole.

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics A little Porter tingaling is pleasant even for Sweeney in the Spring.” And at these words a sullen murmer ran out of the University of Pennsylvania. “However which may be; I grow old,I grow old, I shall tell the tailor what he should be told.”-And as he spake Lars Porcelain struck his bathtub exclaiming,in words of one syllable,Eheu fugaces Postume. (and nobody knew what daisy knew for all men kill the thing they love: Some does it with a turn of the screw . . . . and go wilde afterwards he adding settled his frustrated celluloid collar.

IV at a very little at a tiny very little restaurant where one has to be introduced (let us go to our baths) as I was sitting,with whatishisname Bored Haddocks talking of the Master and sipping our Botticellis,behold (Shall we go to our baths) the eleventh muse erect,candid,standing by my fibula unashamed, garbed in(Speaking of Going To Our Baths)washable crepe-dechine;and crying:“dat don’t go wid me kiddo. I seen youses among de rhododactylosdendrons playing wid youses periphrastic conjugation;youses has got one swell aurora borealis slip it to muh easy kid I’m shortwaisted” and Let at Us this Go i To was Our slightly Baths abashed.

V VENITE ADOREMUS come my shortfellows,let us exploit our inhibitions, let us express our admiration for the-man-with-a-great-future-behind-him

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let us write like Tears Eliot. you are always smoothing your hair with an automatic hand - -I fear,my poundlings,you will disappoint your Penates The Rorlds Wevolve: wipe your Joyce across your James and laugh (the worlds revolve like lovely women stooping to folly in vacant lots, exit the danse de ventre sans changement de Rismet.) But I,oh shindig,arising from my stale smells clasping my yellow feet initiate orgasm: come my tiddledewinks put out and sitting well in order smite the sounding bollox,for my purpose holds which is more than can be said for some people.- -(Exeunt omnes, Exit the muscular urge:arunkyoulayah! enter That Tired Feeling

Notes Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (736). Multiple typescript drafts with extensive handwritten corrections. ‘pound pound pound’: Etcetera 102; CP 987. ‘ “out of the pants which cover me’: Etcetera 101; CP 986. See discussion above, Chapter 9.3, and below in ‘Editing the Unpublished Work’.

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E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the Classics –––The Greek Spirit–––

Just because Matthew Arnold and Ruskin have discussed the Greek spirit is no reason for others to feel abashed. I unhesitatingly affirm, for instance, that there is no-“the Greek spirit.” By this I mean that it is more than useless, it is hopeless, if not, indeed, idiotic, for any one man to suppose that he can define “the Greek spirit” for himself and the world. The pathetic fallacy cannot approach this delusion. There is no one flag floating above Greek literature which can identify that literature from all others from us. I believe that the most ultramodern, the most violently “Futuristic” ideas, such as translation of an image of one of the senses in terms of another of the senses, are to be found in pristine and full-fledged glory in those classics which are dear to the most conventional as well as the most original of men. When Dante says “the sun is silent,” he is a poet of the 21st century. Homer and Vergil are far less poets of antiquity than of today – and in this consists their fame. The Greek point of view is to one generation one thing & to another a different and more beautiful. “The Greek spirit” will never be definable till eternity, when the first poet of the Earth is at last fully understood. Notes Houghton MS Am 1892.6 (47). Handwritten. Essay written for ‘English 5’, which Cummings took in his Senior Year (1914–15). ‘English 5’ = ‘English Composition (advanced course)’, taught by Dean Le Baron Briggs. See notes by R.S. Kennedy, added to the folder HRC 8.11. Cummings’ references to Arnold, Ruskin, and the ‘pathetic fallacy’ reflect literary ideas which he had encountered through Bliss Perry’s lectures. Cummings’ copious lecture notes from Perry’s classes include these condensed notes about the natural or animal world (HRC 10.1): not indiv. but species — S. Johnson Crit of Reynolds MF — Hazlett “ ” Dr. Darwin (vs Pope) — Lewes - conv 4 ways to handle nature - faithful - Greek - magical Pathetic Fallacy - Ruskin

} } } }

Arnold

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–––The Young Faun––– Once (and only once) was there a young faun, who loved to lie under the tallest of tall trees, and blow sweet poems into a reed. More lithe was he than a gold lily; and his eyes were young like dawn. When he made glad music, the hills put on sunlight; and when the notes were slow, the trees wept tears of gold and tears of blood. Now the tallest of tall trees stood by a blue pool, wherefrom uprose lilies like white thoughts. In Spring, a red bird sang to the water; in summer, a yellow flower dwelt upon the banks; and in that time when trees be naked with great wind, there fell upon the pool a purple rain of leaves. Once (and only once) the young faun lay beside the blue pool, and gazed upon the water, and made a trembling poem. And he beheld a whiteness in the water, wherefrom the lilies fled ashamed. Then through that water the young faun looked into a still face and quiet eyes. He did not move; but he breathed once more upon the pipe; and the still face became alive, and the eyes trembled upon his own. And the water stirred a little. Doubtless a white moth had stooped to kiss the lilies. He did not move; but he laid his lips again upon the pipe; and over the face within the water love wonderfully dawned. And the water trembled. A white flower had unfolded upon its surface, doubtless. The young faun lay still for a long time. At last he closed his eyes, and played his soul upon the reed. When he arose, the whiteness was gone, and the water lay still before him. The wind, perhaps, was wandering upon another hill. That night, when the glad fauns and the jolly satyrs came and spoke together in the grove of groves, the young faun told his marvel. All the other fauns were still as he told it; and the grasses forgot to grow as he told it; and earth listened. But the jolly satyrs loudly laughed, saying: “O Faun, foolish little faun, wherefore, after beholding her, and the eyes of her, didst thou not cease from thy playing, and take unto thee this marvelous thing?”--And they went away to their coverts, chuckling; for this is the nature of satyrs. But the young faun was angry, and said: “They be goats.”--And he departed to question the tall wood.

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But the tall wood only laughed in all her leaves. “I care not,” said the young faun. “For what can my brown sisters the dryads know of a whiteness beyond lilies?”--And he went away, and came once more to the blue pool. He cast himself along the pool, and looked upon the blue water, saying: “Have I done well?”--But Silence was gathering flowers hardby; and the young faun came away unanswered. That night, there was an assembly of all stars in the hostel of Heaven. And the King of the Stars looked down where slept the young faun; and the King said: “Who is he that troubleth the green fern with his dreams?”--Anon upspoke an Eastern star, and said: “Lord, by day I hid and I watched. He hath beheld a whiteness in the water.”--And the King of Stars answered: “He shall behold her in the flesh.”--And it was the dawn. That day, the young faun wandered alone under the taller trees, till he came to the pool of blue water, wherefrom arose lilies like souls of children. Then he laid him under the tallest of tall trees. His body was slenderer than sunlight, and his eyes were two dancing poems. And he made a very strange and lovely music on his pipe, thinking of the whiteness in the water, but looking down the green world. And a woman stood before him. But he moved not; only played the poem. Then she went toward him, holding out her arms which were whiter than starlight. But he lay still, only playing. Then she vanished. After her fled the poem; and the young faun was alone. That night, he boasted of the creature whom he had beheld. And the satyrs made the rocks to sing with mirth; for this is the nature of satyrs. And the young faun went away angry to the forest. And he said: “They be he-goats.”--But when the young faun spoke to the tall trees, they wept tears of gold and tears of blood. And the blue pool answered him not; for Night was cherishing the dark hard-by. Now when darkness lived greatly upon earth and sky, the King of Stars called his people together in the tent of Heaven; and said: “Who is he that bruiseth the blue flower with his dreams?”--Anon made answer the Eastern star: “Lord, by day I hid and I watched. Yesterday, he beheld a whiteness in the water; and today a woman in the flesh.” --Answered the King of Stars: “Tomorrow shall the young faun behold her in the spirit.”--And the sun rose. That day, a great loneliness walked with the young faun; and guided him, once and for the last time, to the blue pool of perfect lilies. And the young faun sank down beneath the tallest tree. Fairer

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was his body than a fluttering song; and his face was a hurt marvel. Slowly he began to play; looking not upon the blue water, nor yet the green world, but far and high, where dwell the immortal peoples. The red bird had sung to the water, and it was still. The yellow flower had spoken upon the banks, and they were silent. A purple leaf, careering like a blown bird, settled upon the blue pool. Hard by, God was setting forth His candles unto the tired world. The young faun did not move. From the reed of the young faun there arose a rich, strange poem; a birth of song, struggling upward from the Earth. And the young faun moved not. The green grasses heard the poem, and withered; and the tall trees heard it, and put ashes upon their heads. At least, the poem ceased. That night, the King of Stars summoned a meeting of all stars in the citadel of Heaven; and looking down upon the tallest of tall trees, the King said: “Who is he that is at peace with his dream?”--Then spoke the star of that quarter of Heaven wherein light first blossometh: “Lord, I hid and I watched. The young faun is dead.”--Then the very Star of Stars, who is of a most gentle and gracious aspect, smiled a little, without speaking. It was day. Notes Houghton MS Am 1892.6 (124). Handwritten. Short story written for Dean Briggs, with Briggs’ comments on the draft. There are stylistic similarities between ‘The Young Faun’ and Cummings’ published Fairy-Tales. Phrases like ‘More lithe was he than a gold lily’ and ‘his face was a hurt marvel’ point towards Cummings’ poetic voice. See above, Chapter 7.1. Christian language is casually blended into the paganism of ‘The Young Faun’. The ‘Star of Stars’ is a Biblical construction, the story ends with a reference to God ‘setting forth His candles’, and the influence of the language of Genesis can be seen in the dawning of the days: ‘And it was the dawn’; ‘It was day’. The conjunction of Christian and classical is a recurrent theme in Cummings’ use of classical material. See Chapters 5.2 and 6.2; also passim on Milton and Dante as mediators of the classical tradition.

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Figure 7. Doodling of fauns or satyrs. Pen and ink, by E.E. Cummings. HRC 10.8. From SKETCHES by E.E. Cummings. Copyright © by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Photograph by the Harry Ransom Center. The University of Texas at Austin. From the Harvard years, in among Cummings’ course notes.

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Figure 8. Perseus rescuing Andromeda. Pen and ink over pencil sketch, by E.E. Cummings. Houghton MS Am. 1892.8 (1). Box 112. Sheet number 2302. From SKETCHES by E.E. Cummings. Copyright © by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Date uncertain.

Figure 9. Study of male nude in a classical style. Pencil sketch by E.E. Cummings. Houghton MS Am. 1892.8 (1). Box 113. Sheet number 3319. From SKETCHES by E.E. Cummings. Copyright © by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust.

Figure 10. Study contrasting anatomy of male nude (left) with Hellenistic style (right), labelled ‘Hellene’. Pencil sketch by E.E. Cummings. Houghton MS Am 1892.8 (1). Box 116. Sheet number 5054. From SKETCHES by E.E. Cummings. Copyright © by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust.

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Figure 11. ‘THE SWAN AND LEDA . . . protect your dear ones . . . ’ From SKETCHES by E.E. Cummings. Copyright © by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Photograph by the Harry Ransom Center. The University of Texas at Austin. Pencil sketch. First published 1929 as one of eight illustrations for ‘A Book without a Title’. Republished in A Miscellany Revised (1965: 225). The original is held at HRC Cummings Art Collection 2.14. Accession Number 67.75.12.

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Figure 12. Notes made by Cummings in a notebook kept in France, 1917. Houghton MS Am 1823.7 (17). From CUMMINGS COLLECTION AT HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY by E.E. Cummings. Copyright © by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust.

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Figure 13. Manuscript draft of ‘VENITE ADOREMUS’ together with text (upside-down) of ‘them which despair’ (CP 998). Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (736). From CUMMINGS COLLECTION AT HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY by E.E. Cummings. Copyright © by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Photograph by the Houghton Library (Harvard University).

Editing the Unpublished Work Cummings’ papers are divided between the Houghton Library at Harvard University and the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin. Manuscript call numbers are given above, for each translation or work of prose. I have tried to minimize the hand of editorial standardization. I replicate Cummings’ own titles. These follow no consistent formula, even within related translations (such as the fragments from Sophocles’ Electra). The irregular headings and inconsistency of formula captures some of the spontaneity and charm of the manuscripts. Cummings’ relationship with the Classics was a very emotional one, and I have tried as best I can to allow the feeling of intimacy conveyed by the manuscripts to show through in the edited versions. This attempt to preserve the apparatus of the manuscript material—as much as is reasonably possible without facsimile—can be supported by theoretical arguments about ‘bibliographical code’.1

1 McGann 1991. A proper consideration of bibliographical code and the representation of Cummings’ poems would need to focus on font spacing—that is, on the discrepancy between modern fonts and the typewriter, in which each character, space, and mark of punctuation occupies equivalent width on the page. But since a publisher’s choice of font is not in the control of today’s scholar, this consideration becomes a theoretical one. Note Webster 2004c on font preference for reproducing Cummings’ poems. Riding and Graves 1929 [1927]: 59–82 thought that Cummings’ typography would serve to control, fix, and protect his poems from future editorial hands: ‘ . . . three centuries hence his poems if they survive (and worse poets’ have) will be the only ones of the early twentieth century reprinted in facsimile, not merely because he will be a literary curiosity but because he has edited his poems with punctuation beyond any possibility of re-editing’ (77). Daniel Matore’s in-progress doctoral work makes some insightful points about taking Cummings’ typography beyond the question of bibliographical code.

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Most of the manuscripts, whether handwritten or typed, show signs of revision, and some translations exist in multiple drafts. The translation from Euripides’ Medea exists in two slightly different versions without clear priority. In all other cases, annotations made on earlier manuscripts are incorporated into later drafts, and so it has been clear which draft represents Cummings’ final revised text. Minor revisions made by Cummings in punctuation and wordchoice are too numerous to be laid out individually in the notes. I have, however, noted revisions—even very minor ones—which seem like they might shed light on Cummings’ ideas about the text. Such revisions will only be of interest to someone else who wished to pursue very detailed work on Cummings. But it seemed right to me to make that possible, since I am dealing with texts which are not otherwise available. A full manuscript variorum, however, would clearly overwhelm the reader with trivia, and so I have had to use my judgement. For example, in Horace, Odes I.4, the revision (noted) from ‘limits of earth’ to ‘limbs of the earth’ might be of some slight interest, as Cummings increases the anthropomorphic charge; the revision from ‘in the meadows’ to ‘on the meadows’ (not noted), I judged to be past the limit of any conceivable interest. Corrections made to the manuscript spelling are noted (see discussion in Foreword). The only silent corrections are to a very small number of errors which are unequivocally typographical: for example, ‘Amd’ corrected to ‘And’. In deciding what level of notes and observations should be provided as apparatus, I considered Christopher Ricks’ editorial work on Eliot’s unpublished verse, published as Inventions of the March Hare, and the response of the scholarly community to his edition.2 Alex Zwerdling, in a review of Inventions of the March Hare, remarks: ‘It is bizarre that Eliot’s discards should be attached to a far more thorough scholarly apparatus than we have for his published volumes.’3 The comment is not intended by Zwerdling as any swipe at Ricks, whose ‘extraordinary learning and careful scholarship’ is highly praised.4 But Zwerdling’s comment prompts me to suggest that—even if I could begin to approach Ricks’ erudition (and sadly I could not)— 2

Eliot 1996, ed. Ricks. Reviews include Vendler 1996; Zwerdling 1998; Brown 1999. 3 Zwerdling 1998: 164. 4 See also the review by Vendler 1996.

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I doubt whether such a level of apparatus would be desirable. As Zwerdling says—in spite of the oddity of the situation, Eliot’s ‘transformative impact on twentieth-century literature’ justifies the idea that ‘every scrap is of interest’.5 With Cummings, the academy has not accorded him the stature of Eliot, and his ‘scraps’ run to tens of thousands of archival pages. It is better to be realistic about Cummings’ present stature, and to pare the edition down to the obviously relevant material from the archives and the obviously called-for editorial comment upon it. The most important aspect of the apparatus, in my view, is clarity and transparency about the number of archival drafts, call numbers, etc. The Cummings collection is bewilderingly large and, in spite of a very professional cataloguing job at both the Houghton Library and the Harry Ransom Center, the material is so vast and so inherently disorganized that the researcher cannot know what is in various folders without calling them up. Tracing material without full references is nearly impossible. This was brought home to me particularly through my efforts to ascertain the status of Cummings’ poem ‘REVERIE’. ‘REVERIE’ was identified by Firmage and Kennedy as a translation from Sophocles’ Electra and published as such in Etcetera (and in the Complete Poems). Clearly, however, it does not translate any passage from that play, nor was there any obvious onestep error (e.g. Euripides’ Electra, or Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, or some other play of Sophocles). However, it seemed impossible to be confident of the status of ‘REVERIE’ without tracking down the source of Firmage and Kennedy’s attribution. The drafts of ‘REVERIE’ which I was able to locate gave no clue.6 I finally (after days of archival work devoted to the problem) found the source of the error in Cummings’ 1916 index of his own poems.7 In the index, Cummings lists his poems by verse type. Under the verse type ‘Alexandrines’, Cummings lists: “This love of ours, you of my heart, is no light thing” Trans. fr. Sophocles’ Electra “Lonely of sky is she, lady of lost delight”

5

Zwerdling 1998: 165. Etcetera 15; CP 915. The manuscript drafts which I have seen are at HRC 6.1 and Houghton MS Am 1892.5 (597). 7 HRC 8.11. 6

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The first entry (‘This love of ours . . . ’) is ‘REVERIE’. Firmage and Kennedy must have misinterpreted ‘Trans. fr. Sophocles’ Electra’ as a gloss on ‘REVERIE’. (Indeed, some of the entries on the 1916 index are glossed on the line below—though the real glosses are in all cases indented, which the second line here is not.) On reflection, it is clear that Cummings means to list his own translation from Sophocles’ Electra as one of the three poems which he has composed in Alexandrine verse. The Greek metre, which Cummings is so insistent about reproducing in his translation, would be referred to as ‘iambic trimeter’ in a classical context. But ‘iambic trimeter’ does not convey the expectation of a twelve-syllable line in English verse. To call it Alexandrine—a twelve-syllable line with caesura—is a perfectly sensible taxonomy. Firmage and Kennedy were serious and careful students of Cummings’ work, to whose scholarship and editorial work I am much indebted. The Cummings archives are very difficult to work in: thousands of folders, fiendish handwriting, and a chaotic style of thinking and note-taking. I do not think that anyone could immerse themselves in the archival material and make no errors. I hope I have not made serious mistakes; but if I have, I hope that I have included enough information to allow anyone else to put me right with minimum effort. I have tried to establish the Greek and Latin editions from which Cummings translated, and my conclusions are indicated in the notes to each translation—though certainty here is not possible. I have looked at the editions which Cummings owned (see Appendix) and at other major late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century editions. His personal library includes a copy of Poetarum scenicorum graecorum, Aeschyli, Sophoclis, Euripidis et Aristophanis, fabulae superstites et perditarum fragmenta, ed. Wilhelm Dindorf (1851), but in some cases it is possible to establish with a fair degree of certainty that he was not using Dindorf. I strongly suspect, in fact, that he never translated from the Dindorf. Like many students, he seems to have preferred user-friendly editions. Cummings’ preface to the translation from Sophocles’ Electra refers to Way’s translations of Euripides. Way’s translations were published in various formats, including as volumes in the Loeb Classical Library. (The first two volumes, including Hecuba in volume 1 and Electra in volume 2, came out in the Loeb in 1912.) These are not among the Loeb volumes that Cummings himself owned (or, at

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least, they are not in his surviving personal library). However, the reference to Way raises the possibility that Cummings used the Loeb volumes for Euripides and perhaps for other translations too, maybe in conjunction with other texts which he did own.

1. PRINCIPLES OF SELECTION There is a manifest category difference between translations which present themselves in the manuscripts as literary work and translations which serve as linguistic exercises. The exercises are glossed with Greek words in dictionary form, clearly as vocabulary notes; they include more literal translations in parenthesis; they also include occasional grammatical glosses, e.g. (adv), or ‘s’, ‘v’, ‘o’ over the text. These exercises all exist in a single version, whereas most of the literary translations exist in multiple drafts and finish in a fair copy (or near-fair copy). Every literary translation is included in this edition. I have given only one of the translation exercises—the passages from Euripides’ Hecuba—to serve as an example. I selected the Hecuba because it is a little more readable than some of the other exercises and because it particularly well illustrates the impact of the Greek language on Cummings (see Chapter 2). The translation exercises are not literature and do not pretend to be. The only interest might be in knowing that Cummings had particularly close contact with certain classical passages. I give a full catalogue in the Appendix. I have included above a compressed version of the composition process for Odes I.24, which was the most interesting and best attested composition process amongst the various translations. Cummings began by writing his own translation crib. The crib is not simply a word for word translation: note ‘poppied sleep’, which is not directly from Horace’s Latin, but which draws, rather, on a classical and Swinburnian trope (cf. above, Chapter 7, on poppies). The first draft of the literary translation shows that Cummings had already settled on his form (quatrains). The note ‘Ends on key Patience’ shows him grappling with the tone and purpose of the source text as he revises his own last stanza. I include Cummings’ Alcaic ‘Invocation’ here on the grounds that a classical scholar interested in Cummings’ relationship to the Classics

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is likely to want to see this piece as a companion to the ‘Sapphics’ published in ‘Etcetera’. I have not seen any other unpublished poems which are so directly classicizing as the Alcaic ‘Invocation’, although there are still many unpublished poems, fragments, notes, and pieces of prose containing classical allusions or interacting in some other manner with the classical world. I include the parody of The Waste Land for its strong classical content as well as its inherent interest.

2. PRESENTATION OF THE TRANSLATIONS The order of presentation for the translations—implicitly constructing the reader’s interaction with Cummings’ texts—constitutes (it seems to me) the heaviest interference of the editorial hand in the edition presented above.8 Chronological presentation did not seem promising. The typescript of ‘Oedipus Tyrannus. Chorus.’ is signed ‘Edward Estlin Cummings - Greek 2’ (the course which Cummings took in his sophomore year). However, the rest of the translations have no direct indication of date. While Cummings’ studies and his translations are clearly connected, it does not follow that his translations date exactly to his coursework. Even adopting a progression based on Harvard coursework would not resolve the question of order among texts studied in the same academic year. Questions about order can descend to an unhelpful level. Why order the Horatian translations in the same order as Horace? (But what other arbitrary order ought to be preferred?) However, some broad ordering principle must be adopted. I have chosen to order them based on my assessment of their status, broadly from most to least public. By ‘public’, I mean in this case to judge how far the translations aligned with Cummings’ published work or to what extent he may have toyed with the idea of publishing them. The Horatian translations, which I have placed first, adopt a variety of mature stanza forms. They are highly worked over and revised. The translation of I.28 is headed ‘(Translation of every Latin syllable in the metre with an English metrical equivalent.)’—as if to explain the 8 On the ordering of poems by editors and issues of editorial theory, see Jack 1985.

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principle of translation to a reader. Phrases from the Horatian translations make their way into Cummings’ published work, and the dotting of the manuscript of I.4 (see notes to the edition) shows Cummings working out some of his own principles of typesetting and spacing. Perhaps most importantly, one of the drafts of Odes I.24 is copied and worked over in the middle of a notebook full of Cummings’ own compositions, where it lies among early drafts of subsequently published poems, including ‘All in green went my love riding’ (‘Songs V’).9 Nothing in the notebook marks the drafting and redrafting of this poem as in any way different from the drafting and redrafting of original, and subsequently published, compositions. Cummings’ manuscripts thus signal full ownership of this translation as part of his literary corpus. Sophocles’ Electra appears second. The preface to this translation gives it a more ‘public’ status and suggests that Cummings toyed with the idea of publishing it. The Electra translation is also the only translation to appear in the 1916 index which Cummings compiled of his poetry to date (see above). The translation from Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus follows—not just to keep the Sophoclean translations together, but also because this translation is, arguably, the next most ‘public’ work. In the preface to his Electra translation, Cummings refers to Gilbert Murray and implies familiarity with Murray’s translations. He owned a copy of Murray’s 1911 Oedipus, king of Thebes (though the acquisition date is not certain: see below on Cummings’ personal library). It may be that the translation from Oedipus Tyrannus has an agonistic aspect, and competitive interaction with other translators seems relevant to the gradient from public to purely personal. Beyond this point, distinctions are fine. I group the two Euripides translations next because the choice of terza rima brings the Medea translation into a more self-consciously literary domain. Aeschylus follows. The translations from Homer’s Odyssey are placed last on stylistic grounds. They seem to have a concern with accuracy which puts them nearest—among any of the literary translations—to the translation exercises which Cummings clearly undertook for linguistic, and not literary, purposes.

9

HRC 6.1.

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3. EDITING THE PARODY OF THE WASTE LAND As I have explained earlier, two of the five sections of this parody were published as independent poems by Firmage and Kennedy in Etcetera. In restoring the other three sections and presenting one complete text, I am making a claim about inferred authorial intention. I have given my evidence in Chapter 9.3. There is no fair copy of this poem. For ‘pound pound pound’ (my Section I), the last typed text is annotated in pencil with changes of phrase and with notes pointing to a change in the stanza divisions and a reordering of the lines. Firmage and Kennedy incorporated the indicated revisions into their text, as given in Etcetera. I have done the same—mostly out of respect for the ‘social history’ of the text.10 I owe a debt to Firmage and Kennedy for their work in untangling Cummings’ revisions. The manuscript drafts of the parody give no indication of date. However, a letter from Cummings to John Peale Bishop and his wife, dated 13 December 1922, contains some of the same jokes as the parody. [ . . . ] Lars Posthumus of Cloaca by the Toititree Gawdz E swore Dat De Great House of Weally should suffer wwong no mowe. With which enervate origins permit me to clasp however respectfully your Omegas in farewell

Cummings follows this with a ditty signed: ‘copyright 2987 A.D. by Tears Eliot’.11 The letter and Cummings’ Waste Land parody both joke about the cloakroom Lars: ‘Lars Posthumus of Cloaca’ (cloaca conjures the Roman sewer and/or the evacuatory tract of some animals) and ‘Lars Porcelain / struck his bathtub’. Both letter and parody satirize Eliot’s self-conscious futurity. Another minor similarity is the ‘r’, ‘w’

10 See McGann 1983 and Greetham’s ‘Foreword’, esp. xvii–xviii, to McGann 1992 (a new edition of McGann 1983), discussing the practical impact of McGann’s editorial theories. In the case of Etcetera, we are looking at posthumous publication. For posthumous publication in the context of McGann’s theoretical work on social history, see especially 1983: 43–9, 52, 74–80, 88–9. 11 Cummings 1972: no. 70, pp. 92–3. ‘Tears Eliot’ was Cummings’ standard moniker for Eliot: letter to Sir Solly Zuckerman, 1 June 1947 (Cummings 1972: no. 145, p. 178); ‘Tears Lyut’, letter to Ezra Pound c.1930 (Cummings 1972: no. 86, p. 115), where Cummings writes: ‘I hope Variétés won’t feel united,under the waistland or vice-versa . . . ’. See also ‘Idle Tears L. Yut’ from ‘Brief Biography’, rpt. Cummings 1965: 247.

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joke: ‘wwong no mowe’ and ‘The Rorlds Wevolve’. On this basis, I suggest an early date for the parody. Cummings reproduces an altered version of the first four lines of the parody in a brief note to Pound from 26 September 1952.12 Pound,pound,pound On thy cogent corona,E P! But I would that my tongue could utter The silence of Alfred Noise.

Cummings periodically revisited his earlier notes and papers, and it seems most likely that he had rediscovered his unpublished 1920s verse in 1952 and quoted a few lines to Pound. They are harmless lines, when taken out of their original, more vicious context. The change from ‘cold grey corona’ to ‘cogent corona’ also renders the line far more friendly.

4. ABOUT THE VISUAL ART Cummings left a vast collection of his visual art. The loose sketches, drawings, and watercolours in the Houghton Library fill fifteen boxes—a total of 9,269 sheets in total, many of which have sketches on both sides (Houghton MS Am 1892.8 (1)). There are, in addition, dozens of sketchbooks. A smaller amount of work is held at the Harry Ransom Center, individually itemized as the Cummings, E.E. Art Collection, 1888–1962. Many artworks by Cummings have also been dispersed into private hands. A significant collection now resides with the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York).13 Cummings drew and doodled constantly. He wrote in the preface to CIOPW [Charcoal Ink Oil Pencil & Watercolours]: ‘Like many,the undersigned was found to write spontaneously or pictures before finding oneself compelled to draw or words:unlike some who are threatened with knowledge,he encouraged himself by to be.’ This self-observation—though stylized to capture the persona of ‘an author 12 Ahearn 1996: no. 324, p. 329. Noted by Webster at http://faculty.gvsu.edu/ websterm/cummings/notes.htm#etc 13 Seventy-four works of art from Scofield Thayer’s private collection. Dempsey 2014: 1–6, 185–8 recounts the story of how this came to the Metropolitan Museum. The collection can be searched in the museum’s online catalogue.

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of pictures,a draughtsman of words’ which Cummings cultivated— reflects the reality of Cummings’ thinking and creative processes. ‘Spontaneous written pictures’ are everywhere among Cummings’ ‘drawn words’—that is to say, pen and pencil sketches are regularly found beside, under, or over drafts of poems. Fig. 7 reproduces a page of doodling of fauns or satyrs from Cummings’ Harvard years. This plate has been chosen for its classical content and is not to be taken as representative of Cummings’ more casual drawing. The clean appearance of the page is atypical. Fig. 13 is a more characteristic indication of the appearance of Cummings’ work, on different orientations, and with sketches over words. (Even Fig. 13 is on the relatively calm end of Cummings’ spectrum.) The page reproduced as Fig. 7 is preserved among notes from Cummings’ Harvard courses and is doodled onto the pink and blue-lined paper which Cummings used at Harvard. Other artwork is not necessarily so easy to situate. The thousands of loose sketches, drawings, and paintings held in the Houghton archives are only occasionally titled or dated. Some sense of internal chronology emerges on stylistic grounds, anchored by an infrequent date or by the use of dateable notepaper (e.g. Camp Devens notepaper, where Cummings was posted in 1918) or by reused postmarked envelopes. The archival order of the 9,269 loose sheets does not provide a chronology. There are some sequences which remain grouped together, but there has also been shuffling, with sequences split and chronology clearly broken, e.g. childhood drawings mixed in among adult work. On stylistic grounds, I suggest that Fig. 8 belongs to the late 1910s or 1920s. It has no authorial title. The figure on the horse wears a classical helmet and wields a classical sword, both drawn in a style which goes directly back to Cummings’ childhood drawings of helmets and swords in scenes from the Iliad. The sea monster and the woman chained to a rock suggest a drawing of Perseus rescuing Andromeda. The nudes (Fig. 9 and Fig. 10) might belong to the late 1920s or 1930s. Cummings undertook a systematic study of anatomy (muscle and bone), posture, and of the styles of the Masters (Maillol, Michelangelo, El Greco, Rubens, Rembrandt, and others). Rushworth Kidder dates these exercises to ‘sometime after 1930’ on the grounds that some of the papers include sketches of Anne Barton.14

14

Kidder 1975: 121–2.

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Figure 11 reproduces a published illustration for ‘A Book without a Title’ (1929; republished in 1965 in A Miscellany Revised). The text offers portions of comedically nonsensical prose which aggressively defy categorization. The illustration reproduced here shows Cummings depicting an ostensibly classical scene (Leda and the Swan) in an entirely non-classical manner. (Similarly, another of the eight illustrations for ‘A Book without a Title’ depicts the scene: ‘THE DOG IN THE MANGER . . . Aesop knew . . . ’.) In spite of the importance of the classical world for Cummings’ theories of art (see Chapter 9), classical motifs are not nearly so prominent in the visual art as they are in Cummings’ poetry. One exception is the faun-motif, which is noticeably recurrent in Cummings’ early art. In addition to discussion above (Chapter 4.1), see also ‘Woman and Faun’ from the Metropolitan Museum collection.15 Also in the Metropolitan collection is ‘Scofield Thayer - The Afternoon of a Faun’.16 There, Cummings takes the very distinctive features of Thayer—which he drew in dozens of portraits—and adds hints of the faun. The left eyebrow is raised with a suggestion of goathorn. A raised eyebrow is typical of the Thayer portraits; in this particular portrait, it is just that little bit more suggestively naughty. Cummings’ published collection of reproductions from his artwork, CIOPW (1931) shows very little direct classical engagement, apart from the single watercolour, ‘nymph’.17 The nymph’s body is turned away; she glances back over her shoulder with large, suspicious eyes. The shape of the body is distorted. The belly is almost a barrel, and the legs have larger calves than thighs. It perhaps blurs the nymph with the idea of a tree. More remarkable, in a way, is the oil titled ‘portrait–Anne Barton’.18 Heavy eyeliner and mascara rim eyes which are washed-out yet glowing. The disconcerting effect is both eyeless and all-seeing. It is suggestive of the effects of classical statues as they have come down to us, eyes blank; or, perhaps even more, it is suggestive of the blind seer. Tiresias is a resonant figure in early modernism; he appears in both The Waste Land and in the first of Pound’s Cantos. (And Tiresias was for seven years a woman.) 15

Searchable online at http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collectiononline. ‘Woman and Faun’ is Accession Number: 1984.433.128. 16 Accession Number: 1984.433.89. It is not clear who titled these works. The drawing which was reproduced as ‘A Drawing. By E.E. Cummings’ in the January 1921 issue of The Dial (see Fig. 2, above) is held in the Metropolitan Museum collection, where it is titled ‘Woman and Fawn’. 17 18 Cummings 1931: 111. Cummings 1931: 55.

APPENDIX

Cummings’ Classical Education and Personal Library From autumn 1907 to summer 1911, Cummings attended the Cambridge High and Latin School for the ‘four-year College Preparatory Course’. The C.L.S. (Cambridge Latin School) was not simply a residual name: the school retained a strong focus on Latin. On the College Preparatory Course, more time was devoted to English and to Latin than to any other subjects—both Latin and English were studied for four days a week. For his history subjects, Cummings had a choice between Greek or English History, and between Roman or US History. He chose Greek and Roman.1 The Harvard University application form asked for information about subjects studied and for textbooks used or authors read, which means that it is possible to follow in detail Cummings’ classical studies at the C.L.S.2 For his first year of Latin, Cummings lists his textbook as Collar & Daniell’s 1st Latin Book. For History, he lists George Willis Botsford’s Ancient History, presumably An Ancient History for Beginners (1902). He also studied English, Algebra, and Hygiene. In his second year, Cummings read Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Books I–II, and some Ovid. A Latin notebook contains his translation work for this year, and it reveals the Ovid to consist of three episodes from the Metamorphoses: ‘Baucis and Philemon’ (i.e. Met. VIII. 621–727), ‘The Touch of Gold’ (i.e. the story of Midas, Met. XI. 100–93), and ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ (Met. X. 1–61, only the first part of the Ovidian tale).3 Cummings’ other subjects in his second year were English, French, and Geometry. In his third year of high school, Cummings read Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Book IV, and Virgil’s Aeneid, Books I–II.4 He took up Greek and listed his textbook as 1st Greek Book, White, which must mean John William White’s

1

Houghton MS Am 1892.7 (193); MS Am 1823.8 (33). Houghton MS Am 1823.8 (33). 3 HRC 10.4: erroneously catalogued as ‘Latin Notebook 1912’. This notebook is clearly from the school year 1908–9. It is labelled C.L.S. and corresponds to Cummings’ second year of studies at the C.L.S. There is a ‘12’ on the front of the notebook, but whatever that meant to Cummings, it certainly didn’t mean 1912. 4 Cummings’ translation of the Aeneid is preserved on loose sheets, out of order, among the papers in HRC 10.8. 2

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First Greek Book (1896). For History, he used Botsford’s Greece, presumably A History of Greece for High Schools and Academies (1899). He also studied English and French. His fourth year simply lists, for Latin, Virgil’s Aeneid, Caesar, and Jones’ Latin Prose—which must be Elisha Jones, Exercises in Latin Prose Composition (1881)—and for Greek, Anabasis and Hellenica. He also studied French, History (unspecified), Algebra, English, and Geometry. Cummings sat the Harvard entrance examinations on 19–24 June, 1911. He attempted English, Elementary Greek, Elementary Latin, Elementary History, Elementary Algebra, Plane Geometry, Advanced Latin, and Advanced French.5 On a scale of A–F, the certificate of his results notes that ‘A and B are honor grades; E indicates failure; F bad failure.’ Cummings achieved Cs in English, Greek, Algebra, Geometry, and French, and Ds in Elementary Latin and History. His Advanced Latin was not graded. On this basis, he was admitted to Harvard, with the conditions of an extra requirement in Natural Science (since he did not offer any at the entrance examination) and the requirement either to pass Advanced Latin before his Sophomore year or to take another supplementary course.6 Cummings took the advice contained in his letter of admission and resat the Advanced Latin that same September (1911), passing with a grade of C.7 For Cummings’ Harvard curriculum, see above, Chapter 2, with Kennedy 1976. Cummings continued to read and learn about the classical world long beyond Harvard, as his personal library clearly shows. While the Harvard curriculum shaped Cummings’ classical engagements, with lifelong effects, it is also true that Cummings’ love of the Classics and his love of literature was never exactly a love for the classroom. A piece of juvenilia published in The Cambridge Review in October 1910 (‘BALLAD OF THE SCHOLAR’S LAMENT’, CP 851)—the same month that Cummings turned sixteen, and year before he entered Harvard as an undergraduate—offers a light-hearted complaint about schoolroom learning and its dampening effect on creativity. When the poet has crammed his Homer and his Virgil, ‘And heard how Hercules, Esq., tore / Around, and swept and dusted with a stream, / There’s one last duty,–let’s not call it bore,– / How shall I manage to compose a theme?’ Cummings grew as a poet through his formal studies, but he also grew as a person and a poet outside of them.8

5

HRC 8.11. HRC 8.1. Letter of 1 July 1911 to Cummings, signed J.S. [?]Olart. 7 HRC 8.11 (pass certificate); 8.1 (official letter from Harvard, 30 September 1911). 8 As Kennedy has seen and made clear in his scholarship and in his biography of Cummings. See generally Kennedy 1976 and 1977 (the point made directly at 1976: 267); Kennedy 1994a: 52–104. 6

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Catalogue of Cummings’ Harvard translation exercises Except for the last translation from Euripides’ Electra, all these translations are typescript and can be found in the Houghton Library, call number: MS Am 1892.5 (741). There is also a translation of Cicero, In Catilinam I.1–21; date uncertain (MS Am 1892.7 (104); handwritten). I give Cummings’ headings or titles; additional information in square brackets. Euripides’ Alcestis.  Chorus 435–484 [= ll. 435–454. End missing].  Chorus ) 569–605. Euripides’ Bacchae.  Chorus L 64 [= ll. 64–87, 105–69. A pencil note registers a missing stanza and Cummings has copied out the missing Greek on the back of the preceding page].  Chorus L 370 [= ll. 370–433].  Chorus L 519– [= ll. 519–75].  Chorus L 862–911 [Again a missing stanza is noted; Greek copied on back of preceding page].  Chorus -L 977– [= ll. 977–1023]. Euripides’ Electra  -Chorus–L 112–167.  ELECTRA ) 175 [= ll.175–197].  Electra L 198 [= ll.198–212].  Chorus L 432–486.  [Separately, a translation of lines 300–322; call number Houghton MS Am 1823.7 5a. Handwritten.] Euripides’ Hecuba – as included above, in the edition of Cummings’ translations. Euripides’ Hippolytus.  Chorus ) 121–175. [Last few lines of chorus missing.]  L 208. [= ll. 208–38].  Chorus )525. [= ll. 525–64].  Chorus ) 732–777.  Chorus ) 1102–1152. Euripides’ Medea.  Chorus ) 629–662.  Chorus ) 824–865.  Chorus ) 976–1002.  Chorus ) 1082–1115 (Anaepests).  Antistrophe ) 1261–1270.

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The Houghton Library (Harvard) holds a couple of hundred books from Cummings’ personal library, searchable through the online library catalogue.9 The rest of Cummings’ personal library came into the possession of the Harry Ransom Center and is mostly catalogued online, although some books are listed only in the older card catalogue.10 There are 2, 778 online catalogue entries, but only 2, 231 of these were published in or before 1962 (the year of Cummings’ death). All of the later books (and quite possibly some of the earlier ones) will have been added to the collection by others—principally by Cummings’ widow, Marion Morehouse. How many more books at the Ransom Center are card-catalogue only would be a thankless calculation to try to make, but I do not think that the number is large. I have cross-checked all of the entries of relevance to Cummings’ classical interests, and I found only three entries in the card catalogue which are missing from the online list.11 The 2, 231 (or thereabouts) books at the Ransom Center and the c.200 at the Houghton testify to an extensive personal library. However, a large chunk of the collection—not countable down to the book, but certainly numbering in the hundreds—consists of books gifted to Cummings by their authors in token of admiration for his work. Some of these books were sent by friends and many by admiring strangers. They do not necessarily indicate Cummings’ own taste or reading habits. A further 103 volumes at the HRC and a significant proportion of the Houghton collection are copies of his own work, including translations of his poems into other languages. As a whole, the collection gives the impression of an eclectic and enquiring mind, underpinned by several decided focal interests. One focus of the collection is Pound. There are 32 books by Pound and many others about Pound’s work and about the treason case. Also notably prominent are the Victorians, the Romantics, and Yeats. The importance to Cummings of the Victorians and the Romantics would be obvious from his own poetry. The number of volumes of Yeats’ work is less predictable and therefore quite striking. There is a great deal of French literature. There is also a pronounced interest in psychoanalysis, with a large number of books by Freud, Jung, and Cummings’ own analyst Fritz Wittels—these books are mostly now at the 9 This can done by searching for ‘E.E. Cummings’ and selecting ‘Houghton’ as the location. 10 The online catalogue is available through the library catalogue of the University of Texas at Austin, via an ‘advanced search’ by ‘former owner’. For the benefit of any future researchers: NB the card catalogue includes two separate sets of cards. 11 If you know to look for them (having been alerted to their existence by the card catalogue), they can be located and requested in the online library catalogue via a normal title or author search, but they do not volunteer themselves, as it were, under the ‘Former Owner -- Cummings’ search.

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Houghton. And finally, indeed, among the major focuses of the collection are the Classics and the classical world. The personal library must be approached with caveats, for there are certainly books which Cummings read or knew which are not in his personal library, and some of the books in the library belonged to Marion. The books by Freya Stark, for example, are gifts from Cummings to Marion. The personal library also includes books inherited from his mother and father. However, I see no need to fret overmuch about these overlaps. I have noted below a few cases where it presses upon the attention that certain books belonged to or were used by Cummings’ mother, father, or sister. In general, however, there would be no practical means of delving into the provenance of each individual book. And there would be no point either. Cummings read and used books inherited from his parents, and Cummings and Marion shared an intellectual as well as a romantic life. Between them, there was mutual exchange and conversation, and anyway, he may well have read ‘her’ books and he did not necessarily read all of ‘his’ books. Approached with due caveats and caution, the collection does usefully illuminate the directions of Cummings’ classical interests. The distribution of classical texts owned by Cummings clearly reflects the importance to him of Greek drama and of Homer. On the Latin side, he owned texts of Catullus, Horace, and Virgil, but not Ovid or Propertius. The distribution of books on classical subjects also highlights Cummings’ enduring interest in the physicality of the ancient world: he owned books about Greek, Roman, and Etruscan art, archaeological excavations, travel books with a focus on classical sites, books of photographs of classical sites in Greece, and one of Michael Grant’s books on Roman coins. The collection underlines the point that Cummings’ interest in the Classics was not limited to his Harvard years of study, but was lifelong. His copy of The Decipherment of Linear B (1958) and other mid-century acquisitions speak to his ongoing curiosity and sense of excitement about the classical world. A few of the books suggest perspectives on Cummings’ work which would otherwise escape us. In particular, Cummings owned a copy of a book of photography and text by Hugh Chisholm, titled Hellas; a tribute of classical Greece. Sixty-four photographs by Hoyningen-Huene. This book seems likely to have been a direct inspiration for Adventures in Value. Chisholm’s Hellas juxtaposes photographs of classical sites and statues with excerpts of text. These texts are taken from both ancient authors and later writers (Shelley, Byron, Yeats, Keats, Chateaubriand, and several others). As in Cummings’ and Morehouse’s own Adventures in Value, the juxtaposition of text and photograph in Chisholm’s volume does not constitute direct explanation of the photograph. Rather, the aim is to evoke a mood or to prompt reflection. Hellas and Adventures in Value are similar even in their physicality—their general shape, size, white space, and the whole aesthetic of the book as

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artefact. We have already seen in Chapter 5 that Adventures in Value includes classical material, and we have looked at the way in which the book’s epigraphs toy with a classical frame. It must be of interest, then, to perceive such a direct relationship between Adventures in Value and Hellas. The whole project of Adventures in Value apparently bears a close relationship to Chisholm’s and Hoyningen-Huene’s embodiment of their encounter with classical Greece. Below, I give a full list of classical texts and translations; language textbooks and dictionaries; and books on classical subjects in Cummings’ library.12 I have worked from the online and card catalogues, checking physical copies where there seemed to be any ambiguities. In most instances, it is not possible to determine when a book came into Cummings’ possession; exceptionally, where a book is inscribed with a date of acquisition, I have included that. Since the main part of this information can be retrieved online by anyone whose specialist interests motivate detailed questions about particular books, I have aimed for a minimalist presentation here of author, title, and date. In principle, anyone can access and read through the University of Texas or Harvard online catalogue entries. I have reasoned that the point of inclusion of the list here is that no reader with a mere casual interest would wish to read through more than two thousand online entries, and that what my reader will appreciate is a quick, reader-friendly list in an easily skimmed format. The books catalogued below currently reside at the HRC unless marked as Houghton. In a few cases, Cummings appears to have had doubled copies. In addition to the books which are itemized below, Cummings’ library included books by literary thinkers whose work is part of the shape of nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception of the classical world: Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism and The Portable Matthew Arnold; Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean and Greek Studies; Thomas Babington Macaulay, Literary Essays; E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion. Cummings also owned works of literature in English, French, and German which engage the classical tradition: Racine, Phèdre; Jean Cocteau, Orphée: tragédie en un acte et un intervalle and Oedipe-roi; Roméo et Juliette; Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus (English & German, trans. M.D. Herter Norton); Ezra Pound and Noel Stock, Love Poems of Ancient Egypt; work by the poet and classical translator, Horace Gregory (in addition to Gregory’s Catullus, listed below); Edmund Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow; seven studies in literature (in

12

The main taxonomical challenge was presented by the many travel books in Cummings’ collection. I have endeavoured to include those which really engage with a classical legacy but not those which simply happen to mention classical sites as they dot around a city or region.

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which one of the seven studies is the influential essay, ‘Philoctetes: The Wound and the Bow’); Douglas Woodruff, Plato’s American Republic.

Classical Authors: Texts and translations Loeb Classical Library volumes Aeschylus (2 vols). 1930. Apuleius, Golden Ass. 1915. Aristophanes (3 vols). 1927–1931. Aristotle, Poetics. With Longinus: On the sublime. Demetrius: On style. 1939. Catullus. With Tibullus. Pervigilium Veneris. 2 copies. 1925 & 1950. Juvenal. With Persius. 1918. Plutarch’s Lives (11 vols). 1955–1962. Acquired 1962. Other Classical texts and translations. Aeschines. Against Ctesiphon (On the Crown). Greek with notes, ed. Rufus B. Richardson from the edition of A. Weidner. 1889. Aeschylus. Agamemnon. English & Greek. Trans. W.W. Goodwin. 1906. Aeschylus. Agamemnon. English & Greek. Trans. W.W. Goodwin. 1906. Houghton. [Second copy] Aeschylus. Aeschyli Tragoediae: cum fabularum deperditarum fragmentis poetae vita et operum catalogo, ed. Arthur Sidgwick. 1910. Houghton. Anacreon. Odaria, ed. Edward Forster. 1802. Houghton. Anacreon. Some copies of verses translated paraphrastically out of Anacreon. Trans. Abraham Cowley. [Undated, limited edition. ?195–.] Aristophanes. The Birds. Introd. & notes W.W. Merry. 1904. Houghton. Aristophanes. The Birds. Trans. William Arrowsmith.13 Aristophanes. The Frogs. Introd. & notes W.W. Merry. 1905. Houghton. Auden, W.H. (ed.) The Portable Greek Reader. 1948. Catullus. Works. English. Trans. Horace Gregory. 1956.

13 Published 1961 by the University of Michigan Press, but Cummings had a typescript or proof copy, on which there are occasional pencil or pen corrections in a hand which is not Cummings’ hand (HRC 8.9). Presumably the manuscript was a personal gift from William Arrowsmith. Arrowsmith has translated Herakles using a dialect (‘youse’, ‘wid’) which is familiar from many of Cummings’ poems. Perhaps Arrowsmith recognized Cummings’ influence in this choice of dialect? In any case, Arrowsmith—a major classical scholar and co-founder of the Hudson Review and of Arion—can be added to John Finley for Cummings’ lifelong contacts with classicists. A brief account of the history of Arion is given by Hopkins 2013: 223–4. For a gathering of perspectives on Arrowsmith’s life and work, see Arion vol. 2 no. 2/3 (Spring 1992–Fall 1993).

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Cicero. Cato major sive De senectute; Laelius sive De amicitia, ed. G. Long. De officiis Libri Tres, ed. Reinholdus Klotz. 1879.14 Demosthenes. The Olynthiac, and other public orations of Demosthenes. Trans. Charles Rann Kennedy. 1852. Demosthenes. On the Crown. Introd. & notes Milton W. Humphreys. 1913. Houghton. Epictetus. The Teaching of Epictetus: being the ‘Encheiridion of Epictetus’, with selections from the ‘Dissertations’ and ‘Fragments’. Trans. T.W. Rolleston. 1888. Euripides. Euripidis Fabulae, ed. Gilbert Murray. 4 vols. 1902. Houghton. Euripides. Hippolytus, ed., introduction, notes, and critical appendix J.E. Harry. 1899. Houghton. Euripides. The Medea. Introd. & notes Frederic D. Allen; rev. Clifford H. Moore. 1901. Houghton. Euripides. Works. Trans. Gilbert Murray. 7th edn, 1917. [Contains Euripides’ Hippolytus and Bacchae and Aristophanes’ Frogs.] Euripides. Medea. Freely adapted from the Medea of Euripides by Robinson Jeffers. 1946. Acquired 1947. Greek Anthology (Anthologia Graeca). Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology with a revised text, translation, introduction and notes. English & Greek. J.W. Mackail. 1908. Houghton. Greek Anthology (Anthologia Graeca). Selections. More poems from the Palatine anthology in English paraphrase, by Dudley Fitts. 1941. Homer. The anger of Achilles: Homer’s Iliad. Trans. Robert Graves. 1959. Homer. Iliad, ed. Wilhelm Dindorf. 1856. Homer. The Iliad. Trans. E.V. Rieu. [Penguin Classics] 1950. 2 copies. Homer. Odyssey. Books I–XII. Introd. & notes W.W. Merry. 1899. Houghton. Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. E.V. Rieu. [Penguin Classics] 1951. Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Ennis Rees. 1960. Horace. Complete Works, ed. Casper J. Kraemer, Jr. 1936. Horace. The Odes, Epodes and Carmen Saeculare, ed., introd., and commentary Clifford Herschel Moore. 1902. Houghton. Livy. Books 1–2, ed., introd., and notes J.B. Greenough. 1891. Houghton. Marcus Aurelius. Selections from the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Emperor of Rome. By Mary Wilder Tileston. 1884. Marcus Aurelius. The Thoughts of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Trans. George Long. 1892. Plato. The Portable Plato: Protagoras, Symposium, Phaedo, and the Republic. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. 1948. Houghton.

14

Not 1884 (as catalogued). Acquired by Cummings’ father in 1881.

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Poetarum scenicorum graecorum, Aeschyli, Sophoclis, Euripidis et Aristophanis, fabulae superstites et perditarum fragmenta, ed. Wilhelm Dindorf. 1851. Sappho. Memoir, text, selected renderings, and a literal translation. English & Greek. Trans. Henry Thornton Wharton. 1907. Houghton. Scriptores Graeci minores, quorum reliquias, fere omnium melioris notae, ex editionibus variis excerpsit, J.A. Giles. 1831. Acquired 1948. Selections from Latin Poets, with brief notes. 1908. Houghton.15 Sophocles. Antigone. Trans. Joseph Edward Harry. 1911. Sophocles. The Electra of Sophocles, with a Commentary abridged from the larger Edition of Sir Richard C. Jebb. Gilbert A. Davies. 1908. Houghton. Sophocles. Oedipus, king of Thebes. Trans. Gilbert Murray. 1911. Sophocles. The Theban plays: King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone. Trans. E.F. Watling. [Penguin Classics] 1947. Sophocles. Tragedies and Fragments. Trans. E.H. Plumptre. 1920. Suetonius. The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, ed. Joseph Gavorse. 1931. Terence. Phormio. English & Latin. Trans. M.H. Morgan, with prologue by J.B. Greenough. 1894. Houghton. Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. From the text of Thomas Arnold, trans. Rev. Henry Dale. 1868. Thucydides. Book VI, ed. E.C. Marchant. 1905. Houghton. Thucydides. Book VII, ed. E.C. Marchant. 1910. Houghton. Virgil. Aeneid. Trans. E. Fairfax Taylor. 1930.

Language texts and dictionaries Benner, Allen Rogers and Herbert Weir Smyth. Beginners Greek Book. 1906.16 Collar, William C. and M. Grant Daniell. The First Latin Book. 1904. Houghton. Kinchin-Smith, Francis John, and T.W. Melluish. Teach yourself Greek. 1947. Acquired 1951. Liddell, Henry George and Robert Scott. Greek–English lexicon, abridged. 26th edn. 1956. Smith, William. A Smaller Latin–English Dictionary. New edition. (First ‘Smaller’ edition published 1855. New edition undated.)

15 The Houghton catalogue identifies this as a Harvard coursebook: ‘ “This book is prepared for the use of freshman in Harvard College by their instructors in Latin.”— Prefatory note.’ 16 Inscribed Elizabeth F. Cummings, Greek G, 1923–24 (Cummings’ younger sister). There are extensive annotations, not in Cummings’ hand, so presumably in hers.

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Books on Classical subjects Archaeology; a magazine dealing with the antiquity of the world. v.1–; 1948–.17 Bonnard, André. Greek Civilization: From the Antigone to Socrates. Trans. A. Lytton Sells. Vol. 2 (of 3) constituting Greek Civilization. 1959. Bowen, Elizabeth. A Time in Rome. 1960. Breasted, James Henry. Ancient Times, a History of the Early World; an introduction to the study of ancient history and the career of early man. 1916. Acquired 1935. Briguet, M.-F. Etruscan art, Tarquinia Frescoes. 1961. Burckhardt, Jacob. The Age of Constantine the Great. Trans. Moses Hadas. 1949. Acquired 1951. Buttlar, Herbert, Freiherr von. Griechische Köpfe. 1948. Acquired 1951. Cairns, Huntington (ed.). The Limits of Art: Poetry and Prose Chosen by Ancient and Modern Critics. 1948. Houghton. Chadwick, John. The Decipherment of Linear B. 1958. Charbonneaux, Jean. Greek Bronzes. Trans. by Katherine Watson. 1962. Cheney, Sheldon. The theatre; three thousand years of drama, acting and stagecraft. 1936.18 Chisholm, Hugh. Hellas; a tribute of classical Greece. Sixty-four photographs by Hoyningen-Huene. 1943. Clark, Kenneth. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. 1956. Houghton. Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. from the German by Willard R. Trask. 1953. Acquired 1953. Dill, Sir Samuel. Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius. 1956. Dillaway, Charles K. Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology; for classical schools. 2nd edn. 1833. Finley, John H. Pindar and Aeschylus. 1955. Houghton. Frazer, James George. Aftermath; a supplement to the Golden Bough. 1937. Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough. Abridged edn. 1958. Houghton. Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough. Abridged edn. 1960. Gardner, William Amory. In Greece with the Classics. 1908. Acquired 1908. Gibbon, Edward. Memoirs of Edward Gibbon, esq. 1877. Gibbon, Edward. The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire. 6 vols. 1930–3. Gibbon, Edward. Selected Prose from Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Introd. Simon Harcourt-Smith. 1953. Grant, Michael. Roman History from Coins. 1958. Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. 1948. Houghton. 17 According to the card catalogue, the HRC holds v. 5, no. 2; v. 6, no. 4; v. 14, no. 3. Published Cambridge, Mass.: Archaeological Institute of America. 18 A sweeping history, of which about a seventh is devoted to the ancient world.

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Grillparzer, Franz. Medea. Trans. Theodore A. Miller.19 Hamann, Richard. Geschichte der Kunst von der altchristlichen Zeit bis zur Gegenwart. 1933. Acquired 1946.20 Hamilton, Edith. The Echo of Greece. 1957. Houghton. Hamilton, Edith. The Roman Way to Western Civilization. 1961. Houghton. Hill, Jerome. Trip to Greece: Photographs by Jerome Hill. 1936.21 Jaeger, Werner. Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture. Trans. from the German by Gilbert Highet. 3 vols. 1939–44. Houghton. Lehmann, Karl. Samothrace: A guide to the excavations and the museum. 1955. Acquired 1957. Maiuri, Amedeo. La Peinture romaine. Translated as Roman Painting. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. 1953. Acquired 1954. Mitchell, Lucy Myers Wright. A History of Ancient Sculpture. 1883. Mullahy, Patrick. Oedipus: myth and complex; a review of psychoanalytic theory. 1948.22 Politecnico di Milano. Archaeological Prospecting. ?1963. Powys, John Cowper. Homer and the Aether. 1959.23 Richmond, Ian Archibald. Roman Britain. 1947. Santayana, George. The Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, Goethe. 1953. Schliemann, Heinrich. Mycenae; a Narrative of Researches and Discoveries at Mycenae and Tiryns. 1878. Schwab, Gustav. Die schönsten Sagen des klassischen Altertums. Translated as Gods and Heroes: Myths and Epics of Ancient Greece. Trans. Olga Marx and Ernst Morwitz. 1946. Seltman, Charles Theodore. Approach to Greek art. 1960.

19 Translated by Miller from the German, and gifted by him to Cummings. Undated and with no publication information. Miller’s translation was eventually published in vol. 6 of The German Classics: Masterpieces of German Literature. New York: The German Publication Society. 1914. This is the same Theodore Miller who was so important to Cummings as teacher and mentor. 20 A history of Western art from the classical world to the early twentieth century; the first of the book’s four sections covers ancient art up to late Byzantium. 21 Card catalogue only. A book of 50 photographs, heavily classical. About 20 of the photographs focus directly on classical remains, while others include aspects of the classical landscape in their composition. 22 Cummings’ library includes several books by Freud and several books on psychoanalytic topics by other authors. I include the Mullahy here (though not the others) because Mullahy’s book looks back directly to the classical world and includes English translations of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus. The book, including the translation of Oedipus Rex, is extensively underlined and annotated in Cummings’ hand. 23 This is an English prose retelling of the Iliad. Cummings has annotated it at a few points in Greek.

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Seltman, Charles Theodore. The Twelve Olympians. 1962.24 Stark, Freya. The Freya Stark story. A condensation in one vol. of Traveller’s prelude, Beyond Euphrates, and The coast of incense. 1953. Acquired 1953. Stark, Freya. Ionia: A quest. 1954. Stark, Freya. The Lycian Shore. 1956. Acquired 1956. Stark, Freya. Alexander’s Path, from Caria to Cilicia. 1958. Acquired 1958. Stark, Freya. Riding to the Tigris. 1959. Acquired 1959. Steindorff, Georg. Egypt. 1943. Symonds, John Addington. Studies of the Greek Poets. 2 vols. 1880.25 Toynbee, Arnold J. A Study of History. Abridgement of vols I–VI by D.C. Somervell. 1947. Houghton. Van Doren, Mark. The Noble Voice: A Study of Ten Great Poems. 1946. Houghton. Weber, Alfred. Histoire de la philosophie européenne. Translated as History of Philosophy. Trans. Frank Thilly. 1912. Houghton. Weil, Simone. Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks. Coll. and trans. from the French by Elisabeth Chase Geissbuhler. 1958. Houghton. White, John Williams. The verse of Greek comedy. 1912.26 Wilkinson, Sir John Gardner. The Egyptians in the Time of the Pharaohs. 1857. Woolley, Sir Charles Leonard. Digging up the Past. 1949. Wynne-Tyson, Esmé. Mithras: The Fellow in the Cap. 1958. Houghton.

24 Between pages 46 and 47 is a small sheet of notepaper with ‘Dear M’ in Cummings’ hand. It looks as if he had begun a note to Marion Morehouse and then used the scrap of paper as a bookmark. 1962 was the year of Cummings’ death, and the fact that a book from this year is bookmarked shows how eagerly Cummings continued to consume classical material up to the end of his life. 25 Card catalogue only. This book belonged originally to Cummings’ mother, but the marginalia show that Cummings has clearly read it (or parts of it) himself. A note about Freud is pencilled into the margins near the end of volume 2—yet another illustration of the connections which Cummings drew between the Classics and Freud. 26 Card catalogue only. Most of the books from Cummings’ library carry his own bookplate and/or an inscription, and all are labelled with an acquisition plate from the Harry Ransom Center which identifies them as part of the Cummings collection. However, no bookplate or inscription (from Cummings or from the Ransom Center) links the Ransom Center’s copy of The verse of Greek Comedy to Cummings, so the provenance of this book rests entirely on the card catalogue record. White was a Harvard professor of Greek. Assuming that this book did belong to Cummings, it would be among the classical volumes from his library which might date to his Harvard studies.

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Blake, William. 1966. Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bloom, Harold. 1997. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bourke, Joanna. 1996. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War. London: Reaktion. Bowlby, Rachel. 2006. ‘Family Realisms: Freud and Greek Tragedy’. Essays in Criticism 56: 111–38. Brett, Simon (ed.). 1984. The Faber Book of Parodies. London: Faber & Faber. Brown, Dennis. 1999. Rev. of T.S. Eliot: Inventions of the March Hare. Poems 1909–1917 by Christopher Ricks. International Journal of the Classical Tradition 6: 149–51. Bruzzi, Zara. 1988. ‘ “The Fiery Moment”: H.D. and the Eleusinian Landscape of English Modernism’. Agenda 25: 97–112. Buck, R.A. 2011. ‘When Syntax Leads a Rondo with a Paintbrush: The Aesthetics of E.E. Cummings’ “in Just-” Revisited’. Spring 18: 134–59. Budd, Louis J. 1953. ‘Cummings, Buffalo Bill’s Defunct’. Explicator 11: no. 55. Burkitt, Katharine. 2007. ‘Imperial Reflections: The Post-Colonial VerseNovel as Post-Epic’. In Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie (eds), Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 157–69. Bush, Ron. 2013. ‘ “Intensity by association”: T.S. Eliot’s Passionate Allusions’. Modernism/modernity 20: 709–27. Carne-Ross, D.S. 1990. ‘Jocasta’s Divine Head: English with a Foreign Accent’. Arion 1: 106–41. Carne-Ross, D.S. 2010. Classics and Translation: Essays by D.S. Carne-Ross, ed. Kenneth Haynes. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press. Carne-Ross, D.S. and Kenneth Haynes (eds). 1996. Horace in English. London: Penguin. Carr, Helen. 2009. The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists. London: Jonathan Cape. Chaney, Michael A. 2011. ‘E.E. Cummings’s Tom: A Ballet and Uncle Tom’s Doll-Dance of Modernism’. Journal of Modern Literature 34: 22–44. Cheever, Susan. 2014. E.E. Cummings: A Life. New York: Pantheon. Chinitz, David E. 1996. ‘Cummings’ Challenge to Academic Standards’. Spring 5: 78–81. Chinitz, David E. 1999. ‘T.S. Eliot’s Blue Verses and Their Sources in the Folk Tradition’. Journal of Modern Literature 23: 329–33. Chinitz, David E. 2003. T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chinitz, David E. 2004. ‘In the shadows: popular Song and Eliot’s construction of emotion’. Modernism/modernity 11: 449–67.

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Cohen, Milton A. 1983. ‘Cummings and Freud’. American Literature 55: 591–610. Cohen, Milton A. 1987. PoetandPainter: The Aesthetics of E.E. Cummings’s Early Work. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Cohen, Milton A. 1992. ‘The Dial’s “White-Haired Boy”: E.E. Cummings as Dial Artist, Poet, and Essayist’. Spring 1: 9–27. Cohen, Milton A. 2010. Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press. Collecott, D.F. 1999. H.D. and Sapphic Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collecott, D.F. 2003. ‘ “She too is my poet”: H.D.’s Sapphic Fragments’. In Marina Camboni (ed.), H.D.’s Poetry: “the meanings that words hide”. New York: AMS Press. 3–19. Collins, Michael J. 1976. ‘Formal Allusion in Modern Poetry’. Concerning Poetry 9: 5–12. Comber, Michael. 1998. ‘A Book Made New: Reading Propertius Reading Pound. A Study in Reception’. Journal of Roman Studies 88: 37–55. Commager, Steele. 1957. ‘The Function of Wine in Horace’s Odes’. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 88: 68–80. Rpt. in Michèle Lowrie (ed.). 2009. Horace: Odes and Epodes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 33–49. Cowen, John Edwin. 1996. ‘E.E. Cummings’ Lyricism Today’. Spring 5: 82–9. Cowley, Malcolm. 1973. ‘Cummings: One Man Alone’. The Yale Review 42: 332–54. Crowder, Richard. 1958. ‘Cummings’ “48” ’. Explicator 16: no. 41. Cummings, E.E. 1923. Tulips and Chimneys. New York: Thomas Seltzer. Cummings, E.E. 1931. CIOPW. [Charcoal Ink Oil Pencil & Watercolours.] New York: Covici-Friede. Cummings, E.E. 1934. The Enormous Room; with a new introduction by the author. New York: The Modern Library. Cummings, E.E. 1937. Tulips & Chimneys. Archetype Edition of the Original MS 1922. Mount Vernon: The Golden Eagle Press. Cummings, E.E. 1965. A Miscellany Revised, ed. George J. Firmage. New York: October House. Cummings, E.E. 1967. i: six nonlectures. Rpb. New York: Athenaeum. Cummings, E.E. 1972. Selected Letters of E.E. Cummings, ed. F.W. Dupee and George Stade. London: André Deutsch. Cummings, E.E. 1976. Tulips & Chimneys. The original 1922 Manuscript with the 34 additional poems from &, ed. and afterword George James Firmage and intro. Richard S. Kennedy. New York: Liveright. Cummings, E.E. 1977 [1958, 1960]. Selected Poems: 1923–1958. London: Faber & Faber.

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Cummings, E.E. 1978 [1922]. The Enormous Room, ed. George James Firmage. Foreword by Richard S. Kennedy. New York: Liveright. (Corrected edn; 1st edn. 1922.) Cummings, E.E. 1983. Etcetera: The Unpublished Poems of E.E. Cummings, ed. George James Firmage and Richard S. Kennedy. New York: Liveright. Cummings, E.E. 1994. Complete Poems 1904–1962: Revised, Corrected, and Expanded Edition Containing all the Published Poetry, ed. George J. Firmage. New York: Liveright. Cummings, E.E. 2004 [1965]. Fairy Tales. Illus. 2004 by Meilo So; afterword 2004 by George Firmage. New York: Liveright. Cummings, E.E. 2007a [1933]. EIMI: A Journey through Soviet Russia, ed. George James Firmage. Preface by Madison Smartt Bell. Afterword by Norman Friedman. New York: Liveright. Cummings, E.E. 2007b. ‘Letter to Scofield Thayer [undated, but probably late October, 1917]’. Spring 16: 103–4. Cummings, E.E. 2010a [1927]. ‘An Imaginary Dialogue Between An Author And A Public, printed on the book-jacket of my first play’. Reprinted in Spring 17: 39. Cummings, E.E. 2010b [1927]. ‘Program Note for Him’. Reprinted in Spring 17: 40. Cummings, E.E. 2010c. ‘Explication of “An Imaginary Dialogue,” the Dust Jacket Blurb for Him’. Spring 17: 41–3. Cummings, E.E. 2013. The Theatre of E.E. Cummings, ed. George Firmage; afterword Norman Friedman. New York: Liveright. Cummings, E.E., S. Foster Damon, J.R. Dos Passos, Robert Hillyer, R.S. Mitchell, William A. Norris, Dudley Poore, and Cuthbert Wright. 1917. Eight Harvard Poets. New York: Laurence J. Gomme. Cummings: see also Ahearn, Barry (ed.). Cummings: see also Morehouse, Marion and E.E. Cummings. Cummings de Forêt, Nancy. 1977. Charon’s Daughter: A Passion of Identity. New York: Liveright. Cureton, Richard D. 1979. ‘E.E. Cummings: A Study of the Poetic Use of Deviant Morphology’. Poetics Today 1: 213–44. Cureton, Richard D. 1980. ‘Poetic Syntax and Aesthetic Form’. Style 14: 318–40. Cureton, Richard D. 1981. ‘E.E. Cummings: A Case Study of Iconic Syntax’. Language and Style 14: 183–215. Cureton, Richard D. 1985. ‘Poetry, Grammar, and Epistemology: The Order of Prenominal Modifiers in the Poetry of E.E. Cummings’. Language and Style 18: 64–91. Damon, S. Foster. 1969. William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols. London: Dawsons of Pall Mall.

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Danchev, Alex. 2013. Cézanne: A Life. London: Profile. Das, Santanu. 2002. ‘ “Kiss Me, Hardy”: Intimacy, Gender, and Gesture in First World War Trench Literature’. Modernism/modernity 9: 51–74. Das, Santanu. 2005. Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davenport, Guy. 1980. ‘Satyr and Transcendentalist’. Parnassus: Poetry in Review, 8: 42–50. Davies, Gilbert A. 1908. The Electra of Sophocles, with a Commentary abridged from the larger Edition of Sir Richard C. Jebb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davis, William V. 1970. ‘Cummings’ “All in Green Went My Love Riding” ’. Concerning Poetry 2: 65–7. Dayton, Tim. 2010. ‘ “Wristers Etcetera”: Cummings, the Great War, and Discursive Struggle’. Spring 17: 116–39. Deacy, Susan. 2013. ‘From “Flowery Tales” to “Heroic Rapes”: Virginal Subjectivity in the Mythological Meadow’. Arethusa 46: 395–413. Deane, Patrick. 1992. ‘Rhetoric and Affect: Eliot’s Classicism, Pound’s Symbolism, and the Drafts of “The Waste Land” ’. Journal of Modern Literature 18: 77–93. Debussy, Claude. 2005. Correspondance: 1872–1918. ed. François Lesure and Denis Herlin; notes François Lesure, Denis Herlin, and Georges Liébert. Paris: Gallimard. Delany, Paul. 1987. The Neo-Pagans: Friendship and Love in the Rupert Brooke Circle. London: Macmillan. Dempsey, James. 2011. ‘A Lost E.E. Cummings Poem Discovered’. The Awl, unpaginated. [On-line magazine; article published 25 May 2011.] http:// www.theawl.com/2011/05/a-lost-e-e-cummings-poem-discovered. Dempsey, James. 2014. The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer. Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida. Desblaches, Claudia. 2007. ‘Crossing Generic Boundaries: Sculpture, Painting and Engraving as Compensations for E.E. Cummings’ Hermeneutic Short-Cuts’. In Jiří Flajšar and Zénó Vernyik (eds), Words into Pictures: E.E. Cummings’ Art Across Borders. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 156–69. Dietschy, Marcel. 1990. A Portrait of Claude Debussy, ed. and trans. from the French, William Ashbrook and Margaret G. Cobb. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dilworth, Thomas. 1995. ‘Cummings’s BUFFALO BILL’S’. Explicator 53: 174–5. Dindorf, Wilhelm (ed.). 1851. Poetarum scenicorum graecorum, Aeschyli, Sophoclis, Euripidis et Aristophanis, fabulae superstites et perditarum fragmenta. Oxford: Parker. Dos Passos, John. 1966. The Best Times: An Informal Memoir. London: Andre Deutsch.

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Index of Poems by Cummings Poems in the new edition by translated text or title Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, Chorus 284–5, 321 Euripides, Electra, ll.737–746 280–1, 321 Euripides, Electra, ll.783–794 280–1, 321 Euripides, Electra, ll.839–851 280–1, 321 Euripides, Electra, ll.1062–1079 280–1, 321 Euripides, Hecuba, ll.444–483 36, 292, 295 Euripides, Hecuba, ll.629–658 293, 295 Euripides, Hecuba, ll.906–951 293–5 Euripides, Hecuba, ll.1023–1033 294–5 Euripides, Medea, ll.1021–1039 56, 278–9, 316, 321 Homer, Odyssey 6.127–144 46, 288, 321 Homer, Odyssey 8.454–468 46, 288–9, 321 Homer, Odyssey 9.378–394 289, 321 Homer, Odyssey 10.210–223 290, 321 Horace, Odes 1.4 41–5, 57, 143–4, 254–5, 316, 321 Horace, Odes 1.16 256 Horace, Odes 1.24 52, 144–6, 171, 257, 264–6, 319, 321 Horace, Odes 1.28 55, 258–9, 320–1 Horace, Odes 2.14 40–1, 45, 56, 175, 182, 260 Horace, Odes 4.5 56, 261–2 Horace, Odes 4.7 41, 55, 56, 263 ‘Invocation (Alcaics)’ 8, 55, 298, 319–20 Sophocles, Electra ll.1–140 9, 47–52, 55, 144, 180, 270–3, 275, 315, 317–18, 321 Sophocles, Electra ll.1126–1170 273–5, 315, 317–18, 321 Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, Chorus 45, 50, 276, 320, 321 [Waste Land parody, untitled] 8–9, 41 n.2, 197, 215–22, 226, 238, 299–301, 313, 320, 322–3

Poems in the new edition by first line Ah, Postumus, fleet-footed are the years! 40–1, 45, 56, 175, 182, 260 Breeze,breeze of the sea 36, 292, 295 But as he bowed down, standing upon very 280–1, 321 But hearing these things Aegisthus speaks thus: “Now must ye 280–1, 321 But, when at length was the bar of the olive truly to flame just 289, 321 Farewell,runaway snows! For the meadow is green,and the tree stands 41, 55, 56, 263 Found they then in glens of the wood the halls which are Circe’s 290, 321 For me was ordained misfortune 293, 295 For the form both of Helen and of thee is worthy to bear praise 280–1, 321 Him when the girl-slaves bathed, I say, and ’nointed with olive 46, 288–9, 321 I mourn,mourn,O Prometheus,thy lost star. 284–5, 321 It is said,–but little trust hath the tale from me,– 280–1, 321 My sons, my little sons! ye go to dwell 56, 278–9, 316, 321 Not yet hast thou rendered,but perhaps thou shalt render, justice 294–5 O,blessed of the gods 56, 261–2 O lovelier daughter of a lovely mother 256 O of mankind memorial of the best beloved 273–5, 315, 317–18, 321 O muse, my blessing, source of my confidence 8, 55, 298, 319–20 O son of him who sometime led the host in Troy 9, 47–52, 55, 144, 180, 270–3, 275, 315, 317–18, 321

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Out of the mouth of the Delphian rock hath a God’s voice spoken 45, 50, 276, 320, 321 pound pound pound 8–9, 41 n.2, 197, 215–22, 226, 238, 299–301, 313, 320, 322–3 The fetters of winter are shattered, shattered 41–5, 57, 143–4, 254–5, 316, 321 Thou,O Troy of my fathers 293–5 Though thou the seas and lands and the sands that are infinite numb’rest 55, 258–9, 320–1 Thus he spoke; and under the bushes stooped godlike Odysseus 46, 288, 321 Who chides the tears that weep so dear a head? 52, 144–6, 171, 257, 264–6, 319, 321 First-line index of other poems by Cummings a connotation of infinity (CP 138) 189 A gentleness for my dog [‘THE RED FRONT’] (CP 881–897) 53 n.34 a like a (CP 654) 34–6, 56–7 a politician is an arse upon (CP 550) 26 All in green went my love riding (CP 15) 11, 12 n.19, 144, 146, 153–6, 157, 161–3, 165, 175, 321 Always before your voice my soul (CP 12–13) xxi, 56, 146, 149–53, 156, 158, 161, 163, 164 a(ncient)a (CP 616) 247 n.6 and what were roses. Perfume?for i do (CP 136) 189 annie died the other day (CP 794) 92, 101–9 autumn is:that between there and here (CP 164) 191 Buffalo Bill ’s (CP 90) 12, 84 n.46 Cleopatra built (CP 91–94) 178–83, 194, 202, 207, 209 come,gaze with me upon this dome (CP 272) 118, 124, 189 n.34 cruelly,love (CP 18) 146, 153 n.26, 158–9, 163 devil crept in eden wood (CP 1025) 229, 237 Doll’s boy ’s asleep (CP 17) 140 n.11, 146, 153 n.27, 156–8, 161 n.43, 162–3

dreaming in marble all the castle lay [‘OF NICOLETTE’] (CP 8) 136 earth like a tipsy (CP 54) 118–24, 128, 131 even if all desires things moments be (CP 235) 210 everybody happy? (CP 791) 106, 234 first she like a piece of ill-oiled (CP 947) 15–17 floatfloafloflf (CP 431) 33, 96 flotsam and jetsam (CP 492) 245 n.1 goodby Betty,don’t remember me (CP 117) 189 Harun Omar and Master Hafiz [‘PUELLA MEA’] (CP 20–6) 45, 178, 207 hist whist (CP 28) 81–2, 86–8 Humanity i love you (CP 53) 131 I dreamed I was among the conquerors, [‘SONNET’] (CP 874) 115 i sing of Olaf glad and big (CP 340) 236 in a middle of a room (CP 339) 192–3 in heavenly realms of hellas dwelt (CP 799) 21, 109, 223–44 in Just- (CP 27) 11–12, 68, 77–89, 187, 225 inthe,exquisite; (CP 87) 168, 183–7, 194 irreproachable ladies firmly lewd (CP 122) 189 it is funny,you will be dead some day. (CP 155) 191 Jehovah buried,Satan dead, (CP 438) 13–14 “kitty”. sixteen,50 100 ,white,prostitute. (CP 126) 189 lis / -ten (CP 271) 124 listen my children and you (CP 234) 41 n.2, 88 n.60, 210–11 little ladies more (CP 56–7) 32, 117, 131 little tree (CP 29) 81–2, 86–8 Me up at does (CP 784) 57 mr youse needn’t be so spry (CP 245) 211 my love is building a building (CP 165) 191 my sweet old etcetera (CP 275) 117, 118 n.12 nearer:breath of my breath:take not thy tingling (CP 123) 189 nobody loses all the time (CP 237) 209 n.31

Index of Poems by Cummings O sweet spontaneous (CP 58) 129–31, 170 n.8, 175, 187, 225 of evident invisibles (CP 75) 60, 68, 72–7, 135, 164, 209 of this wilting wall the colour drub (CP 131) 188 Oh thou that liftest up thy hands in prayer, [‘BELGIUM’] (CP 876) 115 one April dusk the (CP 84) 53–4, 121 Only thou livest. Centuries wheel and pass, [‘HELEN’] (CP 913) 116–17, 119, 120, 123, 125 opening of the chambers close (CP 266) 184 n.28 “out of the pants which cover me (CP 986) 41 n.2, 215–16, 301 Perfectly a year,we watched Together les enfants jumping and (CP 1000) 186 n.31 Picasso (CP 95) 202 (ponder,darling,these busted statues (CP 258) 35, 94, 213–15 pound pound pound (CP 987) 215–16, 301 so many selves(so many fiends and gods (CP 609) 247 “so you’re hunting for ann well i’m looking for will” (CP 707) 103, 104 n.37, 105 some ask praise of their fellows (CP 292) 35, 36 somebody knew Lincoln somebody Xerxes (CP 101–2) 209 Space being(don’t forget to remember) Curved (CP 317) 97 stop look & [‘MEMORABILIA’] (CP 254–5) 120, 121 n.15, 211–13 take it from me kiddo [‘POEM,OR BEAUTY HURTS MR.VINAL’] (CP 228–9) 210 The awful darkness of the town (CP 933) 114 the bed is not very big (CP 207) 122–3 the bigness of cannon (CP 55) 130 n.35, 131, 148 the mind is its own beautiful prisoner. (CP 157) 190 the phonograph may(if it likes)be prophe (CP 1016) 238–9 n.42 the round of gold [‘A GIRL’S RING’] (CP 934) 68, 70–2, 78 n.30, 85

361

the silently little blue elephant shyly(he was terri (CP 516) 97 n.19 the waddling (CP 98) 14 n.25 (thee will i praise between those rivers whose (CP 9–10) xxi, xxii, 20, 21 n.8, 32, 137, 139–50, 153–4, 155, 161–3, 164, 171, 183 n.26 them which despair (CP 998) 42, 60, 167, 168–76, 183, 194, 313 This love of ours, you of my heart, is no light thing; [‘REVERIE’] (CP 915) 46–7, 53, 317–18 this man is o so (‘ITEM’) (CP 241) 215 this young question mark man (CP 244) 209 Thou aged unreluctant earth who dost [‘EPITHALAMION’] (CP 3–7) 11, 34, 68 n.15, 69 n.17, 115–16, 131, 136–7 through the tasteless minute efficient room (CP 945) 125–8, 129, 207 Thy fingers make early flowers of (CP 14) 152–3, 155, 158 Tumbling-hair (CP 31) 75, 81–4, 86–8, 106, 143, 151, 164 twentyseven bums give a prostitute the once (CP 130) 189 un(bee)mo (CP 691) 147 n.18 when any mortal(even the most odd) (CP 731) 227–9, 233, 235 when god lets my body be (CP 19) 146, 152, 158–9, 162 When I have struggled through three hundred years [‘BALLAD OF THE SCHOLAR’S LAMENT’] (CP 851) 19 n.4, 328 when life is quite through with (CP 11) 146, 147–9, 153 n.27, 156, 162 when mack smacked phyllis on the snout [‘ADHUC SUB JUDICE LIS’] (CP 706) 105 n.40 When my life his pillar has raised to heaven, [‘SAPPHICS’] (CP 873) 8, 55, 298 When the lithe moonlight silently [‘NOCTURNE’] (CP 864–5) 63 when unto nights of autumn do complain (CP 137) 189 Where’s Madge then, (CP 16) 152, 155–6, 163

362

Index of Poems by Cummings

Whereupon i seize a train and suddenly i am in Paris toward night,in Mai. [‘THE RAIN IS A HANDSOME ANIMAL’] (CP 994) 186 n.31 who’s most afraid of death?thou (CP 149) 189–90

why did you go (CP 30) 81–2, 86–8 Will i ever forget that precarious moment? (CP 260) 191–3 workingman with hand so hairy-sturdy (CP 231) 210 your little voice (CP 41) 34

Index Actaeon 155 n.29 Actium 179 Adam and Eve 227–9 ‘The Adult, the Artist and the Circus’ 97 n.19 Adventures in Value (1962) 33, 90–100, 101, 106–9, 208, 234 n.27, 243 n.56, 331–2 Aeschines 20 ‘Against Ctesiphon’ 20 Aeschylus 20, 49 n.19, 97, 100, 159, 208, 283–5, 317, 321 Agamemnon 49 n.19 Libation Bearers 20, 317 Prometheus Bound 20, 284–5 alcaics 4, 46 n.13, 54–5, 298, 319–20 Aldington, Richard 58 & [AND] (1925) 10, 125 n.27, 197 Anacreon 20 Anderson, Sherwood 102 n.29 Many Marriages (1922) 102 n.29 Anthologia Graeca 20 Anthropos: or the Future of Art (1930) 9, 21, 58, 169, 246 Aphrodite 20, 30, 109, 134, 136, 137, 224, 230, 233, 239 Apollinaire, Guillaume 190 n.35 Aragon, Louis 53 n.34 ‘Le Front Rouge’ 53 n.34 Ares 20, 109, 137, 224, 230, 239 Aristophanes 20, 59 Acharnians 20 Birds 20 Frogs 20 Aristotle 238 Arnold, Matthew 31, 304, 332 Arrowsmith, William 333 n.13 Artemis 155 Bacchus 67 Barton, Anne 15, 102–3, 324, 325 ‘portrait–Anne Barton’ (CIOPW) 325 Beardsley, Aubrey 65 n.6 Berthe 14 n.27 Biblical language 120, 234, 307

bibliographical code 315 Blake, William 9, 69, 75, 81–2, 84, 85, 87, 89, 91, 106, 108, 224, 231, 233–5, 236 n.34, 239, 244 ‘The Little Girl Lost’ 87 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790–93) 234 Milton, a Poem in 2 Books (1804–08) 233–5, 236 n.34 Songs of Innocence and of Experience 81–2 Blast 4, 223 Blixen, Karen, see Dinesen, Isak ‘A Book without a Title’ = [No Title] 204 n.21, 311, 325 Boston, Mass. 3, 12–13, 96, 121 Boston Globe (Boston Daily Globe) 12–13 Brancusi, Constantin 65 Bridges, Robert 49–50, 52 Brittain, Vera 14 Brooke, Rupert 65 n.7, 116 n.8 ‘Menelaus and Helen’ 116 n.8 Brown, William Slater 6–7, 11 n.16, 113, 124, 177 n.19 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 80 n.38, 84 n.48 ‘The Dead Pan’ 84 n.48 ‘A Musical Instrument’ 80 n.38 Browning, Robert 49 n.19, 51, 213 Agamemnon 49 n.19 ‘Home-Thoughts, from Abroad’ 213 Bunyan, John 171 n.9 The Pilgrim’s Progress 171 n.9 burlesque 59, 80, 147 n.17, 181 n.24 Caesar 327–8 Bellum Gallicum 327 Callimachean poetry 235–44 calvados 169–71, 174 Cambridge Latin School 19, 22, 327 Cambridge, Mass. 19, 23, 29, 114, 129, 131 capitalisation, see typography of Cummings’ name xxi

364

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carpe diem 8, 14, 42, 60, 134, 139, 143, 146, 152–3, 166–83, 187, 194, 213, 215 Catholicism 120–1, 226 Catullus 20, 26, 29, 38, 45, 90 n.1, 98, 108 n.47, 127, 136–7, 150, 167 n.1, 178, 221–2, 240, 245, 268, 331, 332 Carmen 3 (‘Lugete, o Veneres Cupidinesque,’) 38, 45, 90 n.1, 178, 245 Carmen 5 (‘Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,’) 127 Carmen 11 (‘Furi et Aureli, comites Catulli,’) 150 Carmen 34 (‘Dianae sumus in fide’) 108 n.47 Carmen 61 (‘Collis o Heliconii’) 222 censorship 13–14 Cézanne, Paul 4, 198–201, 209, 223, 224 ‘Chansons Innocentes’ (from Tulips & Chimneys) 12, 81–9, 106 Chaucer 91 Child, Francis James 104–5 English and Scottish Ballads 104–5 Chimneys (from Tulips & Chimneys) 168, 188–91, 192, 193, 194 Circe 141 Chiron 100, 107 chorus (from Greek drama) 58–9, 180 Christianity 107–8, 123, 171, 203, 234, 237, 307 Cicero 234, 329 In Catilinam I 329 CIOPW [Charcoal Ink Oil Pencil & Watercolours] (1931) 28, 193 n.38, 323, 325 Cleopatra 48 n.16, 177–83, 207, 210 Cocteau, Jean 53 n.34, 332 Colleano, Con 28 n.25 Cowley, Malcolm 23–4, 63, 220 n.48 Cowper, William 238 crucifix 119–23 Cubism 4 n.3, 34, 121, 123, 185, 186, 199, 224 Cummings, Edward (Reverend) (father of the poet) 12–13, 15, 19, 96, 120, 193 n.38, 331 Cummings, Elizabeth, see Qualey, Elizabeth Cummings Cummings, Nancy, see Thayer, Nancy Cummings, Rebecca Haswell (mother of the poet) 18, 248, 331, 338 n.25

Dadaism 4 n.3 Damon, S. Foster 66 n.9, 69, 75, 81–2, 106, 233–5, 236 n.34 Dante 20, 21–2, 32, 40, 51, 91, 141 n.12, 148 n.20, 170 n.8, 171, 173 n.13, 208, 211, 227, 245, 246, 268–9, 304, 307 death 8, 39, 40–5, 116, 123, 130, 133–65, 166, 174–5, 177, 180 n.23, 187–94, 198–9, 203 Debussy, Claude 4, 69, 75–7, 81, 84 ‘La flûte de Pan’ (1900) 75 ‘Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune’ (1894) 75–7, 81 n.41 ‘Syrinx (La Flûte de Pan)’ (1913) 75–6 Decadence 6, 46, 66–9, 133–8, 159, 160–1, 207 n.25 Demosthenes 20, 21 ‘On the Crown’ 20 Des Imagistes (1914) 4, 69, 84, 138 Dial, The 4, 5 n.4, 38 n.60, 50, 64, 73–4, 77 n.28, 102 n.29, 126 n.28, 130 n.35, 138, 197, 198, 220 n.46, 222, 223, 226–7 n.12, 325 n.16 Diana (goddess), see Artemis Dickens, Charles 3 Dicksee, Frank 154 Dinesen, Isak 95 Dis, see Hades discobolus 119–21, 123, 127 Dos Passos, John 28, 64 n.2, 66–7, 98, 115, 118, 125, 223 The Best Times (1966) 28, 66, 98, 115 ‘Saturnalia’ 67 Draper, Paul 33, 96 dryads 68 n.15, 70–2 Duffy, Carol Ann 109 dyslexia xxii, 19 n.4, 168 n.4, 199 Egyptian art 205 Eight Harvard Poets (1917) 34 n.53, 65–7, 75, 82 n.43, 83, 106, 116 n.8, 164 EIMI (1933) 9, 20, 28, 29 n.29, 59, 98–9, 166, 171, 187, 227, 245 n.1, 246–7 ‘The Elephant & The Butterfly’ 96, 97 n.19 Eliot, George 30 Eliot, T.S. 4, 5, 6, 8, 15, 22, 24, 31–2, 128 n.32, 133 n.1, 138 n.10, 159, 165, 175, 187, 193, 194 n.39, 197, 198–9, 209–22, 225–6, 227–9, 231, 233, 237, 238, 240, 243, 244, 316–17, 325

Index ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ 213 ‘Gerontion’ 211–12 Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917 15 n.32, 31–2, 316–17 ‘Milton I’ (1936) 229, 233, 237 ‘Milton II’ (1947) 229, 233 n.25, 237 ‘Preludes’ 221, 238 ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ 193 ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’ 219, 221 ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ 211 n.35, 213, 218, 220 ‘The Tinker’ 31–2 ‘Virgil and the Christian World’ (1951) 128 n.32 The Waste Land (1922) 5, 7, 8, 175, 187, 197, 212–13, 217–22, 223, 225–6, 227, 325 ‘What is a Classic?’ (1944) 237 ‘What is Minor Poetry?’ (1944) 243 Elizabeth (sister of Cummings), see Qualey, Elizabeth Cummings Emerson, Ralph Waldo 26, 93, 97, 225 Enormous Room, The(1922) 7, 21, 32 n. 46, 59, 69 n.17, 84 n.48, 113, 121–4, 126, 127–8, 156 n.30, 171 n.9, 199 n.7, 204 n.21 epic 20, 46, 119, 224, 227–44, 245 epithalamion (genre) 136–7, 222 Etcetera: The Unpublished Poems (1983) 8, 10, 16 n.33, 70 n.18, 116, 125, 129, 168, 185 n.30, 215–17, 254, 257, 260, 262, 263, 301, 317, 320, 322 Eurydice (‘Euridyce’) 141, 143, 148, 168 n.4, 169–73, 176, 327 Euripides 20, 36, 52, 56, 58, 268, 277–81, 291–5, 316, 317, 318–19, 321, 329 Alcestis 329 Bacchae 20, 329 Electra 20, 280–1, 317, 318, 329 Hecuba 36, 291–5, 318, 319, 329 Hippolytus 20, 58, 329 Medea 20, 56, 278–9, 316, 321, 329 Evans, Donald 152 n.23 ‘Rue d’Aphrodite’ 152 n.23 Fairy Tales 307 faiteur 27–8 fauns 14, 63–5, 68, 69–77, 80, 134–5, 190, 305–7, 308, 324, 325

365

‘Scofield Thayer - The Afternoon of a Faun’ 325 ‘The Young Faun’ 9, 68, 70–2, 75, 81 n.41, 134–5, 190–1, 207, 305–7 La Ferté-Macé 32 n.46, 113, 125, 198 Ferry, David 43, 144 Horace, Odes I.4 (translation of ) 43 Horace, Odes I.24 (translation of ) 144 Finley, John 94–5, 97–100, 107–9, 208, 333 n.13 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 101–2 Tender is the Night (1934) 101–2 [Forty-One Poems], see XLI Poems ‘Forward to an Exhibit’ (1945) 204 n.21 France 22, 28, 30, 32, 113–14, 120–1, 131, 133, 140, 161, 169–70, 174, 177, 182, 197, 198, 199, 223, 312 free verse 58 French language 24, 27–8, 32, 98, 136, 169–70, 171, 174, 175, 184 n.28, 186, 328 Freud, Sigmund 4, 45 n.12, 69, 85–9, 91–3, 104–7, 117 n.9, 201, 210–11, 215, 233, 243, 330, 338 n.25 Interpretation of Dreams 92 Futurism 4, 9, 29 n.32, 198 n.3, 304 gender (in Cummings’ poetry) 14–17 German language 32, 98 Graves, Robert 5, 22, 125, 315 n.1 Goodbye to All That (1929) 22 Great War 6–8, 14–17, 22, 98, 113–32, 133, 138 n.10, 140, 148, 161, 166–7, 170, 172 n.12, 174–6, 197 Greek alphabet 13–14, 33, 54, 95–6, 107, 202 Greek art 4, 198–206, 214, 331 Greek language 19, 22–3, 28–9, 32–8, 55, 76 n.26, 126–7, 168, 173, 194, 198, 222, 246–7, 319, 327–8, 331 Greek sculpture 18, 127, 200–7, 213–14, 310, 325 ‘The Greek Spirit’ 9, 30, 31, 58, 304 Gregory, Alyse 226–7 n.12 ‘La Guerre’ (from Tulips & Chimneys) 12, 118, 119, 130–1, 148, 187 H.D. 4, 6 n.10, 7–8, 52–3, 135 n.3, 137–8, 157–8, 160–5, 172, 175 n.17, 194 n.39, 198–9, 243

366

Index

H.D. (cont.) ‘Eurydice’ 172 ‘Garden’ 160 ‘Hermes of the Ways’ 157–8, 162 ‘Huntress’ 161–2 The God (1913–1917) 172 Sea Garden (1916) 8, 135 n.3, 137–8, 157–8, 160–5 ‘Sea Gods’ 161 n.43 ‘Sea Lily’ 160 ‘Sea Rose’ 160 ‘Sheltered Garden’ 162 Translations (1915–1920) 52 ‘The Helmsman’ 160 Hades 83, 141–2, 151 Harvard 3, 4, 9, 13, 15, 18–24, 29–32, 33, 48 n.16, 50 n.23, 53, 54–5, 57, 59, 63, 65–9, 70, 75–7, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89, 91, 95–100, 104, 106–7, 113–18, 133, 134, 140, 152, 164, 189 n.34, 197, 206, 223, 245, 298, 308, 315, 320, 324, 327–9, 335 n.15, 338 n.26 Helen (of Troy) 14, 116–17, 207–8 (Helen in Omeros) 210 Hephaistos 20, 42–4, 109, 224, 230, 233, 239, 242 Hillyer, Robert 66, 82 n.43 ‘Song’ 82 n.43 Him (1927) 9, 21, 36–7, 58–9, 180, 187, 193 n.38, 204 n.21, 224, 245–6 Hollander, John 46 n.13 ‘Off Marblehead’ 46 n.13 Homer 9, 20, 30, 93, 98, 100, 107, 109, 117, 119, 120, 127, 208, 224, 231, 234, 235, 237, 287–90, 304, 321, 328, 331 Iliad 18, 117, 120, 235, 324 Odyssey 20, 21, 53, 109, 141, 224, 229, 235, 237, 287–90, 321 Homer, Winslow 93 Homeric Hymn to Demeter 83 Horace 20, 38–45, 46 n.13, 52–7, 59–60, 88, 98, 108 n.47, 134, 137, 138, 143–6, 149, 151, 163, 164–5, 167–83, 211, 215, 240, 244, 245, 253–66, 316, 319, 320–1, 331 Carmen Saeculare 108 n.47 Odes I.2 (‘Iam satis terris nivis atque dirae’) 54 Odes I.4 (‘Solvitur acris hiems grata vice veris et Favoni’) 41–5, 57, 143–4, 170, 254–5, 316, 321

Odes I.10 (‘Mercuri, facunde nepos Atlantis,’) 54–5 Odes I.11 (‘Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi’) 171, 174, 179–80 Odes I.16 (‘O matre pulcra filia pulchrior,’) 256 Odes I.24 (‘Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus’) 52, 144–6, 171–2, 257, 264–6, 319, 321 Odes I.28 (‘Te maris et terrae numeroque carentis harenae’) 55, 258–9, 320–1 Odes I.37 (‘Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero’) 178 n.21 Odes II.14 (‘Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume,’) 40–1, 45, 56, 88, 175, 182, 188, 211, 245, 260 Odes IV.5 (‘Divis orte bonis, optime Romulae’) 56, 261–2 Odes IV.7 (‘Diffugere nives, redeunt iam gramina campis’) 41, 55, 56, 263 Housman, Laurence 64 n.2 ‘The Reflected Faun’ 64 n.2 The Hudson Review 333 n.13 Hughes, Arthur 154 Hughes, Ted 109 Imagism 4, 29, 34, 68, 69, 72, 74–5, 84, 89, 160, 224 incest 15, 92, 101–9 i: six nonlectures (1953) 26, 37 n.58, 77, 78–9, 91, 98, 104–5, 106 n.42, 125 n.27, 129–30, 169, 181, 225 is 5 (1926) 27, 88 n.60, 124, 129, 191, 193 n.38, 197, 208–15, 221 Italian language 32, 98 Jack the Ripper 12–13 James, Clive 208, 219 The Divine Comedy (trans.) 208 ‘Edward Estlin Cummings Dead’ 219 n.45 ‘The Wasted Land by T.S. Tambiguiti’ 219 James, Henry 217 Johnson, Samuel 233, 304 Joy Farm 72 n.19, 96 Joyce, James 4, 6, 8, 20, 22, 135 n.3, 192, 193, 217, 219, 220, 237–42, 244, 246 Finnegans Wake 5 Ulysses 7, 135 n.3, 192, 227, 237–9, 246

Index Jung, Carl 330 Juvenal 26 katabasis 20, 21 n.8, 170 n.8, 171 n.9, 227 Keats, John 52, 108 n.47, 115, 133, 136, 144, 152 n.23, 154–6, 189 n.34, 331 ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ 144, 154 ‘Lamia’ 152 n.23, 189 n.34 ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ 108 n.47 Kilmer, Joyce 159 ‘Trees’ 159 Kittredge, George Lyman 99–100, 107 ‘Knot for Morons’ 204 n.21 La Ferté-Macé, see Ferté-Macé ‘La Guerre’, see Guerre Lachaise, Gaston 198, 224 Laforgue, Jules 38 Lallemand, Marie Louise 14–15, 114, 125, 177 Latin language 19, 22–3, 32, 36 n.57, 37–8, 76 n.26, 93, 108, 120, 126, 127, 168, 171, 173, 186, 194, 327–8 Leda and the Swan 311, 325 Lethe (river) 138 n.10, 141–2, 146–8, 161 Livy 20 London 12–13 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 38, 217 Longley, Michael 186 n.32, 237 n.35 Lowell, Amy 4, 29–30, 31, 38, 152 n.23, 223 ‘Bullion’ 152 n.23 ‘Grotesque’ 152 n.23 ‘The Bungler’ 152 n.23 ‘The Letter’ 152 n.23 lyric 4, 29–30, 56, 236–7, 239, 242–4, 245 Lysippos 206 Mallarmé, Stéphane 76 Marie Louise, see Lallemand, Marie Louise masturbation 13, 222 Matisse, Henri 121, 223 melopoeia 84 n.48, 202 n.18 Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) 74, 323, 325 middle voice (Greek) 37

367

militia amoris 167 Miller, Theodore A. 20, 337 n.19 Milton, John 9, 68, 69, 80, 83–5, 91, 143, 164, 224, 227–9, 231, 233–5, 237, 243 n.56, 244, 307 Paradise Lost 80, 83–4, 143, 227–9, 233 Mimi 177 Miscellany Revised (1965) 199 n.6, 311, 325 Mitchell, R.S. 66 n.9, 116 ‘Helen’ 116 Montmartre 126, 128 Morehouse, Marion 93–9, 108, 330–1 Morris, William 31 Murray, Gilbert 268, 278, 281, 295, 321 Oedipus, king of Thebes, by Sophocles 321 music (theories of) 84 n.48, 199, 202–3 Myron 119, 123, 124, 127, 206 Nancy (daughter of Cummings), see Thayer, Nancy Napoleon 99 n.23 ‘The New Art’ 30 n.37, 65 Nijinsky, Vaslav 81 n.41 95 Poems (1958) 90 n.2, 103 n.35, 105 n.40, 227 No Thanks (1935) 18 n.1, 96 n.17, 247–8 nonlectures, see i: six nonlectures Norris, William A. 66 n.9, 67 ‘Escape’ 67 n.12 ‘Qui sub luna errant’ 67 nymphs 14, 68, 70–7, 135, 325 ‘nymph’ (CIOPW) 325 Oedipus 45, 117 n.9 Oedipal complex 13, 88, 103, 105, 117 n.9, 233 n.24 1 x 1 [One Times One] (1944) 26 n.17 Orpheus 141, 143–5, 148, 171–2, 176, 327 Orr, Elaine 34 n.52, 68 n.15, 104, 115, 136, 193 n.38, 230, 244 Oswald, Alice 109, 242 Memorial (2011) 242 Ovid 19, 72, 75, 146–8, 234, 240–1, 327, 331 Amores 240 Metamorphoses 72, 75, 146, 148, 327 Tristia 240

368

Index

Owen, Wilfred 16 n.34, 114 n.2, 124, 125 n.24, 167, 170 ‘Arms and the Boy’ 16 n.34 ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ 124, 167 ‘Mental Cases’ 170 n.8 paganism 9, 24, 29, 63–109, 134, 138 n.10, 160, 161 n.43, 307 Pan 24, 63–5, 67–9, 72, 75, 77–81, 83–4, 86, 135, 161 n.43, 164, 187 Paris 5, 14–15, 38 n.64, 114, 125–8, 131, 168, 170, 174, 176, 177, 183–6, 197, 210, 223, 224 n.5 parody of The Waste Land 8–9, 197, 215–22, 226, 238, 299–301, 313, 320, 322–3 Parthenon, the, (Greek temple / Boston restaurant) 53–4, 121, 200–1, 206 pastoral 133–65 Pater, Walter 31, 206, 207 n.25, 332 ‘pathetic fallacy’ 304 Persephone 75, 83, 86, 106, 143, 148 n.21, 151 Perseus and Andromeda 309, 324 Philomela 46, 154 Picasso, Pablo 121, 202, 224 Pindar 97, 100, 208 Plath, Sylvia 109 ‘Faun’ 109 Plato 21, 26–7, 88, 138 n.10, 169–70, 172–4, 176, 183 n.27, 203–4, 225, 234, 245, 246 cave allegory 21, 26, 88, 138 n.10, 169–70, 172–4, 176, 246, 333 Republic 21, 26 Symposium 26 Pluto, see Hades Poe, Edgar Allan 210 poiētēs 28, 247 Polykleitos 206 Poore, Dudley 66–7 ‘A Renaissance Picture’ 67 ‘Portraits’ (from Tulips & Chimneys) 74, 178, 183, 187 postmodernism 4 n.3, 92, 109 post-war period 166–87, 197, 209 Pound, Ezra 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 28–9, 50–3, 55 n.38, 69, 84–5, 89, 91, 125 n.24, 128 n.32, 133 n.1, 135 n.3, 160, 167 n.1, 180, 198–9, 217–22, 223–4, 227, 238–42, 243 n.56, 244, 245 n.1, 323, 325, 330, 332

The Cantos 5, 51, 219, 222, 227, 325 Canzoni (1911) 84 n.48 Cathay (1915) 29, 50–1, 84–5 n.48 The Dial Cantos 222 ‘Δώρια’ 84 n.48 fascism of 29, n.30, 238–9 n.42 Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919) 50–2, 128 n.32, 241–2 Odes I.11 (translation of Horace) 180 ‘Pan is Dead’ 84 n.48 Personae (1909) 91 Poems 1918–21: including three portraits and four cantos (1921) 241 ‘The Return’ 29, 84–5 Ripostes (1912) 84 n.48 Praxiteles 69, 206 pre-Raphaelites 6 n.10, 67, 69, 154, 155 n.29 Procne 46, 154 Propertius 167 n.1, 240–2, 331 Elegies 3.3 (‘Visus eram molli recubans Heliconis in umbra,’), 241 Proserpine, see Persephone prostitutes 14–17, 114, 117, 125–8, 129, 131, 167, 188–9, 207, 209 n.31 punctuation, see typography Pygge, Edward (pseudonym) 219 Qualey, Elizabeth Cummings (sister of the poet) 15, 78, 331, 335 n.16 quantitative metre 49, 54–5 race 205–9 Remarque, Erich Maria 119–20 All Quiet on the Western Front 119–20 Riding, Laura 5, 315 n.1 Rogers, Bruce 31 Romanticism 5–6, 46, 133 n.1, 136, 152–6, 159, 164, 183 n.27, 224–7, 229, 231, 233, 236, 239–40, 330 Rosenberg, Isaac 170 ‘From France’ 170 ‘Girl to Soldier on Leave’ 170 n.8 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 46–7 n.15, 133, 234 n.28 Ruskin, John 31, 304 Russian language 32 sandwich construction (Greek) 36 Santa Claus (1946) 58–9 sapphics 4, 34, 54–5, 85, 238–9 n.42, 298, 320

Index Sappho 4, 20, 24–5, 29–30, 31–2, 38, 98, 134, 137, 138, 157, 160–1, 165, 231, 268 ‘Hymn to Aphrodite’ 30 Sassoon, Siegfried 123 n.22, 170 Satie, Erik 223 Parade 223 satire 26, 59 satyrs 14, 59, 63–5, 67–73, 77–81, 86–9, 92, 101, 106–9, 134, 187, 206, 305–7, 308, 324 Schliemann, Heinrich 117 n.10 seduction 8, 12, 14, 143, 151, 167–83, 213 Selected Poems 1923–1958 (Faber & Faber) 77 Seltzer, Thomas 10 73 Poems (1963) 21, 90–1, 101, 106, 109, 224, 234 sex 12–17, 38–9, 114, 127–8, 129–31, 166, 171, 177, 183, 190–2, 207, 209–22, 229, 231–5, 240–1 sexual abuse 15, 92, 101–9 sexually transmitted disease, see venereal disease Shakespeare, William 5, 38, 47–51, 54, 59, 91, 92, 99, 173, 180–2, 183 n.26, 246 All’s Well that Ends Well 48 n.16 Antony and Cleopatra 48 n.16, 181–2, 183 n.26 Henry IV Part 1 48 n.16 Henry IV Part 2 48 n.16 King Lear 48 n.16 Julius Caesar 48 n.16 Macbeth 48 n.16, 246 Venus and Adonis 48 Shargel, Jack 147 n.17, 181 n.24 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 52, 83, 152 n.23, 189, 331 Adonais 52, 152 n.23, 189 ‘Song of Proserpine While Gathering Flowers on the Plain of Enna’ 83 Simpson, William 117 n.10 Socrates 27 Socratic dialogue 204 ‘Songs’ (from Tulips & Chimneys) xxi– xxii, 8, 12, 133–65, 190 sonnets 11 n.16, 116, 125, 128, 188–94, 219, 225 ‘Sonnets—Actualities’ (from Tulips & Chimneys) 188, 190–1, 192

369

‘Sonnets—Realities’ (from Tulips & Chimneys) 188–9 ‘Sonnets—Unrealities’ (from Tulips & Chimneys) 188, 189–90 Sophocles 9, 20, 45, 46, 47–52, 54, 55, 180, 267–76, 315, 317–18, 321 Electra 9, 20, 46, 47–52, 55, 180, 268–75, 315, 317–18, 321 Oedipus Tyrannus 20, 45, 50, 276, 320, 321 Spanish language 32 Stein, Gertrude 223 Tender Buttons (1914) 223 Stevens, Wallace 24, 28 n.25 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 202 n.18 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 202 n.18 Stravinsky, Igor 53 n.34 Oedipus Rex–The Rake’s Progress 53 n.34 suicide 187–94 ‘suicide’ (CIOPW) 193 n.38 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 6 n.10, 46 n.15, 56, 60, 67–9, 71, 80, 83, 85, 89, 91, 133–8, 144, 147–8, 154–5, 159, 160, 162, 172 n.12, 175, 194 n.39, 231, 234 n.28, 319 ‘Anactoria’ 135 n.2 ‘At Eleusis’ 83, 148 n.19 Atalanta in Calydon (1865) 67–8, 71, 80, 162 ‘Dolores’ 135 n.2 ‘Hesperia’ 148 n.19 ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ 148 n.19 ‘Ilicet’ 148 n.19 ‘Itylus’ 46 n.15, 154–5, 162, 175 ‘Laus Veneris’ 135 n.2 ‘Rococo’ 144 ‘The Garden of Proserpine’ 147, 148 n.19 and n.21 ‘The Triumph of Time’ 135 n.3 synaesthesia 128, 182, 202 Synchromism 224 Syrinx (nymph) 68, 72, 75, 135, 164 syrinx (flute) 72–3, 209 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 51, 126 n.28, 136, 151–2, 156, 158, 159, 162, 164, 236 Idylls of the King 152 n.23 ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’ 236 n.33 Maud: A Monodrama 151–2, 156, 158, 162, 164, 236 n.33 ‘The Lady of Shalott’ 236 n.33

370

Index

Terence 20 Andria 20 Phormio 20 terza rima 40, 54, 56, 321 tetrameter 236–7, 242 Thayer, Nancy 13, 103–4, 230, 244 Charon’s Daughter (1977) 230 n.21 Thayer, Scofield 5 n.4, 30, 34 n.52, 38 n.60, 50–1, 68 n.15, 115, 126 n.28, 128 n.31, 136, 223, 225–6, 226–7 n.12, 323 n.13, 325 ‘third voice’ 37 Thomas, Edward 174 ‘As the team’s head brass’ 174 Thoreau, Henry David 26, 97, 225 Thucydides 20 Timoleon 99 Tiresias 325 tmesis 25, 36 Tolstoy, Leo 30 Tom: A Ballet 156 n.30, 202 n.18 Tomb of the Unknown Soldier 184 Transatlantic Review, The 5 Transcendentalism 6, 26, 225 translation 8–9, 19, 23, 35–6, 39, 40–60, 144–6, 171, 175, 178, 180, 182, 215, 245, 249–95, 315–21, 327 Troy 116–17, 119 Tulips (from Tulips & Chimneys) 188, 194 n.39 Tulips & Chimneys (1922 ms) 7, 8, 10–12, 33–4, 45, 53, 72, 74, 79, 81, 83, 91, 115 n.7, 118, 121, 125 n.27, 129, 130–1, 136, 148, 162, 164, 168, 178, 183, 187, 188, 197, 202, 209, 215, 240 Tulips and Chimneys (1923) 8, 10–12, 33–4, 77 n.28, 81, 115 n.7, 130 n.35, 148, 197 typography 5, 31, 34, 37–8, 57, 66 underworld (classical) 32, 138 n.10, 139–48, 170–2, 174, 176 Unitarianism 96, 120, 121

venereal disease 12–13, 117–18, 124 Venus, see Aphrodite Venus de Milo 13, 206–7 Virgil 30, 125, 127–8, 134, 137, 141–50, 164, 170 n.8, 171, 235, 240, 244, 246, 247 n.6, 304, 327–8, 328, 331 Aeneid 141, 147–8, 235, 247 n.6, 327–8 Eclogues 145 Georgics 134, 141–6, 148, 149–50, 164 Victorians 6 n.10, 53–4, 330 Vulcan, see Hephaistos W [ViVa] (1931) 192, 236 Walcott, Derek 46 n.13, 93 n.13, 109, 207–9, 214, 242 Omeros (1990) 46 n.13, 93 n.13, 109 n.48, 207–9, 214, 242 Watson, James Sibley 5 n.4, 223 Watts, George Frederic 201 n.12 Whitman, Walt 152 n.23, 157 ‘Song of Myself ’ 157 Wilde, Oscar 217 wine 143, 171, 174–5 Wittels, Fritz 92, 330 World War I, see Great War XAIPE (1950) 245, 247 Xenophon 328 Anabasis 328 Hellenica 328 XLI Poems (1925) 10, 197 Yale 118, 124 Yeats, W.B. 53, 133 n.1, 330, 331 Yellow Book, The 64 n.2, 115 ‘You Aren’t Mad, Am I?’ 147 n.17, 201 n.16 ‘The Young Faun’, see fauns Zeus 36, 115, 232, 239 Zukofsky, Louis 167 n.1