E.E. Cummings's Shakespeare and the Modernist Middlebrow Sonnet

Abstract

Abstract: As a popular experimental poet, E.E. Cummings embodied the intersection between "middlebrow" and "elite" cultural arenas as well as their competing claims to cultural institutions, such as the early-twentieth-century "Shakespeare industry" in the United States. Archival documents from Cummings's education at Harvard University and middlebrow studies together help to contextualize Cummings's conventional Shakespearean sonnets against middlebrow culture's emergence in the US. Cummings's Harvard notes show how the formal experimentation for which he is best known mirrors his readings in Shakespeare. These parallels signal the Shakespearean foundation of his own modernism and Cummings's participation in contemporary efforts to designate Shakespeare as an early modern modernist. Historicizing Cummings's conventional verse in this way also reveals how Cummings's Shakespeareanism, which blurs cultural hierarchy, has been obscured in the history of Cummings's reception as a middlebrow modernist by the mid-century "Battle of the Brows" and the cultural stratification it entailed.