New England Prodigal

Abstract

and Cambridge ladies before him, and he was very nervous. The Morris Grey Poetry Fund had brought him there. With stern, courageous insecurity he presented to Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls and young question mark men a private, personal offering. He praised his love and the spontaneous earth, damned commercial America and the Soviet Union, and rent the academic air of the queer, bowl-shaped room with the obscenities of a Bohemian tough guy. The ladies were shocked. There was no fatted calf for that prodigal. But the afternoon did have connotations beyond the reading of verse. Harvard and Cambridge had officially recognized, for the first time since he left them after the World War, a native son. And Cummings, out of an inner need, had defied the whole congeries of convention and authority represented by the place. The career of E. E. Cummings, from his first appearance at Harvard to his last, has been the consistent statement of an attitude toward authority. His entire work raises the question whether this attitude can much longer continue to be a creative one, or even a possible one for the artist. The question remains unanswered, but merely to have raised it so sharply as he has done is a peculiar achievement. It involved first the definition of a world in which poems, Cummings's kind of poems, might be written, a world