The Unworld of E. E. Cummings

Abstract

MR. E. E. CUMMINGS has unquestioned lyric power and a sharp I llIwit, which, when it informs the lyrics, gives them a strikingly individual accent. But many of his poems turn wit to the uses not of lyricism but of satire or invective. The techniques and attitudes in the later type of poem, as in most of Mr. Cummings's prose, are fashioned to startle and annoy, and various critics have pointed out naughty-boyisms in this portion of Mr. Cummings's work. I should like to present two closely related points: that, as time has gone on, these juvenile naughtinesses have hardened into harsher, less witty techniques and attitudes, which render Mr. Cummings's nonlyric verse progressively less effective as either propaganda or art; and that this result is due to a radical fault developing in the poet's Weltanschauung: a nihilism, a near-solipsism, which is the reductio ad absurdum of what is in itself a virtue-his individualism.