A History of American Literature

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1
392 Making It New: 1900–1945

people who prefer to lose their identity in some anonymous nationalistic mass
rather than discover an identity for themselves.
At its most extreme, cummings’s commitment to individualism and anarchic
experiment can lead to difficulties of interpretation. One highly idiosyncratic piece,
for instance, begins in this way:

a -
float on some
?
i call twilight
(1953)

Its subject is the moon, which is transformed as it is described into a symbol of the
dream world of the liberated individual; and an appropriate quality of enigma is
given to this symbol by the poet’s radical innovations of technique. Here, for
instance, he replaces the second syllable of “something” with a question mark, the
implication being that “thing” is too solid and mundane a word to use in describing
the shifting, delicate presence of the twilight. And, elsewhere, he uses a punctuation
mark, the second half of a parenthesis, for its visual effect, because it traces the gentle
curve of the moon. cummings sometimes referred to his work as “poempictures,”
which alerts us to its visual quality: the impact of the typography on the blank, white
page can be a primary part of its meaning. At its best, though, cummings’s writing
blends the visual dimension with the aural, as in this passage, which concludes a
poem about death, “enter no (silence is the blood whose flesh” (1963), written
toward the end of the poet’s life:

O, come, terrible anonymity, enfold
phantom me with the murdering minus of cold
...
gently
...
descend

Beautifully cadenced, these lines dramatize the gradual relaxation of consciousness,
the slipping away of life. Left syntactically and grammatically unfinished, they
also imply that the descent into death is rich in possibilities. Characteristically,
cummings responded to death, with fear certainly, but also with wonder: to be
enfolded in “terrible anonymity,” he felt, was a unique experience that nevertheless
deserved comparison with other, unique moments of intensity in life.
It would be an exaggeration to say that, in his later poems, cummings was edging
toward mysticism; it was more a sense of death as an adventure, a possible entry
into new forms of experience. Other modernist poets were, however, driven toward
the mystical impulse; most notably, Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980), Laura (Riding)
Jackson (1901–2000), and Hart Crane (1899–1932). Much of Rukeyser’s early work

GGray_c04.indd 392ray_c 04 .indd 392 8 8/1/2011 7:53:54 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 54 AM

Free download pdf