Making It New: 1900–1945 391actually alive,” experiencing everything with a “unique dimension of intensity”; and
you could begin to discover a world in which love transcends time, natural sponta-
neity prevails over the demands of habit and convention, and the dreams of each
particular person are the supreme reality.
According to cummings, freedom was not easy; especially, freedom in poetry. “As
for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words,” he declared, “that means working just
a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine.” His aim was to
create a unique, and where necessary eccentric, voice to express his unique, and
sometimes eccentric, personality; and, in order to fulfill this aim he armed himself
with a whole battery of technical effects – free verse or, on occasion, a highly original
development of traditional verse forms, irregular typography, startling imagery,
word coinages, and syntactical or grammatical distortions.
Like Twain and Whitman, cummings chooses “roughs and little children” for
his heroes: outsiders who, according to the Romantic and American notions of
things, have achieved absolute selfhood. Among the roughs is Buffalo Bill, a typically
Western hero associated with the careless energy of the frontier: “he was a handsome
man,” cummings tells us in “Buffalo Bill’s, defunct” (1920), who used to “break
onetwothreefourfivepigeonsjustlikethat.” And among the other exceptional individ-
uals and supreme individualists is cummings’s own father, celebrated in one of his
most famous poems, “my father moved through dooms of love” (1954). cummings
has also written frequently about love, in part because, as he sees it, love offers access
to that dimension of intensity needed to be “incorrigibly and actually alive.” And his
best love poems are precisely those that combine intense personal feeling with
intelligence and verbal felicity. In “since feeling is first” (1926), for instance, the poet
wittily mocks the rules and regulations of language, the very disciplines he is using:
“who pays any attention / to the syntax of things,” he insists, “will never wholly kiss”
the woman he is addressing. Similarly, in “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly
beyond” (1958), cummings alters the conventional word-order and employs a deli-
cate mixture of adverbs, repetition, and nicely placed parentheses to create a gently
ruminative tone. We are obliged to pause while we read this poem, and so experience
that attitude of patient meditation which is, apparently, one blessing of love.
Closely related to cummings’s poetry of love are his erotic poems. cummings’s
erotic verse is at its best when it is at its funniest, as in “she being Brand / – new.” In
fact, a lot of his poetry generally is at its best in this vein. He is probably the finest
American comic poet of the twentieth century because his comedy issues from
serious commitments: a dedication to Eros, the intensities of physical love, and a
hatred of “manunkind” – those people who reject such intensities in favor of stock
reactions, the language and instincts of the crowd. Ogden Nash (1902–1971) is
probably as skillful as cummings when it comes to satirizing particular social types
or writing nonsense verse; Don Marquis (1878–1937) is almost as adept in the use
of verbal and typographical oddities to disturb and amuse the reader. Only cum-
mings, however, can successfully fuse swingeing comic polemic and verbal jugglery,
trenchant satire and typographical play. “next to of course god america;” (1926), for
instance, is a brilliant parody of patriotic cant that makes a powerful point aboutGGray_c04.indd 391ray_c 04 .indd 391 8 8/1/2011 7:53:54 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 54 AM