Helmet of Fire: American Poetry in the 1920s 269spelling and syntax and played with capitalization, lineation, and stanzaic
divisions, creating his own eccentric mode of punctuation and spacing,
sometimes breaking up the integrity of individual words themselves. He was
a determined individualist who signed his name in the lower case and defined
the self with a small i. A feeling of adolescent rebelliousness still clings to a
large number of his typographical experiments, and often the language seems
wrenched into new shapes rather than truly renovated. More profoundly, his
aesthetic favored spontaneity, motion, speed, process over product. As he
wrote in the foreword to Is 5, “If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom
things made matter very little—somebody who is obsessed by Making.”^49
His favorite modern poet was Pound—he was especially influenced by the
satirical aspect of “Mauberley”—and indeed his poems often move with a
Poundian sense of juxtaposition and collage. At the same time, the subject
matter of many of Cummings’s poems is the time-honored, circumscribed,
and conventional subject matter of much traditional lyric poetry: love, death,
and the changing of the seasons.
Cummings’s first book, The Enormous Room(1922), a striking prose
memoir of his experiences as a prisoner in France during the war, established
him as one of the representative voices of freedom for the new postwar
generation. So did his first four books of poems—the work which defined his
lifelong preoccupations as well as his basic stylistic method—all of which
were published in the twenties: Tulips and Chimneys(1923), XLIand &(both
in 1925), and Is 5(1926). The book &, more than any other, established him
as a poet of erotic love just as his next book, Is 5, established him as a satirist
who staunchly condemned America’s moral corruption.
The central oppositions of Tulips and Chimneysdefined the basic terms
that would animate much of Cummings’s work to come: the country against
the city, the spontaneous against the planned, the organic against the lifeless,
the natural against the artificial, the individual against the crowd, the
beautiful against the ugly, the emotions against the rational intellect. His
oppositions were forceful, elementary, reductive. Always he spoke up for the
spontaneity of feeling—the new, the irreverent, the unselfconscious—and
sang in celebration of love and the individual self. There may be what R.P.
Blackmur called “a sentimental denial of the intelligence” in his work, but he
also had an imagination which John Dos Passos called “essentially
extemporaneous.”^50 His best work gave a sense of freedom and buoyancy to
the struggle to create an innovative, indigenous, process-oriented American
poetry in the twenties.
A few years before The Waste Landappeared, Robert Frost wrote to
Hamlin Garland, “I wonder if you think as I do it is time for consolidating