Nobody's Poet

COLLECTED POEMS--E. E. Cummings-- Harcourt, Brace ($3).

Among the various plenties that abound in the U. S., the most indigenous and widespread is the plenty of Nothing that almost any U. S. citizen will admit he's got. This inexhaustible national resource is the inspiration of many a popular song (Nobody's Sweetheart; I Got Plenty of Nothin;'), of many a Negro spiritual and folksong. But it has been passed up by most U. S. poets. The first one to crack this national theme wide open, to taste all its implications and to manage to spit them out in undeviating American language, is Edward Estlin Cummings.

Born in Cambridge, Mass. in 1894, Poet Cummings first made his literary presence felt with a novel, The Enormous Room (1922), written after he had served in an ambulance unit and as a private in the World War. Readers of the book, which gave some remarkably detailed dirt on life in an internment camp, were aware that something new was loose in the literary world. What it was became only gradually clearer when Cummings published Tulips and Chimneys (1923) and six subsequent volumes of poems. With their peculiar typography, syntax, and use of words, these books struck most first-time readers as wilful puzzlers, made many distrust their own eyes and Poet Cummings'.

and this day it was Spring. . . . us drew lewdly the murmurous minute clumsy smelloftheworld. We intricately alive, cleaving the luminous stammer of bodies (eagerly just not each other touch) seeking, some street which easily trickles a brittle fuss of fragile huge humanity. . . . Numb thoughts, kicking in the rivers of our blood, miss by how terrible inches speech--it made you a little dizzy did the world's smell

(but i was thinking why the girl-and-bird of you move. . . . moves. . . . and also, i'll admit--) till, at the corner of Nothing and Something, we heard a handorgan in twilight playing like hell

But with 315 of his most representative Poems now Collected, readers will realize that Cummings' technical unconventionalities have been essential from the start. Only with such assistance could he have made words bespeak his all but ineffable theme: the all-importance--for good men and true poets--of being Nobody.

i, as Cummings always spells ego, stands for Nobody. And Nobody is simply anybody who doesn't have delusions that he's Somebody. Consequently he can think of his physical existence in simple terms, can think of death without thinking of taxes, and can think of doom without thinking about bluffing it: god's terrible face, brighter than a spoon, collects the image of one fatal word; so that my life (which liked the sun and the moon) resembles something that has not occurred. . . .

But Nobody, in one of Cummings' descriptions of him, is "Wifeless and only half awake, cursed with pimples, correctly dressed, cleanshaven above the nombril . . . in brief: an American." So Nobody naturally spends a good deal of his time laughing. The nice thing about Nobody's laughter, and the first thing most readers will like about Cummings' poetry, is that it carries no offense, even when directed at close relations: my uncle Daniel fought in the civil war band and can play the triangle like the devil) my

uncle Frank has done nothing for many years but fly kites and. . . . my uncle Tom knits and is a kewpie above the ears (but

my uncle Ed that's dead from the neck

up is led all over Brattle Street by a castrated pup

The faculty of being Nobody enables Cummings to write about a whole crew of Somebodies--including some U. S. Presidents, Cambridge ladies and minor poets-- without giving offense. It also enables him to write about love without raising the hackles of Purity-Leaguers or Sex Cultists. That Cummings should see print in a country that bans works by Sexual Bantam D. H. Lawrence, shows how the Lord can manage to temper the censor for a Real Ram. Cummings knows all about lovemaking, and treats the most of it with self-respecting vulgarity. The best of it he treats with tenderness, responsibility, comprehension:

love's junction is to fabricate unknown-ness (known being wishless ;but love,all of wishing) though life's lived wrongsideout, sameness chokes oneness truth is confused with fact, fish boast of fishing and men are caught by worms (love may not care if time totters, light droops,all measures bend nor marvel if a thought should weigh a star --dreads dying least;and less,that death should end)

how lucky lovers are(whose selves abide under whatever shall discovered be) whose ignorant each breathing dares to hide more than most fabulous wisdom fears to see (who laugh and cry) who dream,create and kill while the whole moves;and every part stands still:

To Cummings, love, like poetry-- though arising from diverse things--is yet no thing; just as Nobody, however wifeless, somnambulistic, correctly dressed, cleanshaven or American, is really no body. Nobody is the very human soul--that feels it belongs to all the life there is, that knows it will get all the death that's coming to it. And, like that soul, Cummings would rather love and grow than live and die.

To express this preference he has had to balance his way along a hairline between absurdity and slush. His audience has not lacked members watching for him to tumble, and Collected Poems will not entirely disappoint them. Several are mostly flippant, one or two merely sentimental. A few start up like rockets, come down like pancakes that miss the griddle. In a few poems, and in passages of his Introduction, he writes as if he thought the world was his private sanatorium. But such misdemeanors, of such a poet, are of permanent unimportance. Whoever will take the trouble to read, as a plain reader, these Collected Poems will end them feeling like a marsh when spring hits it.

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