GUY ROTELLA
E. E. CUMMINGS: A REFERENCE GUIDE (AGAIN) UPDATED
Part Two (1987-1991)
[Spring New Series 2 (1993): 107-123]
1987
1 CHRISTENSEN, PAUL "E. E. Cummings," in Reference Guide to
American Literature, 2nd Edition. Edited by D.L. Kirkpatrick. Chicago:
St. James Press, pp. 159-61.
Presents an overview of Cummings’ themes and techniques in an encyclopedia
entry containing biographical and bibliographical information. Concludes
that Cummings "did not advance in new techniques so much as refine and
consolidate his [early] discoveries." He did move from a delight in love,
nature and simplicity to an urgent preaching of the virtues of "naive existence."
His large canon is marked by "much repetition of theme and perspective,
but his status as a major poet is secure," his influence "pervasive."
2 COHEN, MILTON A. "Cummings i Freud." Poezja, 22, no. 1
[251] (January), pp. 75-83.
Translation, by Maria Korusiewicz, of 1983.4. In Polish.
3 COHEN, MILTON A. POETandPAINTER: The Aesthetics
of E E Cummings's Early Work. Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
264 pp.
Uses Cummings’ early (1916-1927) poetry, painting, and aesthetics
to expose largely hidden aspects of his work; in addition to being a poet,
Cummings was a self-taught, "cerebral aesthetician and [a] lifelong painter."
When closely examined, those realities [end page 107] subvert his
"public persona" and reveal ‘a complex and sometimes paradoxical artistic
personality." Profusely illustrated, the book provides a detailed record
and analysis of Cummings' career as an artist, along with full discussion
of his early aesthetic research, analysis, theory, and practice as reflected
in the papers at Harvard’s Houghton Library. After an introductory overview,
the first chapter traces Cummings’ entire career as a painter, considering
his painting not as a "relief or diversion" from poetry but as "a complement
and co-equal to it" and exploring such matters as his participation in
the modernist ambivalence toward the object and the influence on him of
Cezanne and of Synchromists, Cubists, and Futurists. The following chapter
examines the shared aesthetic underpinnings of Cummings’ poetry and painting:
his theories of wholeness and of feeling (he wanted to join conscious and
unconscious life in order to create and then merge perceptual and formal
unities and to close the gap between the artist or viewer and the work;
he set feeling against thinking and offered it as the route to wholeness).
Those theories reveal an uneasy relationship between "an aesthetic philosophy
of subjectivity and an aesthetic practice requiring calculation and analysis."
In the early painting and poetry, the resulting tension produces "a complex
balance between discipline and expressiveness"; to its detriment, the later
painting, if not the poetry, sacrifices the tension to consistency. The
next three chapters take up Cummings’ three most essential aesthetic concerns:
perception (his ideal is a "perceptual integrity that subordinates recognizable
figures to the work’s complete configuration"), "seeing around" (his aim
is to achieve "structural solidity...through carefully planned interactions"
of verbal and/or pictorial elements), and motion (his goal is to create
a "dynamic rhythm" that runs through and unifies all the parts of a work).
These chapters include extensive analysis of Cummings’ notes on aesthetics
and of the verbal and visual works they led to, including sketches, drafts,
and revisions. The last chapter explores Cummings’ effort to interrelate
the arts in theory and in practice, offering historical contexts for [end
page 108] attempts in analogy and experiment to unite painting, poetry,
and music. A conclusion summarizes and evaluates, emphasizing the successes
and failures of Cummings’ personal and artistic handling of the feeling-thought
dichotomy. (See 1981.2.)
4 DEFLAUX, PIERRE. "The Enormous Room de E. E. Cummings:
Écriture d'une Aventure ou Aventure d'une Écriture." Revue
Française d'Études Americaines, 13, no. 32 (April), pp.151-62.
Considers Cummings’ "lost generation" novel or anti-novel in the context
of postmodernist conceptions of text production. His narcissistic or solipsistic
style, his self-referential use of language, ludic treatment of time, and
violation of the boundary between poetry and prose all point from the modernism
of the century’s early years toward the postmodernism of its final ones.
In French.
5 FUKUDA, R]IKUTARO. "E. E. Cummings," in his Samazama na Deai--
Tadian, Teidan Kaikenki [Various Encounters: Dialogues, Trialogues, and
Interviews]. Tokyo: Chukyo, pp. 291-95.
Reprint of A1962.1.
6 GOLINO, ENZO. "Cummings Poeta Verde." La Repubblica (13
November), p. [?].
7 HERZFELD, JOHN. "Betwixt and Between." Artnews, 86,
no. 9 (November), p. 13
Brief mention of Milton Cohen's POETandPAINTER: The Aesthetics
of E E Cummings's Early Work (1987.3), illustrated with a Cummings
self-portrait.
8 HÖLBLING, WALTER. On Cummings, in his Fiktionen vom Krieg
in Neueren Amerikanischen Roman. Tübingen: Narr, pp. 55, 56, 292.
In a general study of the modern American war novel, argues that The
Enormous Room joins works by Dos Passos and Hemingway both in ridiculing
the "crusade for democracy" and in seeking a [end page 109] language
to express the gap between official versions of the war and the actual
experience of it.
9 HUNT, TIMOTHY A. On Cummings, in American Literary Scholarship:
An Annual, 1985: Edited by J. Albert Robbins. Durham, North Carolina:
Duke University Press, p. 317.
Describes and evaluates Cummings scholarship in 1985.
10 JOHNSON ROBERT K. Analysis of "somewhere i have never travelled,gladly
beyond" in Reference Guide to American Literature. 2nd Edition.
Edited by D. L. Kirkpatrick Chicago St. James Press pp. 682-83.
On the three kinds of Cummings poem (satire, love, and praise), this
is a love poem, typical not of his typographical innovations but of his
"dynamic intensity" and evocative phrasing and of his theme "that love
permits people to withstand life’s cruelty and to perceive the universe’s
immeasurable positive richness."
11 LOVING, JEROME. On Cummings, in American Literary Scholarship:
An Annual, 1985. Edited by J. Albert Robbins. Durham, North Carolina:
Duke University Press, p. 79.
Notes a comparative essay on Cummings and Whitman.
12 MEYN, ROLF. "Edward Estlin Cummings: 'I Sing of Olaf Glad and
Big,'" in Amerikanische Lyrik: Perspecktiven und Interpretationen.
Edited by Rudolph Haas. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, pp. 285-94.
Surveys existing commentary on Cummings’ poem, emphasizing its relationship
to other American works attacking the military establishment as repressive
itself and as a symbol of all systems of repression. Also notes that Cummings
remained an uncompromising individualist even when most of his fellows
turned to ideology for support. In German.
13 ROBACK, DIANNE. Review of Little Tree. Publishers Weekly,
232 (9 October), p. 86. [end page 110]
Reviews a children’s book reprinting Cummings’ "little tree" with
illustrations by Deborah Kogan Ray that match the poem’s "mood of joy an
awe."
14 SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 7,
no. 1 (June), pp. 1-20.
Contains Cummingsiana and comments by D. Jon Grossman on his translations
of Cummings into French.
15 SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 7,
no. 2 (July), pp. 1-20.
Contains Cummingsiana, comments on Cummings and "poetry therapy,"
and David V. Forrest's essay on the "Dangers of Metaphor."
16 SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 7,
no. 3 (November), pp. 1-20.
Contains Cummingsiana, comments on Slater Brown—the "B" of The Enormous
Room, and memoirs of Cummings by Hildegarde Watson and Evelyn Holohan.
17 SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 7 no.
4 (December) pp. 1-24.
Contains Cummingsiana, comments on the psychology of Cummings’ creativity,
and an exchange of letters between Cummings’ father and Walter L. Fisher,
then Secretary of the Interior.
18 VAN PEER, WILLIE. "Top-Down and Bottom-Up: Interpretative Strategies
in Reading E. E. Cummings." New Literary History, 18, no. 3 (Spring),
pp. 597-609.
Complains that stylistics analyses of Cummings too often use only
the second of this pair of complementary models of the interpretative process:
one "in which the reader’s knowledge of the world plays a predominant role"
and one in which the reader's [end page 111] linguistic knowledge
of texts does so. Analyzes "yes is a pleasant country" in order to demonstrate
that readings combining the two models are more satisfactory, with emphasis
on the importance of vocatives and "the invitation speech act" to the poem’s
interpretation.
19 VERSLUYS, KRISTIAAN. "'The Season ‘Tis,My
Lovely Lambs': E. E. Cummings’ Quarrel with the Language of Politics."
Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters, 17, no 3. pp.
200-213.
Catalogues and analyzes methods by which Cummings’ poem. enacts one
of his essential themes, "the idea that the enslaving power of the, state
is linked to the use of discursive logic’ and pretentious language." The
poet’s voice works as a meta-language or "interlinear gloss" to expose
the complicity of both speaker and audience in the creation of a democracy
where "words have lost their meaning and sacred beliefs have petrified
into shibboleths," a democracy where "might is right"; it does so by means
ranging from dictional ambiguity to large scale parodic structures in which,
for instance, classical rhetoric is present in form but empty of substance.
Reprinted: 1988.15.
20 WILCE, HILARY. Review of Little Tree. New Statesman,
114, no. 2957 (27 November), p. 34.
Mentions the "literary value" of an illustrated children's edition
of Cummings' poem "little tree."
1988
1 ALDAN, DAISY. Review of Milton A. Cohen's POETandPAINTER:
The Aesthetics of E. E. Cummings's Early Work. World Literature
Today, 62, no. 3 (Summer) pp. 460-61.
Reviews 1987.3. Summarizes Cohen's treatment
of the theoretical and practical intersections of Cummings’ verbal and
visual art. [end page 112]
2 BACIGALUPO, MASSIMO. On Cummings, in American Literary Scholarship:
An Annual 1986. Edited by David J. Nordloh. Durham, North Carolina:
Duke University Press, p. 470.
Evaluates an Italian contribution to Cummings scholarship.
3 BRONZINI, STEFANO. "Viaggio nella memoria: note su The Enormous
Room di E. E. Cummings." Contesti 1, pp. 141-65.
Not seen. Described in the 1888 volume of American Literary Scholarship
as "full of admiration for Mr. lowercase's flights of sentiment." In Italian.
4 FAKIH, KIMBERLY OLSON and DIANNE ROBACK. Review of In
Just-Spring. Publishers Weekly, 233 (13 May), p. 274.
Reviews a children’s book that reprints "in Just," "hist whist, and
"Tumbling-hair" with illustrations by Heidi Goennel.
5 GERBER, PHILIP L. "E. E Cummings's Season of the Censor." Contemporary
Literature, 29, no. 2 (Summer), pp. 177-200.
Traces Cummings’ reaction to the climate of censorship in the teens,
twenties, and thirties. Cummings had experienced military and political
censorship in France; he had seen The Enormous Room tampered with
(the world "shit" was inked out of most copies of the first edition when
Horace Liveright was forewarned of an impending raid by the New York Society
for the Suppression of Vice, then chipped from the plates of the next two
printings); he was intensely aware of the censoring of Dreisser's The
'Genius' and of the seizure by the Post Office of copies of The
Little Review in which Ulysses was being serialized; he detested
the priggish avoidance of biological and verbal fact that characterized
the upright America of his youth; and he considered individual freedoms
sacred, including his freedom to write what he pleased. Inevitably, Cummings
did "his utmost to thwart the official censors," inventing strategies and
subterfuges for getting the "interdicted words" onto the printed page.
Gerber catalogues Cummings’ methods: "his practices of circumlocution,
ambiguity, [end page 113] punning, and euphemism" when describing
genitalia, coition, and masturbation; and his introducing of scatological
language "in disguise and under protective coloration," from the (only)
seemingly transparent substitution of "merde" for "shit" to the boyishly
triumphant smuggling in of "fuck" in Greek transliteration.
6 HUBBARD, ELIZABETH THAXTER. "Life Was Lovely."
Harvard Magazine, 91, no. 2 (November-December), pp. 61-64.
Contains reminiscences of Cummings’ childhood, when he was the neighbor
and constant playmate of the author (the "betty" of "in Just-"?). Partially
reprinted: 1989.11.
7 MACLEOD, GLEN. Review of Milton A. Cohen's POETandPAINTER:
The Aesthetics of E. E. Cummings's Early Work. American Literature,
60, no. 2 (May), pp. 31 1-13.
Reviews 1987.3 as "invaluable for its extensive
use of the Houghton material, its superb illustrations, and its convincing
analysis of the young Cummings as poet-and-painter." Cohen "focuses not
on analogous techniques in the paintings and poems, but on the common source
of both: Cummings’ aesthetics."
8 MCQUADE, DONALD, DANIEL AARON, JAMES M. COX, WENDY STEINER, CARY NELSON,
and RUBY COHN. On Cummings, in Columbia Literary History of the
United States. Edited by Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia University
Press, pp. 719-20, 740, 743-44, 770, 849, 919-20, 925, 1110.
Comments briefly on Cummings in these contexts: "Intellectual Life
and Public Discourse," "Literary Scenes and Literary Movements," "Regionalism,"
"The Diversity of American Fiction," "The Diversity of American Poetry,"
and "Twentieth-Century Drama."
9 PAGNINI, MARCELLO. "II Caso Cummings," in his Semiosi: Teoria
ed Ermeneutica del Testo Letterario. Bologna: Il Mulino, pp. 327-48.
[end page 114]
Reprint of 1986.10. In Italian. For a translation, see 1985.7.
10 SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 8,
no. 1 (April), pp. 1-20.
Contains Cummingsiana and reviews by Richard S. Kennedy and David
V. Forrest of Milton A Cohen's POETandPAINTER: The Aesthetics of E.
E. Cummings's Early Work (1987.3).
11 SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 8,
no. 2 (May), pp. 1-12.
Contains Cummingsiana and Norman Friedman’s entry on Cummings for
the Encyclopedia of American Literature, being edited by Alfred
Bendixen for Ungar Publishing. Friedman offers biographical and bibliographical
information and comments on Cummings’ themes, techniques, and reputation,
on his use of the mask of "the naive observer," and on his willingness
to focus on "traditionally more 'romantic' themes.. .without the constant
protection of irony."
12 SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 8,
no. 3 (June), pp. 1-16.
Contains Cummingsiana, a listing of books in the Cummings collection
of The Watson Library in Rochester, New York, and letters from D. Jon Grossman,
David Diamond, and others.
13 SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 8,
no. 4 (December) pp. 1-16.
Contains Cummingsiana and G. O. Mazur’s "E. E. Cummings and the Enigma
of the Eternal."
14 TCHORZEWSKI ANDRZEJ. "Doswiadczerne i Posiadanie." Poezja,
23, no.8 [270] (August) pp. 99-107.
Analyzes Cummings "may i feel said he," with attention to matters
of linguistics and to theories of pornography. In Polish. [end page
115]
15 VERSLUYS, KRJSTIAAN. "'The Season 'Tis,My Lovely Lambs': E. E.
Cummings' Quarrel with the Language of Politics," in American Literature
in Belgium. Edited by Gilbert Debussche. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 77-88.
Reprint of 1987.19.
1989
1 ANDERSEN, MILDRED CECILIA. "Autobiographical
Responses to Prison Experience: An Examination of Selected Writings of
the Late-Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries." D.Litt. dissertation, University
of South Africa.
Includes a chapter on The Enormous Room in its consideration
of autobiographical prison literature (see 1990.1).
2 BAGIGALUPO, MASSIMO. On Cummings, in American Literary Scholarship:
An Annual, 1987. Edited by James Woodress. Durham, North Carolina:
Duke University Press, p. 475.
Comments on two translations of Cummings’ poems into Italian, and
on a review of one of them.
3 CHENETIER, MARC. On Cummings, in American Literary Scholarship:
An Annual, 1987. Edited by James Woodress. Durham, North Carolina:
Duke University Press, p. 442.
Describes and evaluates a French contribution to Cummings studies.
4 CONN, PETER. On Cummings, in his Literature in America: An
Illustrated History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 349-51,
363, 366, 381-83.
Comments generally on The Enormous Room, Him, and the
poems, noting that Cummings shared his generation's angry awareness of
the gap between the brutal, reality of World War I and the pieties that
disguised it. Reproduces the dustjacket of the first edition of [end
page 116] The Enormous Room with Cummings’ sketch of the characters
Pete, Jean, America Lakes, and Mexique.
5 HEUSSER, MARTIN. "The Poempicture: Some Thoughts on Space and
Time in the Poetry of E. E. Cummings," in Meaning and Beyond. Edited
by Udo Fries and Martin Heusser. Tübingen: Narr, pp. 43-68.
Considers spatial elements in Cummings’ poems in the context of supposed
hierarchies of the arts (for example, poetry is superior to painting) and
of theories about what is "natural" to them (for instance, Lessing's influential
view that mixing the verbal with the visual violates the "nature" of poetry
and painting both). The iconic aspects of Cummings’ poems are not merely
additions to their linguistic codes; they are integral: they alter the
nature of the poems and entail a special kind of reading. Cummings "exploits
the visual potential of the typeset page in order to gain a high degree
of control over the reader’s spatial and temporal perception." Since he
tends to regard time as an adversary, he uses space in the poems as a way
to subvert time, while remaining aware that he cannot "defeat" it. The
effect of Cummings’ ingenious typographical arrangements is largely to
eliminate "the compulsory sequential element from the reading process."
Unlike most verbal expressions, including most poems, Cummings’ poempictures
permit "random access." Employing such devices as deliberately ill-defined
endings and the encouragement of circular reading, they undermine the essential
temporality of language and so undermine time itself in single moments
that silence time "for a moment." The poems discussed in detail are "what
time is it?it is by every star," "l(a," "!blac," "un(bee)mo," "a thrown
a," and "your birthday comes to tell me this."
6 MCBRIDE, KATHARINE WINTERS. "Preface," in her A Concordance
to the Complete Poems of E. E. Cummings. The Cornell Concordances.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. vii-ix.
Outlines the editorial procedures informing a [end page 117]
computer-generated concordance to E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1913-1962,
with comments on the sometimes peculiar status of "words" in Cummings’
work.
7 MEYN, ROLF. On Cummings, in American Literary Scholarship:
An Annual, 1987. Edited by James Woodress. Durham, North Carolina:
Duke University Press, pp. 447 and 464.
Describes and evaluates German contributions to Cummings scholarship.
8 NELSON, CARY. On Cummings, in his Repression and Recovery:
Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945.
Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, pp.17, 100, 118, 119, 122-23,
177, 292.
Occasional references to Cummings in the context of an effort to restore
"repressed" aspects of American poetic history, with comments on Cummings
and political poetry and on his "kumrads die because they’re told)."
9 SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 9, no.
1 (January), pp. 1-12.
Contains Cummingsiana, comment on a stage adaptation of The Enormous
Room and on one of Cummings’ portraits, and a letter from D. Jon Grossman
about work on Cummings in French.
10 SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 9,
no. 2 (June), pp. 1-20.
Contains Cummingsiana, reports of a discussion with and copies of
Cummings’ letters to Yasuo Fujitomi, his Japanese translator, a memoir
of a 1961 visit to Cummings by Hanne Gabriele Reck, and reprinted reviews
of The Next Theatre Company's staging of The Enormous Room.
11 SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings
Society, 9 no. 3 (August) pp. 1-24. [end page 118]
Contains Cummingsiana, Norman Friedman’s review of a children's book
reprinting three Cummings poems with illustrations by Heidi Goennel, D.
Jon Grossman's comments on sexism in "anyone lived in a pretty how town."
and G. O. Mazur's "E. E. Cummings and the Symbols of the Soul." Reprints
portions of Elizabeth Thaxter Hubbard's Cambridge memoir (See 1988
6). With a poetry supplement.
12 SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 9,
no. 4 (December), pp. 1-28
Contains Cummingsiana and comments on Cummings and Italy.
13 SULLIVAN, WILLIAM. "E. E. Cummings," in
Modern American Poetry: 1865-1950. By Alan Shucard, Fred Moramarco,
and William Sullivan. Boston G. K. Hall, pp. 190-202.
Comments generally on Cummings' life, career, themes, techniques,
and reputation, hearing his poetry as an arresting counterscore to the
dominant music of modernism. Reprinted 1990.11.
14 VASILIKIS, NANCY. Review of Hist Whist. Horn Book Magazine,
65 no 6 (November-December) p 783.
Reviews a children s book reprinting Cummings' Halloween poem with
illustrations by Deborah Kogan Ray.
15 ZAJDEL MELODY M. On Cummings, in American Literary Scholarship:
An Annual, 1987. Edited by James Woodress. Durham, North Carolina:
Duke University Press, p. 323.
Describes and evaluates 1987.3. [end page
119]
1990
1 ANDERSEN, M. C. "Cummings, Transcendence,
and The Enormous Room." Journal of the Department of English
(Calcutta University), no. 28 (September), pp. 18-26.
Examines Cummings’ transcendentalist response ‘to his own imprisonment
(see 1989.1).
2 BACIGALUPO, MASSIMO. On Cummings, in American Literary Scholarship:
An Annual, 1988. Edited by J. Albert Robbins. Durham North Carolina:
Duke University Press, p. 524.
Describes and evaluates an Italian contribution to Cummings studies
3 COHEN, MILTON A. "E E Cummings: Modernist Painter and Poet." Smithsonian
Studies in American Art, 4 no. 2 (Spring), pp. 54-74.
Surveys Cummings career as a self taught painter his early abstractions
his success at the 1919 exhibition of the Society of independent Artists,
his friendship with Gaston Lachaise, ‘his combining of Futurist dynamism
and Cubist stasis, his illustrations for The Dial the influence
on his work of painters ranging from Cezanne to the Synchromist Morgan
Russell, and his shift away from abstraction in the late twenties and after
in search of "a style that ‘would reconcile the figurative and the abstract
without sacrificing either." Also suggest comparative approaches to the
paintings and the poems: comparisons of subject matter reveal shared themes
and parallel strengths (inspired spontaneity) and weaknesses (sentimentality,
triteness)"; comparisons of genre reveal the presence of both "lyrical
affirmation" and "corrosive satire" in each medium; most important, comparisons
of analogous visual devices in Cummings' poetry and painting reveal "aesthetic
principles generating both," especially in terms of Cummings' sense of
"how directly line creates or impedes motion." A number of paintings, drawings,
and poems are discussed. Concludes that, while Cummings remained a poet
and a painter all his life, his [end page 120] poetry was "more
complex and subtle than his painting": in the poetry he could maintain
several "dimensions of meaning" and "a fine balance between thought and
feeling"; in the painting he usually "gravitated toward one or the other
of the poles but seldom integrated them successfully." With Illustrations.
(See 1987.3.)
4 GRAY, RICHARD. "Whitman and American Experimentalism: Cummings,"
in his American Poetry of the Twentieth Century. Longman Literature
in English Series. London: Longman Group, pp. 194-99.
Places Cummings, with Marianne Moore, "in the great, idiosyncratic
tradition of Whitman." Where Moore's idiosyncrasy led her to a belief in
discipline, Cummings’ led him "towards a kind of imaginative anarchism."
With special emphasis on Cummings as "probably the finest American comic
poet of this century," the only one able successfully to "fuse swingeing
comic polemic and verbal jugglery, trenchant satire and typographical play."
5 HUANG, XINGI. "Evolution and Language Skills of E. E. Cummings'
Poempictures." Waiguoyu, 6, no. 70 (December), pp. 53-58.
Discusses visual elements in these Cummings poems: "l(a," "insu nli
gh t," "i / never," "Buffalo Bill’s," "r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r," and "(im)c-a-t(mo)."
In Chinese.
6 PRITCHARD, STANFORD. "My Friend B." The Kenyon Review,
NS 12, no. 1 (Winter), pp. 128-49.
Depicts the life and work of William Slater Brown, the "soul- and
cell-mate" of Cummings’ imprisonment in France and the "B" of The Enormous
Room. Based on personal interviews and including reminiscences of Brown’s
relationship with Cummings: the social and political attitudes they shared
as they sailed on the Touraine to join the Norton-Harjes ambulance
corps, their days in Paris before reporting to their unit, their time in
prison, their respective releases, their later contacts, and Brown’s cooperation
with Cummings' biographers. [end page 121]
7 ROBACK, DIANNE. Review of Hist Whist. Publishers Weekly,
236 (25 August), p. 62.
Reviews a children's book with illustrations of Cummings’ poem by
Deborah Kogan Ray.
8 SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 10,
no. 1 (January) pp. 1-20.
Contains Cummingsiana and comments on Katharine Winters McBride's
concordance to Cummings' poems.
9 SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 10 no.2
(October), pp. 1-36.
Contains Cummingsiana, materials connected with Viva Cummings!,
a musical based on Cummings' poetry, a previously unpublished and curtly
incisive reply by Cummings to a request for suggestions on improving conditions
for poetry in America, and Norman Friedman’s report on the Cummings panel
at the 1990 American Literature Association Conference.
10 SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 10,
no. 3 (November), pp. 1-32.
Contains Cummingsiana and information on a forthcoming performance
piece based on Cummings' poetry, prose, and illustrations.
11 SULLIVAN, WILLIAM. "E. E. Cummings," in
Modern American Poetry, 1865-1950. By Alan Shucard, Fred Moramarco,
and William Sullivan. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, pp.
190-202.
Reprint of 1989. 13.
12 ZAJDEL, MELODY M. On Cummings, in American Literary Scholarship:
An Annual. Edited by J. Albert Robbins. Durham, North Carolina: Duke
University Press, p. 342.
Describes and evaluates contributions to Cummings scholarship for
1988. [end page 122]
1991
1 FIRMAGE, GEORGE JAMES. "Editor’s Note," in E. E. Cummings:
Complete Poems, 1901-1952. Edited by George J. Firmage. New York: Liveright,
p. v.
Introduces this "revised, corrected, and expanded" edition of Complete
Poems. Unlike its predecessor, which was based only on printed sources,
this edition is "based entirely on the original manuscripts"; it adds the
164 unpublished poems issued in 1983 under the title Etcetera, as
well as thirty-six poems not previously available in an American edition,
including Cummings’ translation of Louis Aragon's Le Front Rouge.
2 POWERS, KATE. Cummings’ "from spiralling ecstatically this." The
Explicator, 49, no. 4 (Summer), pp. 235-37.
Explains how the structure of Cummings’ poem captures the central
paradox of the Nativity: "the fitness of a babe who symbolizes love and
creation being introduced into a fragmented and destructive world."
3 SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 10,
no. 4 (June), pp. 1-146.
Lists the contents of and provides an index to volumes 1-10.
4 ZAJDEL, MEDLODY M. On Cummings, in American Literary Scholarship:
An Annual, 1989. Edited by David J. Nordhoh. Durham, North Carolina:
Duke University Press, p. 285.
Describes and evaluates a contribution to Cummings scholarship for
1989.
[end page 123]
Links:
1. Rotella, Guy. "E. E. Cummings: A
Reference Guide (Again) Updated: Part One (to 1986)." Spring
1 New Series (1992): 127-143.
2. Harris, Kurt W. "Annotated
Bibliography of EEC Scholarship (1985-1993)." Spring 6 (1997):
175-186.
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