[Spring 1 New Series (1992): 127-143]

General Introduction

This annotated bibliography of recent Cummings scholarship updates both my E. E. Cummings: A Reference Guide (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1979) and "E. E. Cummings: A Reference Guide Updated," published in 1985 in the 1982 volume of Resources for American Literary Study. The previous update extended to 1984, but given bibliographical lag--and because things I missed continue to turn up--the present listing briefly revisits 1962 and then "begins" in 1978-1979. Entries here for work from years covered in the preceding compilation are labeled "A." Cross references refer both to the original reference guide and to its first updating. Research for the current listing was (in)completed in March, 1982.

Cummings scholarship in the period from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties was distinguished by the continuing establishment of Cummings' text in the volumes of Liveright's Typescript Editions. If it is not quite complete, that process culminated in the 1991 publication of George James Firmage's superb "revised, corrected, and expanded" edition of Complete Poems. Unlike the previous edition, this one is based not on printed sources alone but on the original manuscripts; it restores many of Cummings' typographical intentions. Additionally, several books on Cummings appeared in this same period: [end page 127]

Kennedy's major biography, Kidder's introduction to the poems, Dendinger's documentation of the critical reception, and my secondary bibliography and collection of critical essays. Then the pace has slowed. Since the mid-eighties only two Cummings books have appeared, but they are important ones: Katharine Winters McBride's invaluable A Concordance to the Complete Poems of E. E. Cummings (1989), keyed to the earlier edition, and Milton A. Cohen's PoetandPainter: The Aesthetics of E. E. Cummings's Early Work (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1987). A richly illustrated study of interrelations among Cummings' poetry, painting, and aesthetics in the period from 1916 to 1927, Cohen's is a clarifying work, especially in its organization and presentation of materials in the Houghton.

In 1984 Language and Literature devoted an issue to Cummings, and he continues to receive attention in scholarly essays, although at a somewhat reduced rate from the previous period and at a considerably lower rate than for the (other) "major" modernists. Perhaps this results from the emphasis given lately to writers less obviously canonical than Cummings; it may also be that Cummings' transcendentalism puts off the new new critics as much as it did the old ones. Still, a number of significant essays have appeared in the years under survey here. Richard D. Cureton consolidates his position as a major Cummings scholar with articles on Cummings' visual prosody and on the thematics of his syntactical deviations. Among other things, these give the lie to any categorization (including Cummings' own) of Cummings as a naive poet of sentiment; considered alongside Cohen's and Norman Friedman's recent discussions of his personal and artistic divisions of feeling and thought, they break fertile ground for re-evaluating Cummings' career and his place within modernism and postmodernism. Lewis H. Miller's informative and entertaining retrieval of the advertising milieu of Cummings' "POEM, OR BEAUTY HURTS MR. VINAL" indicates another field for future Cummings study (one related to the contextual concerns of the new historicism). On a different note, Paul Griffiths' entry on Cummings in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians charts another area for exploration: the use of Cummings [end page 128] material by composers, some of whom, as Griffiths says, are attracted to his "naivety of tone" (Cage, for instance), while others (Boulez and Berio) find precedents in his stylistic innovations for their own experiments in text setting. Such work has begun: in a letter to Spring, D. Jon Grossman mentions a long piece on Berio and Cummings in the French journal Contretemps (it is not listed here because I have not been able to find it or a full citation).

Cummings continues to accrue international interest: the current compilation includes entries from Australia, Canada, South Africa, India, Poland, Holland, Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Brazil, China, and Japan, some of them important. Marcello Pagnini sees Cummings' poetry as a laboratory comprehending the entire phenomenology of language; Kristiaan Versluys examines his use of meta-language to expose the connection between political repression and the priority of discursive logic and inflated language; and, in the context of notions of aesthetic "naturalness" and generic hierarchy, Martin Heusser shows how Cummings' iconicity permits to poetry the "random access" typical of painting and entails a special, nonlinear kind of reading that undermines the essential temporality of language.

The dean of Cummings studies, Norman Friedman, continues to do important work: surveying Cummings scholarship, comparing Cummings and Hopkins, and refining his (and our) sense of Cummings' relation to modernism in psychobiographical and literary terms and in terms of the emphases and exclusions of the critical schools. His current project involves Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society. That jeu d'esprit suspended publication in 1991 with a guide to contents and an index. Who better than Friedman to ease its rebirth so that we pokers and prodders are answered only with Spring?

My thanks to Kevin Cassell and Jing Wang, who helped me to obtain Japanese and Chinese materials, to the staff of Northeastern University's Interlibrary Loan department, and, as always, to Edward Doctoroff of Widener Library. Looking forward to A Reference Guide Updated (Yet Again), I would appreciate receiving corrections, additions, citations, and offprints. [end page 129]

1. FUKUDA, RIKUTARO. "E. E. Cummings." Eigo Kenkyu, November, [?]

Reports on a May 10, 1962 interview, conducted at Cummings' home at Patchin Place. With two photographs. In Japanese. Reprinted: 1987.5.

1. Dl GIUSEPPE, RITA. "E. E. Cummings' 'the bigness of cannon': The Paradox of War." Quaderni di Lingue e Letterature, 3-4, pp. 63-72.

Argues that Cummings' war experience "played an important part in his formation as a poet"; compares Cummings' vision of war to Whitman's: "theirs is a pity born ...of a conscious knowledge of human limitations"; and analyzes "the bigness of cannon" in terms of its thesis-antithesis-synthesis structure, its palimpsestic pattern of rotating juxtaposition," and its four major devices": personification, paradox, symbol, and synaesthesia, as well as in terms of Cummings' "philosophy of silence."

1 FAUCHCEREAU, SERGE. "Cummings, eternel adolescent." La Quinzaine Littéraire, 316 (January), pp.17-18.

Reviews a bilingual edition of Cummings' poems, with French translations by D. Jon Grossman. Cummings is an eternal adolescent, filled with wonder and rebellion; appearances aside, he is less radical than his American contemporaries. In French.

Discusses musical settings of Cummings' poems, noting that where John Cage was more attracted by Cummings' "naivety of tone" than his "novelty of style," such composers as Pierre Boulez and Luciano Berio found parallels to their own experiments in Cummings' innovations in punctuation and layout and in his neologisms. His "sensitivity to phonetic values" offered "a valuable starting point for new approaches to text setting. "With a list of compositions based on Cummings' works.

Compares Cummings' readings of his poems with oral interpretations of them by others Not seen; cited in 1984.5. [end page 130]

Applies linguistic models "to an elucidation of obstructed meanings" in Cummings' "anyone lived in a pretty how town" and places the poem in the category of riddles and gnomic verses.

Reviews a French translation of The Enormous Room, defining its central theme as neither war nor prison nor the conditions of imprisonment but the conflict between the individual and absolute authority, a conflict reflected in Cummings' radically individualistic style. In French.

1 OSTROVSKY, ERIKA. "Saint-John Perse et E. E. Cummings: Points de recontre." Colloque 1980: Saint-John Perse et Les Etats Unis, in Espaces de Saint-John Perse, 3. Aix-en-Provence: University of Provence (Centre Saint-John Perse), pp. [?].

Not seen. In French.

Surveys Cummings' technical innovations, especially typographical rhetoric, syntactic dislocation, and word formation as they appear in "l(a," "Portrait," and "anyone lived in a pretty how town." Indicates his ''remarkable" influence on Brazilian concrete poets. In Portuguese.

1 BACIGALUPO, MASSIMO. "Edward Estlin Cummings," in I Contemporanei: Novecento Americano. Edited by Elémire Zolla. Rome: Luciano Lucarini, pp.631-59.

Summarizes Cummings' life and literary career in considerable detail. Provides biographical information, including discussion of the social and political contexts of his life and work, and presents overviews of Cummings' poetics and of The Enormous Room, Tulips & Chimneys, Is 5, Him, EIMI, Anthropos, Santa Claus, and i: six nonlectures. With a bibliography, including criticism in Italian. In Italian. [end page 131]

Considers Cummings in the context of "self development." Comments on such poems as "l(a," "the hours rise up putting off stars and it is," and "since feeling is first." In Japanese.

Analyzes Cummings' "ygUDuh" to illustrate the value of reformulating notions of literary context so that reading no longer names the reader's recovery of textual origins in an act of vision, but rather indicates the definite recognition-effects produced by the iteration of certain rules and discursive practices"; this permits examination of "the emergence of divergent forms of literary object and meaning from the ensemble of apparatuses which constitutes the shifting contours of the institution of Literature." Asks of Cummings' text, which resists being read as ''literature" not "Is it Literature?" but "How does this text come to be read as Literature?" and "Under what conditions is the effect called the literary reading produced?" Considers those questions in the light of theories of reading offered by Fish and Iser and concludes that context-based cultural studies remain merely "a mutation within the current ensemble of literary apparatuses."

Annotated bibliography of secondary works on Cummings (actually published in 1985) updates Rotella's E. E. Cummings: A Reference Guide (1979.22). Annotates scholarship from 1976 through 1984 as well as earlier pieces that eluded the previous listing. Includes an introduction tracing developments in Cummings criticism for the period under consideration.

5 STEINER, WENDY. On Cummings, in her Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation Between Modern Literature and Painting. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 42-47.

Discusses "these children singing in stone a" in terms of ekphrasis and the "still-movement topos" that is one of literature's responses to the "ephemerality that haunts" its verbal medium. The poem does not escape temporality, of course; it em- [end page 132] bodies the "still movement paradox by sleight-of-hand." However, because "the temporality of a poem is in part created by the demarcation of temporal units through syntax and versification and ordered semantic 'sense,' this poem does manage to prevent such demarcation from functioning fully." To the degree "that it obliterates many of its potential endings, it captures a little of the feeling of eternity.

6 THOMPSON, WILLIAM E. "Intensity: An Essential Element in e. e. cummings' Aesthetic Theory and Practice." University of Windsor Review, 16, no. 2 (Spring-Summer), pp. 18-33.

In the context of Cummings' interest in compression as a source of aesthetic and experiential intensity, offers a detailed comparison of two versions of a Cummings poem: "listen," published in The Little Review in 1923, and "(listen)," published in 73 Poems in 1963. Stresses changes in Cummings' sense of audience from adversarial to "friendly."

1 FRIEDMAN, NORMAN. "Epiphanies are Hard to Come By': Cummings' Uneasy Mask and the Divided Audience." Resources for American Literary Study, 13, no. 1 (Spring), pp. 10-25. [Ed. note: also contained in Friedman's (Re)Valuing Cummings: Further Essays on the Poet, 1962-1993 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), pp. 83-98.]

Essay review of Lloyd N. Dendinger's E. E. Cummings: The Critical Reception (1981.5), a representative selection of reviews of Cummings' books from The Enormous Room (1922) through 95 Poems (1958). Organizes the attitudes of reviewers in relation to the "collected poems" of 1938 and 1954. Before the first collection, reviewers were concerned mainly to approve or disapprove of Cummings as a kind of test case for modernism itself. After the 1938 collection, with modernism more or less established, they typically examined the degree to which Cummings was a representative modernist; during this period, reviews became generally more favorable, Cummings' experimentalism was better understood and more often accepted, and his traditionalism also became more evident. With the appearance of the 1954 collection, old questions were reopened and Cummings was often found wanting, a development explained in terms of the New Criticism's preference for the "tragic" modernism Cummings fails to exemplify rather than the transcendental modernism he does exemplify: "that part of modernism deriving from romanticism"; analogous to certain forms of mysticism, orientalism, and symbolism; and confident "that there are higher forms of truth than those grasped by knowledge and intellect." Friedman then summarizes reviews of 95 Poems. [end page 133]

Uses a Spanish translation to discuss Cummings' The Enormous Room, comparing it with Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Dos Passos' Three Soldiers. Summarizes the novel's biographical sources, its action, and its theme of individualism in conflict with authority, describes its experimental techniques, and emphasizes the redemptive role of the characters known as "The Delectable Mountains." In Spanish.

Reports briefly on Cummings in Paris, emphasizing his relationships with certain filles de joie in the early twenties and his later status as "un américain qui pisse."

1 BELLEI, SERGEI LUIZ PRADO. "E. E. Cummings: The Comedy of Language." Estudos Anglo-Americanos, 7-8, pp. 59-68.

Linguistics approach to word-play and humor in Cummings' work, with special reference to Freud's ideas about comedy and jokes.

1 BRADLEY, MARK JONATHAN. "E. E. Cummings' Him: An Annotation with Analysis and Production History." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota.

Opening chapters consider the play as autobiography, "modernist romantic satire" thematic statement, and "pure design," and in terms of its production history. A corrected edition of the text of Him follows, with annotations of its references, a brief critical summary of each scene, and an index of images and references.

2 CROWDER, RICHARD. On Cummings, in American Literary Scholarship: An Annual, 1982. Edited by J. Albert Robbins. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, p. 305.

Describes and evaluates 1982.4, and comments on increased critical interest in the relationship between Cummings' poetry and paintings.

3 FAIRLEY, IRENE R. "Syntax for Seduction: A Reading of Cummings' 'since feeling is first'." Language and Literature, 9, nos. 1-3, pp. 57-77. [end page 134]

Stylistic analysis notes that the poem lacks many of Cummings' more radical "morphosyntactic features" and instead involves "an almost exclusive stylistic concentration on the semantic level and the connotative relationships between words"; charts its binary opposition of "syntax" and "feeling"; and relates its version of the seduction theme to works by metaphysical as well as cavalier poets.

Sketches "the Cummings critical enterprise as a whole" to preface a review of five works on Cummings: Rotella's E. E. Cummings: A Reference Guide (1979.22), the Cummings issue of the Journal of Modern Literature (1979.1, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23, and 24), Gary Lane's I Am: A Study of E. E. Cummings' Poems (1976.13), Rushworth M Kidder's E. E. Cummings: An Introduction to his Poetry (1979.18), and Richard S. Kennedy's Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings (1980.21). Having surveyed Cummings scholarship before the late 70s, concludes that three things caused the failure of modern criticism adequately to attend to or account for Cummings' achievement: the provocative nature of Cummings' habitual tendency to present himself as both better than he was and better than we are; the preference of modern criticism for "a vision which, however limited, is not transcendental at all"; and the inability of the instruments of modern criticism to measure what Cummings actually created, "appropriate embodiments" of a "valid transcendental vision." Then describes and assesses bibliographies by Rotella and Artem Lozynsky (1979.20); evaluates the "very useful, if somewhat miscellaneous and uneven" Cummings special number of JML, while commenting on each of its articles or features and discussing such topics as Cummings' ''treatment of women" and the division between "the Platonic notion of supersensible forms" and "the Taoist attitude of acceptance of the here and now" in his transcendentalism; judges the values and limitations of Lane's and Kidder's interpretations of individual poems (while including consideration of Christian elements in Cummings); and summarizes the results of the "extraordinary research" informing Kennedy's biography, emphasizing its revelation of the "psychology" of Cummings' life and work.

5 FUNKHOUSER, LINDA B. and DANIEL C. O'CONNELL. "Cummings Reads Cummings." Language and Literature, 9, nos. 1-3, pp. 91-126. [end page 135]

Obtains acoustic data for Cummings' oral readings of "Buffalo Bill's," "Dying is fine)but Death," "in Just-" and "O sweet spontaneous" by processing the Caedmon recording of those readings through an audio frequency spectrometer and a level recorder. Presents the results in tables measuring emphasis and charting various sorts of pauses (fulcrums, caesuras, enjambment, and spacing); analyzes the effects of those features, and concludes that "pause and stress often reinforce each other" and "support an analysis of the structure of the poems" but not "the use of Cummings' devices of spacing and capitalization as reliable performance cues for his own reading."

Summarizes avant-garde elements in Cummings' work, noting his connections to Futurism, Dada, and Vorticism but insisting that his most important innovations are purely his own and lead toward unification of the psyche and radical transformations of modern hermeneutics. In Italian.

Contains Cummingsiana, John Ordemann's memoir of a discussion with Cummings in the mid-1950s, Norman Friedman's review of two MA theses on Cummings, and comments by Gerry Locklin on Etcetera and other Cummings matters. With a supplement on Robert Shafer's choral setting of five Cummings' poems, William Mooney's one-man show, Damn Everything But the Circus, based on Cummings' writings, and an exhibit of Herriman's "Krazy Kat at the Museum of Cartoon Art.

Contains Cummingsiana, a report of a conversation about Cummings and psychoanalysis, a letter from D. Jon Grossman on Etcetera, and a letter commenting on the use of Cummings poems in the ministry.

Contains Cummingsiana and an essay by Norman Friedman on Cummings' influence on his (Friedman's) poetry. [end page 136]

Argues that the structural equivalences and repetitions of Cummings' poem are better understood when its connections to the traditions of descriptive and love poetry are subordinated to its more essential relations to the tradition of religious lyric. Poems by Thompson, Hopkins, Blake, and Claudel suggest contexts. In Polish.

Defines Cummings' version of the repudiation of "accepted conventions characterizing the twentieth-century "Revolution of the Word" as involving the transposition to poetry of certain techniques of modern abstract painting in order to create "a dynamic interplay of graphic illustration and verbal significance." Compares Cummings' poetry to visual-verbal work by Sterne, Herbert, and Apollinaire. Concentrates on devices of fragmentation and tmesis in "sh estiffl."

1 CURETON, RICHARD D. "Poetry, Grammar, and Epistemology: The Order of Prenominal Modifiers in the Poetry of E. E. Cummings." Language and Style, 18, no. 1 (Winter), pp. 64-91.

Sets out to explain in thematic terms why Cummings resorted to syntactic manipulation as he did. While some of Cummings' syntactic deviance is an aspect of art's general project of defamiliarization or a "shock" tactic expressing an iconoclast's need for iconoclastic means, much of it can "be directly associated with Cummings' central vision of life." The case in point is one of Cummings' "favorite constructions, polyadjectival noun phrases." In his work these structures "challenge readers to reorder their conceptions of the relationship between objects and their associated attributes." In English, polyadjectival noun phrases have a functional grammar or constraint which more or less requires a particular order of prenominal modifiers; this order displays an epistemology, since in polyadjectival noun phrases qualities judged to be epistemologically central, stable, and objective typically appear nearer to the object ("head noun") they modify, while qualities judged to be "epistemologically peripheral, unstable, and subjective" typically appear further from it. Cummings exploits this grammatical constraint for [end page 137] thematic purposes: by variously violating a grammatical order reflecting a materialist epistemology (again, the more material an attribute is, the more intrinsic it is thought to be and the nearer it is placed to the noun it modifies), Cummings both expresses and embodies his own alternative and corrective epistemology of spirit. With extensive examples and supporting tables and charts.

Marks similarities and differences between Cummings and Hopkins. Both were "strikingly intense lyric poets," innovators who were influenced by classical literature and nineteenth-century aestheticism, who "regarded words as tangible objects," who experimented vigorously with syntax, grammar, rhythm, and "notation," and who stressed the nonlogical structure of poetry. But where Hopkins' vocation was religious, Cummings' was artistic; Cummings' satires and his poems of sex, love, the city and its underside have no parallel in Hopkins; and where Hopkins' experiments are largely aural, Cummings' are often visual. Such differences aside, the clearest connection between the two poets is their shared preference for a poetry of process and, in contrast to most modernists, their focus on "the intuition of immanence" rather than on an existential sense of alienation. With consideration of literary historical contexts.

1 ANON. and OTHERS. ''e. e. cummings, in the Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism: Twentieth Century American Literature, 2. New York: Chelsea House, pp. 903-39.

Traces sources of current interest in visual prosodies (emphases on free verse, concrete poetry, the self-reflexive text, deconstructionism, and semiotics, along with the cross-disciplinary concerns of a media-dominated society) and discusses ways in which visual form "both 'announces' and 'embodies'" phonological, syntactical, and narrative structures in convention- [end page 141] al poems. Then analyzes many poems from No Thanks, Cummings' most experimental volume, in order to exemplify five ways in which visual form might be extended beyond the conventions: "visual iconicity" (using visual form to render directly "aspects of the text's poetic world"), "visual voice" (using visual form further to "specify the linguistic referents of [a poem's] orthography"), "visual ambiguity" (using visual form to "overcome the dominant one-form-one meaning iconicity of conventional linguistic design"), "arbitrary form" (using visual form to "announce its own 'patternedness,' perhaps in opposition to other structures in the text"), and "concrete form" (using visual form ''to overcome the linearity of the text" and permit its processing in sequential or simultaneous orders).

Links: 

1. Rotella, Guy. "E. E. Cummings: A Reference Guide (Again) Updated: Part Two (to 1986)." Spring 2 New Series (1993): 107-123.

2. Harris, Kurt W. "Annotated Bibliography of EEC Scholarship (1985-1993)." Spring 6 (1997): 175-186.

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