Arts and Letters

E. E. Cummings was too distinctive a person to be subjected to inapposite comment. It is with diffidence that I speak—as Mr. Brooks and Miss Geffen will corroborate.

"Art," E. E. Cummings said, "is pure personal feeling." His work says it again—the painting, writing, drawing: especially the line drawings comprising curves, swirls, and leaning ellipses, like Chinese calligraphy which does not hesitate. His art of economy has left its mark on us, making verbosity seem suicidally crass. Instead of saying that the prison cell was six feet long and four feet wide, he says it was six feet short and four feet narrow.

Ignorance to E. E. Cummings was a "monster, the collective pseudo-beast." Nonentity as "the general menedjerr"

…smokéd a robert burns cigerr
to the god of things like they err

A poem by E. E. Cummings has the sound of the voice:

SNO [falls]
….
(on
air)
don't speak

and

i've come to ask you if there isn't a
new moon outside your window saying if
that's all, just if"

This grace with naturalness is best personified, I think, in the text by E. E. Cummings to Marion Cummings' photographs entitled Adventures in Value: "a wave… beginning—e-x-p-a-n-d-i-n-g UpReArlnG — to:" infinity? he leaves us to say it. The cross-shadows in Patchin Place enshrine reverence: "and nobody ever thought of touching them," the water-lilies Mrs. Corkery, caretaker of Patchin Place, remembers in the fountain behind Washington Square Arch.

One of the pictures is of a stone angel—a marvel of grace—superimposed on a grave, its wings closing about the grave in all-embracing compassion. "Death," E. E. Cummings said (in another connection), "as men call him, ends what they call men." The fact of it is dire. It makes of us orphans, waifs, mourners. Attempted consolation emphasizes the impossibility of consolation. For a positiveness, however, that is indivisibly undismemberable joy, it doesn't exist. At The Dial, we talked about "intensity" as a test for what purported to be art. What is this individual thing that lasts, that can not be counterfeited, this magician's secret that we call beauty—the result of hyper-care that is synonymous with affection? Henry McBride, our art critic for The Dial, said of the paintings by E. E. Cummings exhibited by the American-British Art Center, "They have the purities of mushrooms blooming in darkness." His oil, "Paris Roofs, rue de la Bûcherie" has this sacrosanctity of untainted naturalness; some of his poems have it. Two poems especially have made an indelible impression on me—the one about the Gravenstein apples, in its ability to evoke a place where apples grow by a wall in sunny grass:

it's over a (see just
over this) wall

There are further lines, returning like a fugue, to say:

But over a (see just
over this) wall
the red and the round
(they're gravensteins) fall
with a kind of a blind
big sound on the ground

The other poem is yet more the person. It has the unswerving individuality—better say, the unyielding vitality, of one who knew how "in an epoch of Unself" (of nonself) "to be ONEself":

now (more near ourselves than we)
is a bird singing in a tree,
who never sings the same thing twice
and still that singing's always his

. . .

there never lived a gayer he;
if earth and sky should break in two
he'd make them one (his song's so true)

Mr. Archibald MacLeish sent the following poem to Miss Moore, asking her to read it at the conclusion of her tribute to E. E. Cummings, but it arrived too late for her to comply with his request:

E. E. C. SEPTEMBER 2, 1962

True
Poet
who could live and die
Eye to eye

The rain ends, the sky slides
East a little as our skies here do
This time of year and lets the sunset through—

Or not the sunset either but a blue
Between the hill and what the sky still hides
That promises—a poet's blue…

I should have known, my friend, you'd see it too
Eastward across New Hampshire where the night
Found you in that glimpse of light…

The cloud lifts and the rift of blue
Blazes and the sun comes through.

Conway, Massachusetts