Summary
#e paper presents the unique oeuvre of E.E. Cummings, who claims an outstanding position 
in the heritage of American poetry, as a case of Bildungsdichtung. #is status is largely due 
to his highly innovative and iconoclastic approach to poetic composition, starting from his 
early rebellious endeavours drawing on an astounding variety of non-standard and downright 
shocking potentialities of the English language (including such peculiar linguistic and stylistic 
idiosyncracies as drastic changes of the syntactic English word order, shifts at the morphology 
and word-formation level, unorthodox use of punctuation, extravagant typography and spacing 
or arrangement of space between the lines, a diversity of meters and rhymes, as well as seemingly 
eccentric imagery), to his later and invariably maturer poetic diction – the diction of one who has 
apparently come to terms with the world and his fellow-beings, realising that genuine wisdom 
resides in the understanding and forgiveness of the inherently fallible human nature rather than 
in its continuous sardonic scrutiny.
Key words: E.E.Cummings, uniqueness of rhetoric, poetic truth and human truth, epiphany
 Povzetek
Članek oriše umetniški in človeški razvoj ameriškega pesnika E.E.Cummingsa, ki ima v ameriški 
književnosti poseben sloves. Utemeljen je na Cummingsovi nezmotljivi avtorski govorici ter vrsti 
njegovih izvirnih posegov v ustaljeno pesniško dikcijo, ki jo spoznava za preživeto, iztrošeno, 
neprepoznavno in zatorej vredno temeljite prenove. Takšno prenovo najde Cummings v 
mnogovrstnih preigravanjih skrajnega dometa angleščine ter njene leposlovne izraznosti, od 
osupljivih jezikovno-slogovnih bravur, kot so na primer drastično spreminjanje ustaljenega 
skladenjskega reda, premiki na oblikoslovni in besedotvorni ravni (posamostaljena raba glagolov, 
zaimkov, prislovov in veznikov), neustaljena raba ločil (zlasti oklepajev) ter velike/male začetnice, 
nenavadna tipograﬁja in razmiki oziroma razporeditev prostora med verzi, preigravanje raznoterih 
oblik metruma in rime, do navidez čudaškega podobarstva in drugih retoričnih ter vizualnih 
prijemov. Razprava sledi razvoju avtorjeve pesniške in osebnostne konstelacije, ki jo zaznamujeta 
mladostno vihravo uporništvo ter poznejši zreli uvid v bistvo človeškega poslanstva.
Ključni pojmi: E.E.Cummings, revolucija retorike, pesniška in človeška resnica, epifanija
 DOI: 10.4312/elope.3.1-2.201-212
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
 #e greatest names of 20th-century American poetry, such as Robert Frost, T . S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, 
William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and in the last decades John Ashbery, undoubtedly 
include E(dward) E(stlin) Cummings. But while Cummings’ poetic expression and spirit had 
received occasional attention in the Slovene cultural circles,
1
 it was only in 2006 that a translation 
of his selected poems was published in book format. Rather than to the Slovene Geistesgeschichte, 
this belated Slovene reception is probably to be attributed to the form, style, and language of 
Cummings’ work, for his poetic experience is articulated in a highly idiosyncratic, experimental 
idiom, extremely diﬃcult to imitate or reﬂect in any target language. #is, of course, means 
that many of his well-nigh emblematic poems are simply not transferable to any other, diﬀerent, 
language system. While this is to a degree true of many poets, the inner structure of Cummings’ 
expression in fact rests on the closest possible interdependence of content and form – sometimes, 
as will be shown later, to the point of their amalgamation into a tightly knit cohesive and 
coherent organism. According to a 1940 letter by William Carlos Williams, who was known for 
his extraordinary ear for language, “[i]n the use of language Pound and Cummings are beyond 
doubt the two most distinguished American poets of today” (qtd. in Matthews 1985, 251). 
Williams even included the ﬁgure of Cummings in his famous epic Paterson under the name of 
Hopper Cumming (derived from one of Cummings’ early poems which graphically represents 
the movement of a grasshopper, with the letters and syllables hopping over each other on the 
page in various combinations, until the poem literally jumps over the edge), sending him to his 
death in the waterfalls of the Passaic River, which represents the living stream of language. In a 
sense, then, Williams portrays Cummings’ poetic horizon as embracing both birth and death, 
success and defeat, originality and exhaustion – as if foreseeing the absence of further linguistic 
innovations in Cummings’ subsequent work (he died in 1962). Instead of these, Cummings 
signiﬁcantly expanded the horizons of his thought, ﬁlling the existing form with new contents 
– contents which were to inﬂuence not only American but world poetry at large. 
In many respects, E. E. Cummings, poet, writer, playwright, and essayist (Cummings himself 
would certainly include – and doubly emphasise – his painting, although his pictures
2
 are little 

known today and rate far lower than his literary works), holds an exceptional place in modern 
literature. On the one hand, there are many critics, especially those opposing the modernist 
movement in literature, who would group him with avant-gardists, dadaists, surrealists, and 
even futurists. On the other, there are those who see his works as marked with indisputable 
features of the romantic tradition and symbolism, which has often earned him the labels of 
a “sentimentalist” and “perennial adolescent”. His love lyrics, moreover, which the author of 
this article considers to be among the world’s most beautiful, have been repeatedly dismissed 
as “infantile”. #e unfavourable reviews may be said to culminate in a piece by Philip Horton, 
who evaluated Cummings’ poetry collections over the previous ﬁfteen years for the Partisan 
Review (Friedman 1996, 90−1).
3
 According to Horton, the poet’s “notorious typography” is 
a mere “historical curiosity”, while his satirical mingling of the trivial and the serious leads to 
a complete confusion of values, resulting from his deliberate rejection of knowledge. Other 
more or less vituperative views include Horace Gregory’s description of Cummings in the New 
Republic as “the Jazz Age Peter Pan”, “ﬁxed in rigid attitudes of youth” in his deﬁance of the 
ruling values of the modern world (ibid., 88), and Edwin Honig’s piece in the Kenyon Review 
(one of the severest), which proclaims Cummings’ poetics to be “cantankerous and juvenile”, 
capable of neither acting nor feeling but merely thinking, as a mere “public confession of 
opposing selves” (ibid., 94).
All these views raise the following question: How was it possible to level charges of artistic 
immaturity, lack of aesthetic dimension, and all manner of simpliﬁcation at a poet nowadays 
considered one of the most fanatic rebels and nonconformists in the American literary experience, 
an author with the most radical, original yet precise poetic idiom? Although the decisive majority 
of reviews have been positive and highly favourable to Cummings, the fact remains that no critic 
would have ventured a similar dismissal of, say, the (ultra)modernist poetics of Ezra Pound or 
Wallace Stevens. What, then, are the elements in Cummings that have prompted (and probably 
always will prompt) conﬂicting critical responses, while paradoxically ensuring him relatively 
high popularity with readers? And not only with readers, but with undergraduate students as 
well – during his lifetime, when he was invited to give lectures and poetry readings, as well as 
today, when he is discussed in university classes worldwide. A strikingly enthusiastic critical 
response was oﬀered by Ezra Pound, who rated Cummings’ poetry collection is 5 (1926) as the 
second most important book of the 20th century, before Joyce’s Ulysses and immediately after 
 e Apes of God by Wyndham Lewis. His popularity with readers, on the other hand, is attested 
to by statistics: at the time of his death in 1962 he was second on the list of the most widely read 
American poets, preceded only by Robert Frost.
#e reasons for Cummings’ popularity with readers are fairly obvious: he is one of the few 

modernist poets to write about love (as well as sexuality, particularly in his early and middle 
periods)
4
 in a straightforward and simple but original manner, with an enviable lighthearted 
humour which brings together sensuality, satire, and exceptional openness to the entire physical 
world, urban and rural alike. At the same time he remains highly serious, always striving for a 
metaphysical surplus. #e ﬁnish which separates him from other modernist lyric poets is his 
ability to encapsulate a mood of love in a single moment, invest it with the voluptuousness 
of pleasure, and ﬁnally exalt it to sublime devotion. #is is where Cummings comes closest 
to the romantic subjectivity, a subjectivity unburdened by any experience of the scepticism, 
ambivalence, and paradox which underlie modernist vision and are present in the poetry of 
T . S. Eliot (“#e Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”) or Wallace Stevens (“Final Soliloquy of the 
Interior Paramour”) – and, of course, in that unoﬃcial avatar of Anglo-American love poetry, the 
poem “Lullaby” by W . H. Auden. Since the latter naturally invites comparison with Cummings’ 
poem somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond, the two should be illustrated here with a few 
representative lines:
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
 oughtful children, and the grave 
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me,
 e entirely beautiful. (Auden [1937] 1973, 2098)
somewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
… 
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands (Cummings 1972, 366)
In comparison with Auden’s, Cummings’ attitude to love appears rather more sentimental at 
ﬁrst glance because it is not conditional or momentary – not the result of a passing inspiration, 
which would make it transitory or at least entail the inequality of the two participants, as 
is evidently the case in Auden’s poem. While Auden’s speaker, addressing a sleeping lover, 

is in a position of dominance, Cummings’ speaker (or, rather, the poet’s own projection)
5
 
never addresses a beloved person who is not at least hypothetically present. Most importantly, 
Cummings’ notion of love diﬀers from all others in not depending on a three-dimensional 
modernist coordinate grid, where a transcendental vision can only be reached via a struggle. 
By Cummings, this vision is approached through a fourth dimension as an intuitive and 
immediate experience. He appears to be untouched by the fundamental rift between reality 
and truth which preoccupies modernist poets, especially in his earlier poems, which surprise 
the reader with their author’s masterful understanding of the world and its laws. But a deeper 
reading of Cummings’ poetological maxims, such as the introduction to his Collected Poems 
(1938), reveals indisputable and signiﬁcant points of contact with the philosophy of high 
modernist poetics:
... never to rest and never to have:only to grow.
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question (Cummings 1972, 462)
#ese lines unmistakably evoke Rilke’s poem “Der Fremde” (1908):
Und dies alles immer unbegehrend 
hinzulassen, schien ihm mehr als seines 
Lebens Lust, Besitz und Ruhm. 
Doch auf fremden Plätzen war ihm eines 
täglich ausgetretnen Brunnensteines 
Mulde manchmal wie ein Eigentum.
#e similarity between the two is no accident, for Cummings was thoroughly acquainted both 
with Rilke’s poetry and his Letters to a Young Poet (1903–4). He quoted a passage from the latter 
in his ﬁrst 1952 Harvard lecture (all six lectures were published in 1953 under the title i: six non 
lectures) to express what he considered the essence of art criticism:
Works of art are of an inﬁnite loneliness and with nothing to be so little reached as with criticism. 
Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them. (Cummings [1953] 1995, 7)
Cummings’ rootedness in the physical world – indeed, his sheer delight in it, his denial of the 
(modernist) ever-changing value standpoint, his persistent assertion of the ego through rejecting 
inherited, norm-bound patterns of perception, his consolidation of his own identity while 
 −
emphasising individuality – all these are features which never fail to establish contact with the 
reader. Critical response, however, is a more complex issue, requiring a deeper, more detailed 
insight into the fundamental characteristics of the poet’s aesthetics and beliefs. 
Although Cummings had written poetry ever since his childhood, his ﬁrst published book 
(1922) was not a collection of poems but a prose work, a novel/memoir entitled  e Enormous 
Room. It describes a segment of his World War I experience as an American volunteer in France, 
three months spent in the internment camp at La Ferté-Macé with his friend and comrade 
Brown. He had been arrested and incarcerated under a mistaken suspicion of espionage, the 
French counter-intelligence having allegedly intercepted a suspicious letter of Brown’s to the US. 
At ﬁrst Cummings had no intention of making his diary notes public, but he ﬁnally decided on 
publication at the constant promptings of his father, an eminent Boston intellectual, university 
professor and humanist, who had made use of all his contacts in government to secure his son’s 
release (his letter to the White House, together with the reply, was included by Cummings in 
the book’s preface). In contrast to many literary autobiographies dealing with similar themes, 
Cummings’ evocation of his mental and physical torments contains no bitterness, let alone self-
pity. His writing is surprisingly lighthearted, full of humour, satire, and, above all, a sense of 
distance which helps him to preserve his human dignity in a demeaning environment. Even at 
this early stage, the young Cummings seems to have perfected his basic anti-authoritarian, anti-
institutional, and generally rebellious attitude, to which he would remain faithful all his life.
6
 
A closer examination of his attitude to politics and society reveals a surprising lack of 
commitment, as if, for him, the so-called real world had never existed. Many poets and writers in 
the interbellum period, including famous names such as Ezra Pound, W . H. Auden, Archibald 
MacLeish, Steven Spender, or John Dos Passos, felt that their mission involved active public 
criticism of the socio-political constellations,
7
 even if “poetry makes nothing happen” (Auden 
[1940] 1973, 2105). Cummings, by contrast, displays a sometimes puzzling ambivalence: he 
rejects or is even indiﬀerent to such crucial developments as Roosevelt’s introduction of the New 
Deal programme or the fast-emerging fascism, socialism, and communism, while expressing 
distress about relatively trivial events. An example is his indignation on learning about the 
 −
manufacture of billiard balls from ivory, given voice in his collection W [ViVa] (1931):
 Space being(don’t forget to remember)Curved
  …
     LONG LIVE that Upwardlooking
  Serene Illustrious and Beatiﬁc
  Lord of Creation,MAN:
                at a least crooking
  of Whose compassionate digit,earth’s most teriﬃc
  quadruped swoons into billiardBalls! (Cummings 1972, 315)
Cummings’ political scepticism was probably reinforced by his visit to Russia in 1931, when 
her communism was still seen in the West as a potential hope for humanity. What Cummings 
encountered in Russia, however, was extreme poverty, oppression, and death – a far cry from a 
new Arcadia. On his return, he is reputed to have all but gone down on his knees and kissed his 
“bourgeois” home soil. While his satire does include a political edge, it is true that the relatively 
vigorous anti-imperialist criticism of his youth weakened over the years, gradually seguing into 
the conservatism of his family tradition.
Lacking reference to external, abstract entities such as history, government, or the socio-political 
system, Cummings’ understanding of the true reality could only exist in relation to a pure 
transcendence, as the result of his contact with the seamless unity of existence as such. And 
the key to such contact, as he was to discover, lay in an annihilation of the dichotomy between 
matter and spirit, temporality and timelessness.
#e narrative style of  e Enormous Room was steeped in French avant-garde art, especially 
dadaism and surrealism but also cubism, which had aroused Cummings’ enthusiasm when he 
studied Picasso’s sketches during his ﬁrst visit to Paris in 1917. It launched him among the 
contemporary “pioneers” of the rising modernism,
8
 even more so because the seminal works 
of Anglo-American modernism,  e Waste Land by T . S. Eliot and Ulysses by James Joyce, were 
published in the same year (1922). Although some critics (such as the writer John Dos Passos) 
admired Cummings’ spiritual fervour, his views and humanist vision in this book are not as clear-
cut yet as they appear in his later works. Nevertheless, the language and style of  e Enormous 
Room show a degree of inventiveness and experimentation perfectly suited to the modernist 
demand for the articulation of fragmented, hollowed-out, or even emptied experience – an 
articulation which would invest this experience with a new meaning and restore the quality of 
immanence. #is may be achieved by saying something new against a familiar background – or, 
as in the case of Cummings, by saying the familiar in a novel way. 

Since an idea is inseparable from its form of expression, it must be expressed so as to appear in the 
most original and striking light possible. A poet, in other words, needs the kind of language which 
will not intrude between the subject and object of perception but accurately represent the true, 
objective reality which it aims to encompass poetically. And this is where we encounter the ﬁrst 
diﬃculty, for, according to Cummings, the greater part of our perception has become blurred by 
habit and our vision reduced to mere outlines of objects, with a correspondingly blurred language 
to describe them. A poet, however, must ﬁnd a language which will derail the accustomed, norm-
bound, stereotyped way of looking, thus shedding light on the objects from a new, ever-changing 
perspective. Indeed, Cummings sees it as a mission of art to encapsulate in a single moment all the 
complexity of the dynamics of observation, and consequently of reﬂection.
Cummings’ thoughts on the task of the poet (artist) are not entirely original, for identical or 
at least very similar premises appear almost simultaneously in the art theory of the Russian 
formalist school, especially in the writings of Viktor Shklovsky. In his view, art should be capable 
of tapping into the linguistic potential to ﬁnd ways of defamiliarising perception: “…[art] exists 
to help or recover the sensation of life, it exists to enable us to feel things, to make the stone 
stony. #e purpose of art is to give a sensation of the object as something seen, not something 
recognised. #e technique of art is to make things unfamiliar” (Gray 1990, 22−3). #is view 
harmonises perfectly with Cummings’ understanding of artistic creativity as the interaction of two 
processes: the concentration on the “moment”, on the act in the process of changing, as well as the 
representation, not of the object itself, but of the way in which it is perceived by the artist.
A key to this defamiliarisation eﬀect is found by Cummings in radical experimentation with 
language and style, which he elaborates to a perfection and distinctiveness hardly parallelled in 
Anglo-American literature. What, then, are the basic characteristics of his poetic diction? #ere 
would be little point in attempting to impose a hierarchical order on his various techniques, for 
they are mutually dependent and supportive to such a degree that the least tampering with their 
internal structure would result in the total collapse of the text. His idiosyncrasies of style and 
language include drastic changes of the syntactic English word order, shifts at the morphology 
and word-formation levels (the nominalisation of verbs, pronouns, adverbs, and conjunctions), 
unorthodox use of punctuation (especially of parentheses) and of uppercase/lowercase letters, 
extravagant typography and spacing (or arrangement of space) between the lines, a diversity 
of metres and rhymes, seemingly eccentric imagery, and other rhetorical and visual devices. 
While astonishing and delightful, these techniques also tend to hamper unaccustomed readers, 
confronting them with the extremes of linguistic potential. #is is why the opinion expressed 
by Richard D. Cureton
9
 in his detailed analysis of Cummings’ visual prosodies has particular 
signiﬁcance. According to Cureton, the poet’s visual experiments paradoxically often seem more 
important for their failure than for their success, but, “[s]ucceed or fail, Cummings puts us to 
school about our language, and we should be grateful for the education” (1986, 277). His most 
eﬀective experiments, on the other hand, are paragons of superb typographical poem structure 

(dubbed poempicture by the poet himself), as is revealed by probably the most popular and most 
frequently analysed piece from his collection 95 Poems (1958):
10
l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness (Cummings 1972, 673)
#e eﬀect of Cummings’ verbal “pyrotechnics” was graphically expressed by the American poet 
Randall Jarrell: “Cummings is a very great expert in all these, so to speak, illegal syntactical 
devices: his misuse of parts of speech, his use of negative preﬁxes, his word-coining, his systematic 
relation of words that grammar and syntax don’t permit us to relate – all this makes him a magical 
bootlegger or moonshiner of language, one who intoxicates us on a clear liquor no government 
has legalized with its stamp” (qtd. in Schafer 2002).
It must be noted, however, that this technical artistry is more prominent in the poet’s earlier and 
middle phases, while the ﬁnal part of his oeuvre shifts to an increased use of symbolism, allegory, 
and paradox, limiting the rhetorical idiosyncrasies to word-coining and some typographical 
techniques. Cummings’ love of linguistic and stylistic innovation thus grows less rampant over 
the years, being replaced by a metaphysical content – one that reaches such maturity towards the 
close of his life that its message no longer depends on formal eccentricity.
(T o be continued.)

− − − − − Why do you paint? 
For exactly the same reason I breathe. 
 at’s not an answer. 
 ere isn’t any answer. 
How long hasn’t there been any answer? 
As long as I can remember. 
And how long have you written? 
As long as I can remember. 
I mean poetry. 
So do I. 
T ell me, doesn’t your painting interfere with your writing? 
Quite the contrary: they love each other dearly. 
 ey’re very diﬀerent. 
Very: one is painting and one is writing. 
But your poems are rather hard to understand, whereas your paintings are so easy. 
Easy? 
Of course – you paint ﬂowers and girls and sunsets; things that everybody understands. 
I never met him. 
Who? 
Everybody. 
Did you ever hear of nonrepresentational painting? 
I am. 
Pardon me? 
I am a painter, and painting is nonrepresentational. 
Not all painting. 
No: housepainting is representational. 
And what does a housepainter represent? 
T en dollars an hour. 
In other words, you don’t want to be serious – 
It takes two to be serious. 
Well let me see ... oh yes, one more question: where will you live after this war is over? 
In China; as usual. 
China? 
Of course. 
Whereabouts in China?  
Where a painter is a poet. (Firmage 1965, 316–7)
 i like my body when it is with your
body.  It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body.  i like what it does,
i like its hows.  i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-ﬁrm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss,  i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting ﬂesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,
 
and possibly i like the thrill
 
of under me you so quite new (Cummings 1972, 175)
 …
…
And aren’t you supposed to be ultramodernistic? 
- I dare say. 
- But I dare say you don’t dare say precisely why you consider your art of vital consequence – 
-  anks to I dare say my art I am able to become my self. 
- Well well! Doesn’t that sound as if people who weren’t artists couldn’t become themselves? 
- Does it? 
- What do you think people who aren’t artists become? 
- I feel they don’t become. I feel nothing happens to them. I feel negation becomes of them. 
- Negation? 
- You paraphrased it a few moments ago. 
- How? 
- “ is so called world of yours” …