[Mark McDonnell]

I wasn't arguing with you Mark.

Oh Andrew, I know you weren't! When I said "That's not what we've been arguing about" in post #86 I meant me and Aaron. Oh dear, sorry. I thought that was clear. Though as I said I'm not really sure what that's been about either.

I'll go argue with myself in a dark room somewhere...

[W T Clark]

Hello Julie,
First, thank you for the kind words!

I call Cummings a painter not a poet. The first line of the sonnet bears that out. It has power as a word painting, but is there any real way to read that out and make the audience feel in spoken words what the reader sees in punctuation? Now, the other lines of the sonnet are less intense, and there is definitely a musical quality to it. But if we look at all his work, what would Cummings be without the punctuation experiments, or the word games? You might argue that this is like saying what would Adele be without that baritone, but I think there's a difference. A poet (as opposed to a painter) should be interested in the effects of language, but Cummings talents are mainly in his poem's visual appearance. How to read out "L(a leaf falls)oneliness"? He does have a certain rhythm, a technical grasp of anapests and iambs, but don't a lot of poets? I rest my case. Cummings is a painter first and foremost, and I do not think that is the worst way to be.
Regards,
Cameron

[Mark McDonnell]

I think the words and music certainly carry these beautiful poems, rather than any visual or typographical effects. How romantic and sentimental (in the best way) he was, for such a formally experimental poet!


somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

somewhere i have never travelled, 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

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(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


since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
– the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

[W T Clark]

I'm not so sure. Cummings was a romantic, yes, but what did he say that Shelley or Keats didn't? While the modernists were off remaking poetry, he was still comparing everything to flowers. Hart crane and Wallace Stevens were Romantics, but they had much more original imaginations. Voyages, trumps anything cummings could do in terms of love.

[Mark McDonnell]

Hi Cameron,

I wasn't at all suggesting he was the "greatest" romantic (or Romantic) poet, either pre or post 20th century. That was just an aside. My main point in posting these was in response to your assertion that he was simply or primarily a "visual" poet. I do love these poems, though. I'm not sure I agree with the dismissive implication of his "still" comparing everything to flowers, like any poet has an obligation to keep up with the trend in terms of their imagery. Flowers haven't gone anywhere, they're still around in 2020 as they were in 1820 and 1920. Anyway, s'all subjective innit?

[W T Clark]

Hi Mark,
Yeah, aren't differentiating aesthetic tastes fun!

I'd only say that I think while you don't have to jump on the band wagon, there is a time when comparing something in certain ways becomes cliché. I'm not saying you can't use flowers (I'd be pretty damn hypocritical if I did) but the way of using and comparing flowers must change, as worn out metaphors are replaced by new ones. Cummings just doesn't feel very innovative in subject matter visa vie, his use of flowers. Unlike other Romantics of his time, like Stevens and Crane who found new ways of saying old things. I just think Cummings didn't find a new way to say old things. He did find a new way to make new things look on the page, though.
Still, the beauty of aesthetic disagreement!

[Mark McDonnell]

Indeed they are!

Back to sonnets, I love this one by Cummings from 1926. Entirely traditional in form, but (still) entirely contemporary in tone and subject matter. And not a flower in sight

"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more. what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water.

[W T Clark]

I reckon it's his best poem, ever. It also feeds my argument, it wouldn't be as good as it is, nor really a sonnet, without that last line, and that brutal turn.

[Julie Steiner]

Cameron, I'm humming:

I can't make you love ee if you don't.
I can't make your heart feel something it won't.



The incantatory [anyone lived in a pretty how town] and [maggie and millie and molly and may] are definitely far more about sound and mood than about images or how they look on the page, though. So on the whole, I think Cummings is more than “an author of pictures, a draughtsman of words," even if that's what he called himself.

Not to persuade you, but because I like the sound of my own voice, I'll mention two more Cummings sonnets that I particularly admire.

The first--[the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls]--shuffles the rhyme scheme to the point that yes, it does become visual rather than auditory. I have to hunt with my eyes to find the rhyme pairs, because they are too far apart to be heard. But I find that those nearly-unpaired rhymes emphasize the nearly-unpaired nature of these sexless women who have somehow (parthenogenically?) produced "with the church's protestant blessings /daughters,unscented shapeless spirited." Their love is abstract and lifeless ("they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead"). Their intense feelings are so diffuse ("are invariably interested in so many things—") and even their compassion so passionless that it's difficult to remember the target of it ("delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles? /perhaps.") The closest they come to sex is to discuss others' "scandal," and even that is "coyly," with "permanent" faces. They "do not care" for anything so romantic as the moon or as pleasurable as candy (which also has traditional romantic associations).

The second sonnet--[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]--has been recited at countless weddings, and as this link shows it has also been canonized by Poetry Out Loud as a competition possibility for students to present, so the unorthodox punctuation definitely does not just work on the page. Yes, declarations that the beloved is the lover's sun and the moon are nothing new, but I think Cummings has reinvented them here and transcends mere sentimentality. Full disclosure: one of my daughters is a heart transplant recipient, so I bring some personal biases to my reading of the poem that Cummings never foresaw. But the poem was special to me decades before all that.

[Mark McDonnell]

Yes, Julie. For me he is about word choice and sound as much as anything. They feel wonderful to say aloud. anyone lived in a pretty how town is an incredible poem, and so clever in how it opens up as narrative when you substitute proper names for the "anyones" and "no-ones" etc. That "root of the root and the bud of the bud" idea in i carry your heart is repeated here at the end. Few poets can do childlike as well, without sounding twee. He pulls it off, I think.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)


Mark (who also likes the sound of his own voice far too much)