The Inaudible Poet

“Is That a Poem? The Case for E. E. Cummings” by Billy Collins, in Slate (April 20, 2005), www.slate.com.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it also has a more pragmatic use: Its practice by lesser lights keeps a luminary’s work refracting through the poetry canon. Pity poor E. E. Cummings, a poet so inimitable that his fame is fading, writes Collins, a former U.S. poet laureate.

Cummings changed the rules by breaking nearly all of them. “In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings,” writes Collins. “By erasing the sacred left margin, breaking down words into syllables and

Cummings came up hard in the poetry world. Born in 1894, he had, by age 25, placed poems in avant-garde magazines and  published two books, The Enormous Room and Tulips and Chimneys. However, as late as 1935 he was driven to self-publish a poetry collection titled No Thanks, dedicated to the 14 publishers who had turned down the manuscript. For much of his life his poetry paid very little, and “well into his fifties, he was still accepting checks from his mother.”

But in the decade before his death in 1962, several major collections were published, and he once read to 7,000 people at the Boston Arts Festival. Today, Cummings is variously denigrated for spawning the “desiccated extremes” of so-called language poetry, and lauded as “the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry.” Despite this influence, he is no longer much read.

“Because he is synonymous with sensational typography,” writes Collins, “no one can imitate him and, therefore, extend his legacy without appearing to be merely copying or, worse, parodying.” It doesn’t help matters that his “most characteristic” poems are nearly impossible to read out loud; Cummings himself described his work as “inaudible.”

“He has become the inhabitant of the ghost houses of anthologies and claustrophobic seminar room discussions,” Collins observes ruefully. “His typographical experimentation might be seen to have come alive again in the kind of postmodern experiments practiced by Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer, not to mention the coded text-messaging of American teen­agers. But the eccentric use of the spatial page that accounted for Cummings’s notoriety must be seen in the end as the same reason for the apparent transience of his reputation. No list of major 20th-century poets can do without him, yet his poems spend nearly all of their time in the darkness of closed books, not in the light of the window or the reading lamp.”