E. E. Cummings: Modernist Painter and Poet

E. E. Cummings: Modernist Painter and Poet 

Author(s): Milton A. Cohen 

Source: Smithsonian Studies in American Art, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring, 1990), pp. 54-74 

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Milton A. Cohen 

Self-Portrait, 1958. Oil on canvas, 20 x 15 

in. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian 

Institution 

E. E. Cummings 

Modenist Painter and Poet 

As painters took down their can- 

vases after the huge 1919 exhibi- 

tion of the Society of Independent 

Artists in New York, one young art- 

ist eagerly wrote to his parents of 

his success: 

You may be glad to know that 

Gleizes(the 'first cubist"-probably 

the most individual,though somewhat 

cold, abstract painter in 

America,and-after Picasso-best 

known among painters of a 

type-was(to use Lachaise's phrase) 

"TAKEN OUT OF HIS FEET" by the 

two things of mine at the Independent. 

According to Nagle,he said 

later on that they were the "best 

things in oil" that he had seen 

"in America". Mr. [Walter] Pach, 

the director,was(as you may 

imagine)highly pleased;and said 

very pleasant things a propos 

when Nagle and I came to take 

away our things.1 

The painter who penned these ex- 

uberant words was the twenty- 

four-year-old E. E. Cummings 

(1894-1962), and this was his first 

public exhibition. 

One of the paintings that im- 

pressed Albert Gleizes (1881- 

1953) was a large, square oil 

Cummings called Sound Number 

1 (fig. 1). A casual glance reveals 

an abstract formalism analogous to 

the "defamiliarized" surfaces 

Cummings was then devising in 

his poetry, a style that placed him 

in the orbit (though not in the ac- 

quaintance) of such contempo- 

raries as Morgan Russell (1886- 

1953), Abraham Walkowitz (1881- 

55 Smithsonian Studies in American Art 

1965), Max Weber (1881-1961), 

and Edward Bruce (1879-1943).2 

Cummings's letter refers to three 

highly influential artists in postwar 

New York: the Cubist painter 

Albert Gleizes, the sculptor Gaston 

Lachaise (1882-1935), and the 

painter and director of the Society 

of Independent Artists, Walter 

Pach (1883-1958). Their recogni- 

tion-especially Gleizes's-of a 

young painter's first public effort 

is significant, and Cummings 

seemed to be making important 

contacts in the New York art 

world only a few months after his 

discharge from the army in Jan- 

uary 1919. By this time, in fact, 

Lachaise was his close friend and 

mentor, visiting Cummings's 

studio often and offering him ad- 

vice and encouragement. Two 

weeks before Cummings wrote to 

his parents about the exhibition, 

Isabel Lachaise, the sculptor's wife, 

had asked him: "How does it feel 

to be the sensation of the Inde- 

pendent? That's what everyone is 

telling me."3 

Was Cummings the "sensation" 

of the 1919 Independent? Besides 

the opinions of Gleizes and Pach 

that Cummings recorded, more 

objective facts confirm that his 

work was noticed. First, of the 

more than six hundred canvases 

vying for the attention of the jour- 

nalists covering the exhibition, 

Cummings's abstractions were 

among the few that received spe- 

cific mention: "The brilliant sally 

in color by Mr. Cummings will 

greatly impress those who have

1 Sound Number 1, 1919. Oil on canvas, 35 

x 35 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Bequest of Scofield Thayer, 1982 

arrived at an appreciation of the 

abstract in art," wrote a reporter 

for the New York Sun. Cummings 

also received invitations to exhibit 

elsewhere: at the Penguin Gallery, 

where he showed Sound Number 

2 (fig. 2) while the Independent 

was still on, and, as a result of his 

Independent entries, at an un- 

named gallery in Greenwich Vil- 

56 Spring 1990 

lage. He was even nominated 

(though not elected) as one of the 

twenty directors for the next Inde- 

pendent exhibition.4 

Whether these facts prove that 

Cummings's premiere was a "sen- 

sation," they do suggest that by 

April 1919, on the basis of his 

public work, he was more likely 

to have been known (if at all) as a

2 Sound Number 2, 1919. Oil on paper, 19 x 

24 in. Memorial Art Gallenr of the 

University of Rochester, Gift of a friend of 

the gallery in memory of Hildegarde Lasell 

Watson 

57 

painter than a poet. Outside of his 

poems in the Harvard Monthly 

and a conventional piece or two 

in the Boston Evening Transcript, 

Cummings's published poems by 

1919 numbered eight, appearing 

in a little-read, privately printed 

volume, Eight Harvard Poets 

(1917). Several years were to pass 

before this public perception 

would change. For those today 

who know Cummings only as a 

poet, however, his painterly iden- 

tity in these years is intriguing. 

The Modernist Painter 

Perhaps the two signal facts about 

Cummings's background as a 

painter are that he was entirely 

self-taught and entirely serious 

about teaching himself. Although 

he painted and drew from child- 

hood, he began painting in ear- 

nest only during his last years at 

Harvard, 1915-16, when he be- 

came avidly interested in Mod- 

ernism in all the arts.5 Identifying 

himself with the avant-garde, how- 

ever, he equated academic instruc- 

tion with creative suicide. In art 

schools, Cummings wrote in 1920, 

Smithsonian Studies in American Art 

a pupil's originality is "irrevocably 

diluted" if not "entirely elimi- 

nated." He cited both Lachaise and 

Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) as 

proof that "the man who by the 

gods has been fated to express 

himself will succeed in expressing 

himself in spite of all schools."6 

To nurture this independence 

and self-expression-qualities he 

cherished throughout his life- 

Cummings set about teaching him- 

self the fundamentals of his craft 

from a modernist perspective. A 

determined autodidact, he de- 

voured every available work on 

modern painting, even translating 

for himself A. J. Meier-Graefe's 

Cezanne und sein Kreis (1918). 

Cummings eagerly attended mod- 

ernist exhibitions beginning with 

the 1913 Armory Show in Boston, 

and, more important, he studied 

intensively on canvas, sketch pad, 

and notepaper the way basic ele- 

ments of painting interacted. His 

notes on painting in these years, 

preserved at the Houghton Library 

at Harvard University, are exten- 

sive and far exceed his notes on 

poetry.

Of the Modernists whose tech- 

niques Cummings studied- 

Cezanne, Pablo Picasso (1881- 

1973), Gleizes, Henri Gaudier- 

Brzeska (1891-1915), and the Fu- 

turists-Cezanne was clearly the 

most influential. Quotations from 

Cezanne's letters and his aesthetic 

opinions, as recorded by Emile 

Bernard or interpreted by W. H. 

Wright and Meier-Graefe, turn up 

often in Cummings's notes. But as 

with his study of the other mod- 

ernist masters, what Cummings 

sought was not to imitate but to 

develop his own style. Thus he 

wrote to his mother in 1922, "In 

great part I've been using the 

world famous Cezanne palette ... 

but employing it not a Cezanne in 

his watercolors-feeling me out 

with it, rather; me times water 

times paper times dejaunir [?] so 

to speak."7 Shaping his mastery of 

modernist techniques and his own 

aesthetic principles into an orig- 

inal style was what mattered most 

to Cummings the painter, as it did 

to Cummings the poet. 

Poetry was, of course, always a 

full partner in Cummings's self- 

concept as an artist. When he 

moved into his first New York 

studio in January 1917, he was 

fully determined to pursue two ca- 

reers simultaneously-and with 

luck even support himself as well. 

He composed poems and even 

briefly held a conventional job 

with a mail-order bookseller 

during the day yet rallied his 

energies to paint "8-12" each 

night, as he informed his parents. 

His constant reports home about 

his painting suggest that, like so 

many artists of middle-class fami- 

lies, Cummings had to convince 

his parents (who were still paying 

the bills, after all) of his vocational 

intent and to free himself of their 

well-intentioned urging that he 

pursue the more rewarding career 

of writing prose. The letter he 

wrote to his mother on 2 March 

1922, excerpted below, reveals his 

exasperation.8 

But his parents were not the 

only ones Cummings had to con- 

vince: there was also himself. His 

roommate at the time, William 

Slater Brown, asked him (with the 

frankness permitted a roommate) 

why he should work so hard at 

painting when he was far more 

skillful at writing poetry. Cum- 

mings replied that because it was 

harder for him to paint, "it was 

artistically more important to 

achieve something in the more 

difficult medium."9 The argument 

seems contrived to convince him- 

self as much as his roommate. 

Similarly, Cummings's frequent 

declarations of painterly intent to 

his parents might be seen as pro- 

testing too much, bolstering his 

own uncertainty. 

But despite parental pressure, 

the difficulty of the medium, the 

nagging question of identity, and 

two major interruptions-nine 

months driving American ambu- 

lances and enduring internment in 

French prisons in 1917 and six 

months training in army boot 

camp from 1918 to 1919- 

Must I roar out that there are, live, eat, exist persons of 

sensitiveness 

stienesto whom the (as you infer) 

intelligence 

un-thorough-bred branches of my interest (e.g. poetry painting) ... 

appear as a more formidable achievement than prose? Or does the 

penchan[t] for running somebody else's mentality strike deeper than 


aught else within the Patemal heas ? Not sooth! 

mat heart' 

(Letter to Rebecca Cummings)

3 Noise Number 5, 1919-20. Oil on canvas, 

401/2 x 401/2 in. State University of New 

York College at Brockport Foundation 

4 Sound Number 5, 1920. Oil on canvas, 42 

x 36 in. State University of New York 

College at Brockport Foundation 

5 Morgan Russell, Synchromy in Orange: To 

Form, 1913-14. Oil on canvas, 135 x 

1211/2 in. Albrigbt-Knox Art Gallery, 

Buffalo, New York, Gift of Seymour H. 

Knox, 1958 

Cummings kept painting. By 1920, 

he had worked on ten abstractions 

in the series begun the year be- 

fore, for his entries in the 1920 In- 

dependent exhibition were enti- 

tled Noise Number 5 and Sound 

Number 5 (figs. 3, 4). 

Not surprisingly, these early ab- 

stractions bear the imprint of sev- 

eral Modernists whom Cummings 

admired. Sound Number 5 recalls 

the synchromist abstractions of 

Morgan Russell such as Synchromy 

in Orange: To Form (fig. 5). 

Cummings learned of Synchro- 

mism through Willard Huntington 

Wright's Modem Painting: Its 

Tendency and Meaning (1915). 

The brother of the synchromist 

painter Stanton MacDonald-Wright 

(1890-1973), W. H. Wright publi- 

cized the movement, explained its 

aesthetics, and displayed its paint- 

ings at the important Forum exhi- 

bition of 1916, which Cummings 

probably attended. From Wright's 

discussions and Russell's applica- 

tions, Cummings derived his in- 

terest in juxtaposing color planes 

to achieve the "bumps and hol- 

lows" of three-dimensional form. 


Russell may also have inspired 

Cummings's penchant for bio- 

morphic abstraction in sub- 

merging figurative motifs just 

below the surface of an abstract 

design. Both Sound Number 5 and 

Synchromy in Orange abstract a 

torso in contrapposto into large 

color planes. Sometimes, in fact, 

Cummings's figures break through 

the abstract surface, as the ele- 

phant does in Noise Number 1 

(fig. 6), his other entry to the 1919 

Independent. Essentially, however, 

he thought of his motifs as "or- 

ganizations of colour and line."10 

Picasso's Cubism, the Futurists, 

and their American exponents also 

informed Cummings's early aes- 

thetics. He admired Picasso's 

"elimination of [the] trivial, pretty, 

[and] charming" in directly con- 

veying "sensations of weight, so- 

lidity, Depth (hugeness)," and he 

even devoted an entire poem to 

Picasso, concluding, "You hew 

form truly." But Cummings dis- 

liked Cubism's ponderousness and 

stasis: Cubism created a "cold and 

frozen grammar" and adminis- 

tered "an overdose of architecture

6 Noise Number 1, 1919. Oil on canvas, 36 

x 36 in. State University of New York 

College at Brockport Foundation 

7 Joseph Stella, Battle of Lights: Coney Island, 

1913. Oil on canzas, 76 x 84 in. Yale 

University Art Gallery, New Haven, 

Connecticut, Gift of Collection Societe 

Anonyme 

to the human form," he com- 

plained in 1918.11 Futurist dyna- 

mism nicely compensated Cubist 

stasis, but Cummings distrusted 

the Futurists' posturing bravado: 

early and late, he respected indi- 

viduals, not groups. Among Fu- 

turist-inspired American painters, 

he especially admired Joseph 

Stella (1880-1946) and John Marin 

(1870-1953). Cummings met 

Stella in 1919, and Stella's Battle 

of Lights: Coney Island (fig. 7) 

probably inspired the tangle of 

serpentine and jagged lines and 

elliptical curves that Cummings 

created a few months later in 

Noise Number 5. Like Stella, 

Cummings went to Coney Island 

to "capture colour and motion." 

And like Marin, he found New 

York skyscrapers, such as the 

Woolworth Building (fig. 8), alive 

and dynamic-apt subjects for 

paintings such as New York, 1927 

(fig. 9) and its poetic counterpart 

"at the ferocious phenomenon of 

5 o'clock i find myself."12 For all 

their indebtedness, however, 

Cummings's early abstractions re- 

tain their individuality in the way 


they transform these influences 

into a unique whole. Their poised 

tensions of planar solidity and dy- 

namism, of an abstract design and 

its figurative origins, embody aes- 

thetic ideas Cummings had devel- 

oped in his notes and applied to 

his poetry as well. 

The public response to 

Cummings's entries at the 1920 In- 

dependent exhibition must have 

exceeded his most optimistic ex- 

pectations. This time reviewers 

from four newspapers mentioned 

his paintings. One called them 

"a striking bit of post-impres- 

sionism." Another recommended 

that Cummings's paintings be in- 

cluded in future exhibitions of ab- 

stract art. The most detailed re- 

view appeared in the Evening Post: 

E. E. Cummings entitles one of 

these [abstractions] "Noise Number 

5" and the other "Sound Number 

5". Of the two, we preferred the 

noise; both of them are interesting. 

Of course, these irregular patterns 

of sharp positive color are banners 

of a small army of theorists, and 

the theories will either entrance

8 John Marin, Lower Manhattan (Composing 

derived from top of Woolworth), 1922. 

Watercolor and charcoal with paper 

cutout attached with thread on paper, 

215/8 x 267/8 in. The Museum of Modern 

Art, Lillie P. Bliss Bequest 

9 New York, 1927, 1926-27. Oil on canvas, 

67 x 42 in. Published in E. E. Cummings, 

CIOPW (New York: Covici-Friede, 1931) 

you or set your teeth on edge, ac- 

cording to the bias of your theo- 

ries. But if the paintings can be 

looked at with the eye, if they can 

be seen as frankly as one sees the 

pattern of a roll of linoleum they 

are bound to be admired.13 

In the spring of 1920, 

Cummings was busily developing 

another outlet for his art and 

writing: Dial magazine, which had 

been recently taken over by his 

two close friends, Scofield Thayer 

(1890-1982) and Sibley Watson 

(1894-1982). Under their superb 

guidance, it would become the 

best and most influential little 

magazine of the 1920s, and 

Cummings's work-poems, essays, 

paintings, and twenty-two line 

drawings-graced mary of its is- 

sues over the next nine years. 

Here his poetic innovations often 

appeared alongside his line draw- 

ings. The best of these drawings, 

such as Charles Spencer Chaplin, 

reveal Cummings's talent for com- 

pressing character and motion 

into a few sinuous strokes (fig. 

10). His fluent line fuses several 


features of the comedian: his for- 

lorn shuffle, legs and feet seeming 

to fold into each other; his tragi- 

comic nature in the rose and cane; 

the ingratiating, waifish smile in 

the subserviently bent head; and 

his nimble dexterity both in bal- 

ancing the rose and in seeming to 

come toward the viewer with his 

top half while moving away with 

his bottom half. 

Given the modernist audience 

for these Dial drawings (not to 

mention the distinguished com- 

pany they kept with works of 

Picasso, Andre Derain [1880- 

1954], Henri Matisse [1869-1954], 

and others), and given that 

Cummings's large abstractions 

caught the eye-and usually the 

approval-of journalists covering 

every Independent exhibition he 

entered from 1919 to 1924, 

Cummings seemed well on his 

way to establishing himself pub- 

licly, like Dante Gabriel Rossetti 

(1828-1882) before him, as an 

artist of two equal callings, a Mod- 

ernist of poetry and painting. In- 

deed, in one of the first serious 

studies of Cummings's poetry in

10 Charles Spencer Chaplin, 1924. Ink 

drawing published in the Dial 76 (March 

1924): 248 

11 A Line Drawing, 1922. Ink drawing 

published in the Dial 72 (January 1922): 

46 

1923, the critic Gorham Munson 

concluded that "a complete study 

of Cummings should take pene- 

trating account of his painting and 

drawing, and no estimate of his 

literary work can begin without 

noting the important fact that 

Cummings is a painter."14 

Just how thoroughly Cummings 

himself believed this "fact," how- 

ever, is open to question. Despite 

his steady output of large abstrac- 

tions (at least fifteen by 1921), his 

early successes, and his declara- 

tions to his parents, peculiar 

lapses in his emerging career as a 

painter hint at professional uncer- 

tainty. For one thing, Cummings 

was not aggressive in seeking ex- 

hibitions and one-artist shows in 

the 1920s, settling instead for a 

place in the yearly Independent 

exhibition. The Dial, of course, 

carried his line drawings to an in- 

fluential readership, but reproduc- 

tions in a magazine are no substi- 

tute for paintings in a gallery. 

Moreover, the mediocre quality of 

several drawings published in the 

Dial (e.g., fig. 11) suggests that 

Thayer and Watson may have 

placed personal friendship over 

their much-vaunted taste. Such 

preferential treatment could have 

stunted Cummings's ability to criti- 

cize his own work, judgment he 

badly needed if no art teacher was 

to look over his shoulder. Equally 

important, after 1919 Cummings 

did not generally associate with 

painters. Certainly he knew of the 

circle of Alfred Stieglitz (1864- 

1946) and probably visited 

Stieglitz's gallery "291," but he 

made no contacts with this impre- 

sario who might have arranged a 

one-artist show for him as he had 

done for so many other young 

Modernists. Apart from Lachaise 

and his stepson, the painter 

Edward Nagle (1893-?), 

Cummings's friends were nearly 

all writers or Harvard chums, and 

he was aloof to gallery politics, a 


loner. His distrust of coteries may 

have prevented his making important 

contacts with other painters 

and patrons, but his distrust of 

himself probably explains his reluctance 

to seek out one-artist 

shows. He may not have felt 

ready yet. 

Such reluctance may also partly 

explain Cummings's decision to 

leave America in 1921 and settle 

in Paris for the next three years. 

To judge from the hundreds of 

drawings he made abroad, he apparently 

felt the need to rethink 

his aesthetics and rework his techniques.15 

In Paris he had easy access 

to his favorite artists, and the 

sketch pad was a convenient place 

to work out compositional ideas 

gleaned from the Bernheim-Jeune 

Gallery and the Luxembourg Museum. 

But in America, Cummings's 

painting virtually disappeared. The 

Sounds and Noises yielded to silence, 

and only a few of his watercolors 

were exhibited. 

At the same time, however, 

Cummings's literary reputation 

blossomed with the publication of 

The Enormous Room in 1922, Tulips 

and Chimneys in 1923, and 

poems in numerous little magazines. 

And unlike his abstract 

painting, which belonged to a 

broader modernist movement, his 

poems had indeed "done something 

FIRST," as he boasted to his 

father. His typographical innovations 

sparked an immediate and 

lasting controversy, and Cummings 

was soon known for them. Thus 

we find the potent irony that 

when he returned to America in 

December 1923, Cummings still 

considered himself "primarily a 

painter," as he wrote to his father, 

yet to a journalist reviewing his 

painting at the 1924 Independent 

exhibition, he was already "better 

known as a poet and novelist."16 

What heightens this irony is 

that Cummings's painting had matured 

during his Parisian hiatus.

12 Noise Number 12, 1924. Oil on canvas, 50 

x 40 in. Iconography Collection, Harry 

Ransom Humanities Research Center, 

University of Texas at Austin 

13 Noise Number 13, 1925. Oil on canvas, 

5912 x 43 in. Private collection, New York 

His Noise Number 12 of 1924 and 

Noise Number 13 of the following 

year are markedly superior to the 

earlier abstractions in their fluency 

of line, concentrated force, and 

balance of planar weight and dy- 

namism (figs. 12, 13). The noise of 

Noise Number 12, for example, is 

clearly jazz, conveyed not only by 

the central figure suggesting a sax- 

ophone and the silhouetted hints 

of toe tapping and faces and hands 

making music, but also by the 

flowing, twisting, and jaggedly syn- 

copated rhythm lines.17 The aural 

metaphor of these visual images 


impressed a reporter from the 

New York Sun and Globe as being 

especially apt: he gave Noise 

Number 12 premier mention in 

reviewing the 1924 Independent.18 

If Noise Number 12 portrays 

fluent rhythms, Noise Number 13 

emphasizes conflicting tensions of 

expansion and contraction. Tubes 

and cones push in toward the 

center, spirals spin out toward the 

edges and coil inward to suggest 

three-dimensional depth, and the 

foreshortened cylinder at bottom 

center leads down into the design 

to convey height. These conflicts

14 sea, 1944. Oil on canvasboard, 12 x 16 in. 

State University of New York College at 

Brockport Foundation 

15 View from Joy Farm: Mt. Chocorua, 1941. 

Oil on canvas, 38 x 48 in. Private 

collection 

of directional force and dimension 

create (to quote from Cummings's 

play Him) "a kinesis fatally com- 

posed of countless mutually de- 

pendent stresses, a product-and- 

quotient of innumerable perfectly 

interrelated tensions." Cummings 

liked this oil well enough to have 

it reproduced several times: in the 

1925 Independent catalogue, in 

the Dial of August 1927, and in his 

1931 art book, entitled CIOPW 


(charcoal, ink, oil, pencil, water- 

color). But it proved to be his fare- 

well to modernist abstraction: late 

in 1926 he revealed, in a letter to 

his mother, that he hoped "to re- 

sume Painting but in a new 

direction."19 

The "new direction" developed 

in New York, 1927, an ambitious 

oil that superimposes a larger- 

than-life nude over a Marinesque 

melange of tulips, chimneys, and

16 Untitled (Man Worshiping Moon), n.d. Oil 

on cardboard, 15 x 8 in. State University of 

New York College at Brockport Foundation 

skyscrapers (see fig. 9). Clearly 

Cummings was seeking a style that 

would reconcile the figurative and 

abstract without sacrificing either. 

In this retreat from modernist ab- 

straction, he was certainly not 

alone. Indeed, by 1926 scarcely 

any American painter besides 

Arthur Dove (1880-1946) and 

Stuart Davis (1894-1964) main- 

tained the abstract styles of the 

teens. As the critic Sam Hunter 

observed, "The rapid decline of 

American experimental art [in the 

early 1920s] left a vacuum which 

increasingly all but the most reso- 

lute innovators filled by relaxing 

into less demanding styles of re- 

alism or eclecticism."20 But just as 

with his development of a mod- 

ernist style, external fashion mat- 

tered far less to Cummings than 

did a personal aesthetics, which 

abstraction could no longer fulfill. 

His "new direction," moreover, 

did not evolve into a single style, 

for he painted in several styles in 

subsequent years, from the 

expressionism of sea (fig. 14), to 

the naturalism of View from Joy 

Farm: Mt. Chocorua (fig. 15), to 

the dreamy sort of night painting 

of Untitled (fig. 16). 

By "new direction," Cummings 

meant less a new style than a new 

orientation to the subject, one that 

abandoned the detached objec- 

tivity of Modernism for an 

engaged subjectivity and that 

embraced nature as a medium of 

self-expression rather than as an 

accessory to an abstract design. As 

in New York, 1927, he sought to 

transcend categorical distinctions 

between abstract and figural, nat- 

ural and human: his trees twist an- 

thropomorphically; his clouds 

swirl apocalyptically. In his Self- 

Portrait with Sketchpad, for ex- 

ample, the tree trunk-a curving 

feminine torso-extends a shel- 

tering branch over the artist (fig. 

17). Is she the artist's muse or the 

Jungian complement, the anima, to 


his animus, his identity as an 

artist? For a poet and painter who 

revered nature as deeply as 

Cummings did-and who specu- 

lated in Jungian terms on the fem- 

inine side of his creativity-this 

need to express the relation be- 

tween self and nature, male and 

female, was as essential to his ar- 

tistic identity as his need to recon- 

cile the figural and abstract was to 

his aesthetics.21 

Cummings felt that his new di- 

rection suited his identity as an 

artist. In encouraging spontaneity 

and self-expression, it permitted 

his painting "to live suddenly 

without thinking," as he put it in 

one early poem.22 Expressive 

freedom, in turn, encouraged sty- 

listic uniqueness, an all-important 

quality for this artist. For several 

reasons, however, Cummings's 

abandonment of modernist ab- 

straction proved to be a critical 

disaster. While he tinkered with 

his new direction, he became 

even more reticent to display his 

work outside the yearly Indepen- 

dent exhibition. Not until 1931 did 

he "go public" with two one-artist 

shows and with his art book 

CIOPW. By this time, however, he 

had published five volumes of po- 

etry, participated in a sixth, and 

written a book-length narrative, a 

play (produced in 1927), and 

about two dozen short essays for 

the Dial and Vanity Fair. 

If Cummings was "better 

known as a poet and novelist" in 

1924, he was likely known only as 

a writer by 1931. Critics who re- 

viewed his one-artist shows in the 

years thereafter-notably in 1934, 

1944, and 1949-invariably ex- 

pressed surprise on learning that 

the bad boy of American letters 

also painted; they thus viewed the 

paintings as "A Parenthesis to the 

Career of a Poet," as Hilton 

Kramer entitled a 1968 review. 

The critics were also surprised- 

unpleasantly, for the most part-

17 Self-Portrait with Sketchpad, 1939. Oil on 

canvas, 43 x 311/2 in. Iconography 

Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities 

Research Center, University of Texas at 

Austin 

that Cummings's postmodernist 

painting did not pose the visual 

challenge of his writing. Henry 

McBride's response to Cummings's 

1934 exhibition is typical: "You 

could never imagine [the paint- 

ings] to be by the author of 'Eimi.' 

They are thin, uncertain, and sepa- 

rated by some curious wall of in- 

hibition from the medium."23 

Cummings's stylistic mean- 

dering in his later work strength- 

ened the critics' misconception 


that painting was only a pastime 

for him. In turn, their coolness to 

his later work and misreading of 

his seriousness probably kept him 

from exhibiting more often (he 

had ten one-artist shows after 

1927) and impelled him after 1949 

to seek safer havens, like Roch- 

ester, New York, when he did ex- 

hibit: thus the vicious circle of pri- 

vacy causing misconception and 

misconception causing greater 

privacy.

Whether Cummings could have 

succeeded in establishing a public 

persona as a painter had he con- 

tinued his modernist style is a 

moot but interesting question. All 

the abstractions he exhibited pub- 

licly proved their power to cap- 

ture the eye, just as his early po- 

etry did. His last abstractions, 

Noise Number 12 and Noise 

Number 13, moreover, demon- 

strate an impressive growth in sty- 

listic confidence and suggest that, 

had he continued in this vein, he 

might have developed a distinctly 

personal and recognizable brand 

of Modernism, as Stuart Davis did, 

for example, even as modernist 

abstraction faded from the Amer- 

ican scene. But Cummings's failure 

to develop his painterly potential 

in the early 1920s to match his 

burgeoning reputation as a writer 

and his abandonment of Mod- 

ernism later in the decade effec- 

tively consigned his later painting 

to obscurity. 

Painting and Poem: Some 

Comparative Approaches 

In a catalogue statement for one 

of his one-artist shows, Cummings 

posed and answered a persistent 

question about how his two arts 

cohered in practice: 

Tell me, doesn't your painting in- 

terfere with your writing? 

Quite the contrary: they love each 

other dearly.24 

Indeed, that "mutual love" marked 

the modernist movement as a 

whole. Interminglings of the arts 

were visible everywhere: in 

Richard Wagner's (1813-1883) 

Gesamtkunstwerk; in the Symbol- 

ists' colloquies and shared sub- 

jects; in Ezra Pound's (1885-1972) 

forays into other arts to expand 

his concept of the image; in 

Gertrude Stein's (1874-1946) 

Cubist-inspired portraits; in Arnold 

Schonberg's (1874-1951) painting 


and composing with the Munich 

expressionist group Blaue Reiter; 

and in the influence that Marcel 

Duchamp (1887-1968), Charles 

Sheeler (1883-1965), and Charles 

Demuth (1883-1939) exerted on 

William Carlos Williams's (1883- 

1963) poetry, to cite but a few in- 

stances. But perhaps for no one 

more than Cummings were two 

arts so closely connected and mu- 

tually interactive, since he not only 

devoted equal time to each but 

also guided them both by a 

common set of aesthetic 

principles. 

Early on, critics recognized the 

importance of considering to- 

gether Cummings's "twin obses- 

sions," as he called them, but this 

awareness soon faded with his 

public persona as a painter and 

did not reemerge until the late 

1970s. Comparative studies since 

then have noted parallels in sub- 

ject matter, genre, technique, and, 

more recently, aesthetics.25 All 

these approaches deserve mention 

to emphasize how profoundly 

Cummings's visual imagination in- 

formed his poetry-but not equal 

mention, since they do not equally 

delineate the relations between 

his arts. Similarly, any comparative 

method must be sensitive to dif- 

ferences in Cummings's practice 

and skill in the two arts and to 

their apparent stylistic divergences. 

Given Cummings's strong re- 

sponse to the subject and his un- 

abashed romanticism, it is hardly 

surprising that the things he cared 

about-mountains and flowers, 

friends and lovers-should inhabit 

his poems and later canvases 

equally. Even the most casual 

reader of his poems, for example, 

quickly discerns how profoundly 

Cummings loved nature, a love 

that, in fusing childlike joy and re- 

ligious reverence, could reach a 

pitch of lyrical ecstasy, or just as 

easily fall into saccharine 

sentimentality:

when faces called flowers float out of the ground 

-it's april(yes,april;my darling)it's spring! 

yes the pretty birds frolic as spry as can fly 

yes the little fish gambol as glad as can be 

(yes the mountains are dancing together)26 

The same two-edged potential 

holds for the views of Mount Cho- 

corua that Cummings painted tire- 

lessly from his family's farm in the 

White Mountains of New Hamp- 

shire, much as his hero, Paul 

Cezanne, repeatedly returned to 

the distant motif of Mont Sainte- 

Victoire. Indeed, Cummings's View 

from Joy Farm (see fig. 15) even 

borrows the framing motif from 

Cezanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire 

(1886-88, Courtauld Institute). As 

View from Joy Farm suggests, 

these landscapes, while technically 

accomplished, sometimes lapse 

into prettiness and conventionality. 

Occasionally, though, when inspi- 

ration overcame his chronic un- 

certainty in oils, Cummings could 

turn out impressive work, particu- 

larly in watercolors calling for 

light, fast brushwork. His painting 

Untitled (fig. 18), in capturing one 

moment of a shifting, tumultuous 


n(o)w 

how 

the 

dis(appeared cleverly)world 

iS Slapped:with;liGhtninG 

sky, recalls the nature poems that, 

although carefully crafted, evoke a 

startling moment-a lightning 

bolt, for example, as in the poem 

"n(o)w," excerpted below-with 

the feeling of spontaneity.2' 

Comparisons of subject matter 

in the paintings and poems may 

reveal shared themes and likewise 

suggest parallel strengths (inspired 

spontaneity) and weaknesses (sen- 

timentality, triteness) to which 

Cummings's work in each medium 

is prone. But such comparisons do 

not really explain how his painting 

relates to his poetry. 

Genre brings us a little closer. 

The other side of Cummings's lyr- 

ical affirmation was his corrosive 

satire and biting portraiture. As his 

Chaplin (see fig. 10) shows, Cum- 

mings had a caricaturist's eye for 

telling detail. Even in a drawing 

obviously tossed off in a hurry, 

such as one of his friend and pa- 

at 

which(shal)lpounceupcrackw(ill)jumps 

of 

THuNdeRB 

loSSo!M 

(Excerpt from E. E. Cummings, "n(o)w")

18 Untitled (Landscape with Stormy Sky), n.d. 

Watercolor on paper, 812 x 11 in. Prizate 

collection 

tron Scofield Thayer, Cummings 

wittily captures Thayer's aristo- 

cratically arched brow and dan- 

dified bow mouth (fig. 19). In 

Cummings's poetry, satire figures 

even more prominently. It pro- 

vided the perfect medium to at- 

tack values he opposed, for the 

Reverend Edward Cummings's son 

was, beneath his celebrations of 

the senses, a moralist, albeit a 

witty one. As both his contempo- 

raries and his recorded Nonlec- 

tures confirm, he had a superb ear 

and voice for mimicry.28 Witness 

his evocation of the half-formed 

thoughts, half-swallowed syllables, 

and half-human savagery of this 

South Boston "tough" opining on 

what wartime America should do 

to the Japanese: 


ygUDuh 

ydoan 

yunnuhstan 

ydoan o 

yunnuhstan dem 

yguduh ged 

yunnuhstan dem doidee 

yguduh ged riduh 

ydoan o nudn 

LISN bud LISN 

dem 

gud 

am 

duhSIVILEYEzum29 

lidl yelluh bas 

tuds weer goin

19 Untitled (Scofield Thayer), before 1923. 

Pencil drawing, 81/2 x 11 in. E. E. 

Cummings Papers, Houghton Library, 

Hanrard University 

Both expressions of satire demonstrate 

Cummings's sensitivity to 

visual and aural nuance and his 

ability to exaggerate nuance into 

caricature and mimicry. Yet poetry 

gave him more opportunity for 

subtlety, for thematic complexity 

and double entendre, such as slipping 

"EYE" into "SIVILEYEz" to 

recall one moral code that the 

speaker would no doubt affirm: 

"an eye for an eye." With brush 

and pen, Cummings was no 

George Grosz (1893-1959) and 

could not achieve a comparable 

subtlety. 

When we turn to the visual devices 

in Cummings's poetry and 

compare them to analogous devices 

in his paintings and to the 

aesthetic principles generating 

both, the connections between the 

two arts become tighter. Although 

Cummings's famous typographical 

innovations in one sense came out 

of the free verse movement of the 

teens and owe much to Pound 

and perhaps to Guillaume 

Apollinaire (1880-1918), they owe 

even more to his own painterly vi- 

sion-only now the typewriter 

served as his paintbrush. In this 

regard, critics have often and 

rightly observed how much the 

typewriter, with its sharply delineated 

print, its precision of placement, 

and its mechanical regu- 


larity, enhanced and even 

stimulated Cummings's visual dis- 

locations. One element in both 

media can serve as an example. 

As a painter, Cummings knew 

how directly line creates or 

impedes motion. As he acknowl- 

edged in his foreword to is 5, his 

1926 book of poems, "I am abnor- 

mally fond of that precision which 

creates movement." His unpub- 

lished notes, moreover, speculate 

often and in detail on methods to 

achieve motion in both arts and 

the types of motion various lines 

effect.30 Not surprisingly, then, 

such abstractions as Noise Number 

1 (see fig. 6) emphasize lines that 

create dynamism-sweeping arcs 

and curves, diagonals-while es- 

chewing more static horizontals 

and verticals. 

In Cummings's poems, line is 

more complex, for it functions in 

dimensions of space and time si- 

multaneously.31 As the poem un- 

folds temporally, the narrative line 

conveys motion through its pace, 

its accelerations and retards. Si- 

multaneously, however, the short 

lyric (Cummings's metier) exists 

in space, its line lengths and 

placements immediately appre- 

hensible to the eye. Cummings ex- 

ploited both of these linear di- 

mensions to generate the motions 

of his well-known "Buffalo Bill's": 

Buffalo Bill's 

defunct 

who used to 

ride a watersmooth-silver 

stallion 

and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat 

Jesus 

he was a handsome man 

and what i want to know is 

how do you like your blueeyed boy 

Mister Death32

Spatially, the lines lengthen in 

the poem's top half as they move 

farther to the right. They reach 

their extremity with the expletive 

"Jesus," then retreat and shorten 

in the lower half, returning finally 

to the left margin with "Mister 

Death." A diagram of the extremi- 

ties of this progression and reces- 

sion produces an arrowhead-an 

appropriate shape to associate 

with this famous Indian scout- 

with its point of maximum force at 

'Jesus." Temporally, the poem's 

pacing begins slowly with the an- 

nouncement of Buffalo Bill's death 

spaced over two lines, gradually 

accelerates as his dynamic life is 

recalled, and reaches its peak of 

acceleration and greatest intensity 

when Buffalo Bill himself was 

most magnificently alive: "and 

break onetwothreefourfive pi- 

geonsjustlikethat /Jesus." As the 

line shortens and returns to the 

left margin-the margin of death 

and the present-the pace decel- 

erates, the intensity slackens, and 

the poem grounds to an emphatic 

halt on "Death." Linear spacing 

and pace thus work in perfect syn- 

chrony to create motion and in- 

tensity by controlling not only the 

poem's visual form and thematic 

development but also the reader's 

perception and experience of it. 

The full power of Cummings's 

visual imagination-the painterly 

vision of his poems-occurs in 

poems that must be seen and can 

scarcely be read orally, such as 

"r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r," reprinted 

below.33 

The transformations of "r-p-o-ph-e-s-s-a-g-r" 

are almost exclusively 

visual, not only in the scrambled 

letters of "grasshopper" that gradually 

unscramble themselves but 

also in the tmesis of "rearrangingly 

become"-a simultaneous 

presentation that virtually defies 

coherent oral reading-and in the 

falling "1 / eA / !p:" with its capital 

"A" suggesting the apex of the grasshopper's 

leap. In exploiting the 

visual potential of each black mark 

on his white page-its potential as 

ideograph, as abstract shape, as 

implied line, as something to slow 

or speed the pacing, as visual embodiment 

of semantic meaning- 

Cummings made the real subject 

of his poems the experience of 

reading and seeing them: their 

process, their continuous becoming, 

their inexhaustible transformativeness. 

Ironically, though, 

even as they give the effect of 

r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r 

who 

a)s w(e loo)k 

upnowgath 

PPEGORHRASS 

eringint(oaThe):l 

eA 

S 

rivlnG 


(r 

rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly 

,grasshopper; 

a 

.gRrEaPsPhOs) 

to 

(E. E. Cummings, "r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r")

spontaneity, of "happening" on 

the page, they result from the calculated 

placement of each mark: 

Cummings planned his spontaneity.3" 

In his painting after 1926, 

by contrast, Cummings usually 

pursued this spontaneity more directly 

through a kinetic technique, 

or, as he put it in one private 

note, "chunking ahead with a big 

brush held loosely & loaded with 

paint."35 The painting sea is one of 

the more successful examples of 

this style (see fig. 14). 

In virtually all respects, then, 

Cummings's poetry was more 

complex and subtle than his 

painting. By responding to the 

slightest nuance of language and 

intensifying such nuances with his 

visual imagination, he was able to 

manipulate and exploit words in 

more ways to effect more kinds 

and dimensions of meaningvisual, 

aural, semantic, and syntactic-than 

he could achieve 

through his painting. The "calculated 

spontaneity" of his poems, 

moreover, permitted a fine balance 

between thought and feeling, 

between the poem's disciplined 

construction and its visceral ap- 

Notes 

1 E. E. Cummings to Rebecca H. 

Cummings, 24 April 1919, Selected Letters 

ofE EE. Cummings, ed. F. W. 

Dupee and George Stade (New York: 

Harcourt Brace & World, 1969), p. 58. 

2 Although the term "defamiliarization" 

belongs to Russian Formalism, 

Cummings's notes show that he pur- 

sued the same effect in his poetry 

through visual displacements in 

spacing and typography. See Milton A. 

Cohen, "E. E. Cummings' Sleight-of- 

Hand: Perceptual Ambiguity in His 

Early Poetry, Painting, and Career," 

Universit, of Hartford Studies in Liter- 

ature 15, no. 1 (1983): 33-46. 

3 Isabel Lachaise, quoted in Cummings 

to Rebecca Cummings, 7 April 1919, 

Selected Letters, ed. Dupee and Stade, 


pearance. His painting, by contrast, 

gravitated toward one or the other 

of these poles but seldom inte- 

grated them successfully. The cal- 

culated paintings, such as View 

from Joy Farm (see fig. 15), thus 

risked stodginess and convention- 

ality, while the "spontaneous" 

style could produce a muddle 

when it was not inspired. 

William Slater Brown was per- 

haps right to question from the 

outset Cummings's dogged persis- 

tence in painting when words 

were clearly his medium. 

Cummings was a born writer, a 

self-made painter. Yet one cannot 

help but respect his perseverance 

as a painter who endured all 

manner of disappointments: bad 

reviews, indifference and igno- 

rance, misconceptions about his 

seriousness, and, potentially most 

crippling of all, self-doubts about 

his aims.36 Cummings weathered 

them all and continued painting to 

the day he died. Whatever their 

stutterings of facility, their lapses 

of critical judgment, his paintings 

bespeak an artist for whom the 

self-created identity of "poet and 

painter" was indivisible. 

p. 58. For other references to Lachaise, 

see letters dated 1918-20, pp. 45-63. 

4 "Independents Run Gamut in Art 

Show," New York Sun, 30 March 1919, 

p. 14, col. 3. On Cummings's gallery 

invitations, see Cummings to Rebecca 

Cummings, 7 April and 24 April 1919, 

Selected Letters, ed. Dupee and Stade, 

pp. 57-58. On his nomination to the 

board of directors of the Independent, 

see Richard S. Kennedy, Dreams in the 

Mirror: A Biography of E. E. 

Cummings (New York: Liveright, 

1980), p. 204. 

5 Cummings's 1915 undergraduate com- 

mencement address, "The New Art," 

reflects his familiarity with an impres- 

sive range of avant-garde artists, in- 

cluding Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

and Arnold Schonberg, Paul Cezanne, 

Pablo Picasso, Ezra Pound, and 

Gertrude Stein. Reprinted in E. E. 

Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, ed. 

George J. Firmage (New York: October 

House, 1965), pp. 5-11. See also 

Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror, pp. 

78-82; John Dos Passos, The Best 

Times (New York: New American Library, 

1966), p. 35. 

6 E. E. Cummings, "Gaston Lachaise," 

Dial, February 1920, reprinted in Mis- 

cellany Revised, ed. Firmage, pp. 

16-17. 

7 Willard H. Wright, Moder Painting: 

Its Tendency and Meaning (New York: 

John Lane, 1915); Emile Bernard, Sou- 

venirs sur Paul Cezanne (Paris: So- 

ciete des Trente, 1912); Cummings to 

Rebecca Cummings, 2 March 1922, E. 

E. Cummings Papers, Houghton Li- 

brary, Harvard University, Cambridge, 

Mass. 

8 Cummings to Rebecca Cummings, 19 

February 1917 and 2 March 1922, 

Cummings Papers. 

9 Cummings, quoted in Kennedy, 

Dreams in the Mirror, p. 166. 


March 1922 and 18June 1918, 

Cummings Papers. So devoted was 

Cummings to Wright's criticism (which 

included brilliant exegeses of 

Cezanne's techniques) that to praise 

his college friend Scofield Thayer, 

Cummings dubbed him "W.H. 

W[ right], Jr." 

11 Cummings, "Notes," ca. early 1920s, 

Cummings Papers; E. E. Cummings, 

"Picasso," iii, Portraits, XLI Poems 

(1925), reprinted in E. E. Cummings: 

Complete Poems 1913-1962 (New 

York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 

1980), p. 195; Cummings, "Notes," ca. 

1918, Cummings Papers. 


June 1918 and 2 March 1919, 

Cummings Papers; E. E. Cummings, 

"at the ferocious phenomenon of 

5 o'clock i find myself," rx, Portraits, 

XLI Poems, reprinted in Complete 

Poems, p. 201. In 1925 Cummings 

called Marin "America's greatest living 

painter" in an article that also refers to 

their common motif, the Woolworth 

Building. "The Adult, the Artist, and 

the Circus," Vanity Fair, October 1925, 

reprinted in Miscellany Revised, ed. 

Firmage, pp. 112-13. 

13 "L'Art Pour L'Art Revels in Splash of 

Naked Truth," New York World, 12 


March 1920, p. 8, col. 3; S. Jay 

Kaufman, review of the 1920 Indepen- 

dent exhibition, New York Globe and 

Advertiser, quoted in Kennedy, Dreams 

in the Mirror, p. 211; review in New 

York Evening Post, 12 March 1920, p. 

11, cols. 4-5. 

14 Gorham Munson, "Syrinx," Secession 5 

(July 1923): 2-11, reprinted in E. E. 

Cummings and the Critics, ed. Stanley 

V. Baum (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan 

State University Press, 1962), pp. 9-18. 

15 Cummings's Parisian drawings, in the 

Cummings Papers, Houghton Library, 

are easily datable by their French wa- 

termark-the same paper he used in 

dated letters home. 

16 Cummings to Edward Cummings, 22 

May 1920, Selected Letters, ed. Dupee 

and Stade, p. 71; Cummings to Edward 

Cummings, 5 December 1923, 

Cummings Papers; review in New York 

Sun and Globe, 6 March 1924, p. 16, 

cols. 2-3. 

17 Compare Cummings's poem "ta," 

which depicts a toe tapping to synco- 

pated jazz. III, Portraits, & [AND] 

(1925), reprinted in Complete Poems, 

p. 107. 

18 New York Sun and Globe, 6 March 

1924, p. 16. 

19 E. E. Cummings, Him (New York: Boni 

& Liveright, 1927), act 1, sc. 4; 

Cummings to Rebecca Cummings, 4 

October 1926, Cummings Papers. 

20 Sam Hunter and John Jacobus, Amer- 

ican Art of the 20th Century (New 

York: Abrams, 1973), p. 120. 

21 Cummings, "Notes," ca. 1940s, 

Cummings Papers. 

22 E. E. Cummings, "let's live suddenly 

without thinking," Dx, Sonnets-Actual- 

ities, & [AND], reprinted in Complete 

Poems, p. 160. 

23 Hilton Kramer, "A Parenthesis to the 

Career of a Poet," New York Times, 16 

March 1968, p. 26, cols. 1-3; Henry 

McBride, review of Cummings's 1934 

exhibition, New York Sun, 3 February 

1934, p. 9, cols. 1-2. 

24 E. E. Cummings, "Foreword to an Ex- 

hibit: II," from catalogue of one-artist 

show at the Memorial Gallery, Roch- 

ester, N.Y., May 1945, reprinted in Mis- 

cellany Revised, ed. Firmage, pp. 

316-17. 

25 Munson, "Syrinx." Besides an impres- 

sionistic chapter on Cummings as 

artist in Charles Norman's biography

The Magic Maker: E. E. Cummings 

(New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), pp. 

255-76, and chronological references 

in Kennedy's biography Dreams in the 

Mirror, the chief work on Cummings's 

painting is by Rushworth Kidder: 

"E. E. Cummings, Painter," Harvard Li- 

brary Bulletin 23 (April 1975): 117-38; 

"'Author of Pictures': A Study of 

Cummings's Line Drawings in The 

Dial," Contemporary Literature 17 

(1976): 470-505; "'Twin Obsessions': 

The Poetry and Paintings of E. E. 

Cummings," Georgia Review 32 

(Summer 1978): 342-68; "Cummings 

and Cubism," Journal of Modern Liter- 

ature 7 (April 1979): 225-91; and by 

Milton A. Cohen: PoetandPainter: The 

Aesthetics of E. E. Cummings's Early 

Work (Detroit: Wayne State University 

Press, 1987), pp. 33-64; E. E. 

Cummings' Paintings: The Hidden Ca- 

reer (Dallas: University of Texas at 

Dallas and Dallas Public Library, 1982). 

26 E. E. Cummings, "when faces called 

flowers float out of the ground," 67, 

XAIPE (1950), reprinted in Complete 

Poems, p. 665. This and other poems 

by Cummings appearing in this article 

are reprinted by persmission of Live- 

right Publishing Corp. ? 1923, 1925, 

1931, and renewed 1951, 1953, 1959 

by E. E. Cummings; ? 1973, 1976, 

1978, 1979 by the Trustees for the 

E. E. Cummings Trust; ( 1973, 1976, 

1978, 1979 by George James Firmage. 

27 E. E. Cummings, "n(o)w," xxxviii, 

W[ViVa] (1931), reprinted in Com- 

plete Poems, p. 347. 

28 E. E. Cummings, i: Six Nonlectures, 

Charles Eliot Norton Lectures re- 

corded at Sanders Theatre, Harvard 

University, 1952-53, phonograph rec- 

ords, Caedmon TX 1186-91, 1965. 


29 E. E. Cummings, "ygUDuh," VII, 1 x 1 

[One Times One] (1944), reprinted in 

Complete Poems, p. 547. 

30 E. E. Cummings, foreword to is 5 


p. 223. See also Cohen, Poetand- 

Painter, p. 151. 

31 Of course line in painting can also 

convey passing time, as painters from 

Tommaso Giovanni di Masaccio 

(1401-1428) to Picasso have demon- 

strated. But Cummings, in striving for 

instantaneity in his painting, ignored 

this potential. 

32 E. E. Cummings, "Buffalo Bill's," vii, 

Portraits, TULIPS, Tulips and Chimneys 


p. 60. 

33 E. E. Cummings, "r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r," 

13, No Thanks (1935), reprinted in 

Complete Poems, p. 396. 

34 In E. E. Cummings: The Poet as Artist 

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University 

Press, 1960), chap. 5, Norman 

Friedman traced Cummings's poem 

"rosetree,rosetree" through numerous 

drafts. Both as dynamic process and 

crafted object, his poems confirm 

Cummings in the classical role of 

maker-poietes, as he himself acknowl- 

edged: "If a poet is anybody, he is 

somebody ... who is obsessed by 

Making." Foreword to is 5, reprinted 

in Complete Poems, p. 223. 

35 Cummings, "Notes," 1940, Cummings 

Papers. 

36 As late as 1940, Cummings could de- 

clare, "Apparently I've found my style 

in painting," confirming not the dis- 

covery so much as the search. "Notes," 

1940, Cummings Papers.

E. E. Cummings: Modernist Painter and Poet

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