E. E. Cummings: Modernist Painter and Poet

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-
70 Spring 1990
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