E. E. Cummings: Modernist Painter and Poet

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,
72 Spring 1990
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)