each, he is seeking the most economical means to convey ideas and feelings about ideas. In
each, too, he is seeking precision….Above all, in both poetry and drawing, he seeks
movement and life.
from Rushworth M. Kidder, "‘Author of Pictures’: A Study of
Cummings’ Line Drawings in The Dial." Contemporary Literature 17
(1976): 470-505.
Rushworth M. Kidder (1979)
[Here Kidder discusses "fragmentation and fusion, simultaneity, and bilateral
symmetry" as formal features "which show up consistently in [Cummings’]
painting as well as in his poetry."]
Fragmentation and fusion appear in the visual arts in the work of the Divisionists,
who, after analyzing their subject into discrete spots of color, synthesized these spots
into an image.
In the work of the Cubists, and in [some] Cummings drawings and paintings…the process
often emphasized analysis over synthesis….
In poetry, fragmentation and fusion consists in the breaking up of the conventional
arrangements of stanzas, lines, or words into smaller units and in the combining of them
into larger ones. In Cummings’ poetry this rearrangement takes two forms. First,
there are those poems in which he so orders an entire stanza that it takes on a
significant visual pattern….
[Second is] the "splintered / normality" that fractures words into syllables,
nonsyllabic entities, and single letters, and its counterpart, the fusion of words into
larger units….
[Kidder defines Cummings’ interest in simultaneity in art as "the
simultaneous presentation of various points of view in a visual image" and proceeds
to discuss how this feature is used in poetry. One way is through creation of "double
meanings," another is through interweaving "various threads of narrative into a
garble," and yet another is the insertion into words of parenthetical words or
phrases.]
The point of this simultaneity is not (as it was in Cubism) to show more than
can usually be seen, but to allow language, for all its inefficiencies in portraying
pictorial images, to express as much as the visual arts. The effect, in other words
is to construct a parallel in poetry for painting.
This interest in the simultaneity of of disparate impressions produces, in many cases,
a third formal feature of Cummings’ poetry and painting: bilateral symmetry.
Cummings, it seems, thought in terms of "opposites," whether they "occurred
together" as in burlesque or not. No Hegelian, he did not always demand a resolution
for his thesis and antithesis. He was often content simply to present binary structures,
with some attention to various ideas he had learned from studying composition in the
visual arts–the balancing of equivalents, the distribution of emphasis, the repetition of
forms.
from Rushworth M. Kidder, "Cummings and Cubism: The Influence of the Visual Arts
on Cummings’ Early Poetry." Journal of Modern Literature 7 (1979):
255-91.
Milton A Cohen (1983)
Taken together, the poems and paintings show nearly analogous techniques of ambiguity:
figurative in the painting, thematic in the poems. Flickering in and out of view, these
ambiguities tease the viewer’s eye and mind to see first one view or meaning, then
another, but not one or the other exclusively. By balancing their perceptual force,
Cummings keeps both possibilities simultaneously present….
…[Cummings] sought to make his works more "feelable to the eye,"…and less
recognizable to the mind; to emphasize the sensuous elements that intensify perception of all
the parts, and to obscure the figures that elicit recognition of only part of the
whole.
The first half of this aesthetic solution, that of making works "feelable to the
eye," helped to generate many of the visual techniques for which Cummings’
poetry is best known: the busted lines, broken words, ideographic punctuation, and sprung
syntax that move vertically and diagonally, as well as horizontally, on the page. As these
devices slow one’s recognition of thematic meaning, they acquire their own perceptual
importance as fragments. Any linguistic element, no matter how lowly, could be made to
carry an immediately perceptible, sensuous charge. Thus punctuation and capitalization,
lowly servants to words, could act ideographically as well as functionally….
…To achieve the second half of his aesthetic solution, that of retarding recognition
of figures in an abstract painting and of themes in a poem, Cummings considered omitting
the figures and themes altogether from his work and constructing pure abstractions….But
pure abstraction ultimately proved unsatisfying to the painter, and impossible to the
lyrical poet. For Cummings was too much in love with the sights and smells and sounds of
the phenomenal world, too devoted to nature, to abandon it in abstractions.
A happier solution was to admit nature, but to hold it in check: that is, to include
the figures and themes on which the paintings and poems are based, but to diminish their
perceptual dominance by concealing them in perceptually ambiguous structures; to hide them
among the sensuous planes and to divide them between competing arrangements of syntax.
from Milton A. Cohen, "E. E. Cummings’ Sleight-of-Hand: Perceptual Ambiguity
in His Early Poetry, Painting, and Career." University of Hartford Studies in
Literature 15(1983): 33-46.
Regis L. Welch (1984)
…Cummings was attempting…to imitate the modern artist’s attempts to depict a
fourth dimension within a work of graphic art….
…To accomplish [the] feat of linguistic fidelity to the immediacy of experience,
Cummings developed the literary technique of fragmentation or the dismemberment of
language into autonomous yet related fragments. In the technique of fragmentation,
Cummings first reduced language to those components usually regarded as the lowest common
denominators, morphemes and graphemes. Then, instead of the usual arrangements of words
placed in normal syntactical order and grouped into poetic stanzas, Cummings rearranged
these linguistic units into a visual representation of an experience. Such dismemberment
is analogous to the analysis of surfaces into planes and angles such as are depicted in
the Picasso portraits of a profile superimposed on a full face view. Cummings believed
that this separation of phrases, words and morphemes would provide special and unusual
stress for these linguistic fragments because separation would emphasize the spatial
elements surrounding them andwould heighten the aesthetic visual experience of the reader.
Similarly, Cummings felt that the technique of tmesis or the re-combination and the
interspersing of other phrases, words or parts of words would illustrate the
interrelatedness and the overlapping of events which actually or perceptually occur
simultaneously. In the same way that the Cubist painters illustrated the various visual
viewpoints of physical objects, Cummings’ verbal-graphic techniques of fragmentation
and tmesis demonstrated the structure and the component froms of language. At first, the
reader faces the scattered letters and punctuation marks with much the same bewilderment
as that expeienced when first viewing the non-representational cubes and cones of a Cubist
painting. Eventually, the reader realizes that the external elements of language have
merely been dislocated and juztaposed in new ways within the jumbled typography.
from Regis L Welch, "The Linguistic Paintings of E. E. Cummings,
Painter-Poet." Language and Literature 9(1984): 79-89.
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