The Harmless Rebellion of E.E. Cummings

I went to high school in central California in the 1980s.  My sophomore English class was formative, foundational.  I had a brusque, gruff, outstanding teacher who taught me more about the mechanics of writing in one year of high school than I’ve learned in all my years since.  And she walked us—or, really, marched us—through American letters from (roughly) Washington Irving to Chaim Potok, while also teaching units on such things as analyzing poetry or interpreting fiction and, every Friday, giving a spelling / vocabulary test.

Somehow, our teacher mostly succeeded in getting us to do the reading and talk about the texts. We had a survey textbook—gosh, I wish for the life of me I could remember which publisher’s it was; I’d love to page through it now—and we read a few standalone novels throughout the semester:  The Scarlet Letter, Turn of the Screw, The Great Gatsby, and My Name is Asher Lev.

I don’t recall how far the survey textbook went in terms of coverage of American authors. Was there a Ray Bradbury story in it, perhaps? Was Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” in our anthology? Poetry by Robert Lowell? Sylvia Plath? I honestly don’t know.

I do recall that there apparently wasn’t enough E.E. Cummings in the textbook to suit the high school English department; we all got a mimeographed collection of Cummings poems to read, and we did a whole unit on Cummings as an exemplar (the exemplar?) of modern American poetry.  We spent a fair amount of time on Cummings—maybe three weeks?—and had to write a paper analyzing how the formal aspects of his poems reinforced his idiosyncratic figurative language to communicate meaning. Something like that.  It was a major assignment, a big deal for our semester grade:  making sense of the formal and figurative rebellions of E.E. Cummings.

I was reminded of this unit of study recently while reading a chapter in Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War.  It was his chapter on literary criticism, “The Free Play of the Mind.”  He had written extensively about the Beat writers earlier in the book, in a chapter that mostly explored Ginsberg’s connections to and frustrations with Lionel Trilling.  But I wasn’t surprised to see Ginsberg and Kerouac again, this time mixed in with I.A. Richards and Northrop Frye and Robert Penn Warren.  In these big books about major eras or turning points of American thought, no matter who writes them, there’s usually a cast of recurring characters; and for the field of American studies more broadly (and let’s put Menand in that pasture for now), there is sort of a collective thesaurus of texts, key figures, key thinkers, key moments scholars call up as needed to convey the sense of an era.  So it is with Menand’s massive book—and all for the good.

Anyway, as I was thinking about our collective cast of characters for sweeping surveys of American thought and culture, and thinking about how early in my life I encountered some of these standard figures and how recently I encountered others, I realized that in all my reading of American cultural and intellectual history, I have almost never encountered E.E. Cummings as a significant figure in anybody’s history.

I’m not saying that I should be seeing numerous mentions of E.E. Cummings in works on American thought and culture in the 20^th century, whether that’s the Progressive era or the Depression or the war years or the Cold War.  I’m not saying that I find the paucity of mentions problematic.  But I’m intrigued by the fact that Cummings is probably the only American writer I was assigned to read extensively who doesn’t figure into many histories of his era.  He loomed way too large in that high school curriculum—we read more of Cummings than we read of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, or even Robert Frost—but he really hasn’t showed up much for me since.  As I said on Twitter, “I was led to believe that there would be a great deal of E.E. Cummings content to grapple with throughout adulthood and there really is not much.”

The easiest move here is to say that nobody drags E.E. Cummings into their story because his work just wasn’t that important, it wasn’t that resonant in the culture; whatever representative ideas may be salient in his poetry are just as salient in the work of more interesting and more important thinkers.  Even if one’s object of inquiry is “middlebrow culture” or “religious sensibilities and American poetry” or “Harvard in the early 20^th century,” there’s no need to use Cummings to carry the narrative load. I am not out here asking for more E.E. Cummings content, and I doubt I’ll be providing any beyond this blog post.

What’s a bit more interesting is to think about what function E.E. Cummings served in the high school English classrooms of the 1980s, since he seems to serve very little function as a significant node of thought in American intellectual history.  And here I think Menand—or Robert Genter in his fantastic study Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America, or Jamie Cohen-Cole in his marvelous book The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature—can help answer the question.  They do this by reminding us of what the stakes were for art during the Cold War, what the possibilities for art—for painting, for music, for poetry, all of it, any of it—became during the Cold War.  They remind us how urgent it was to irresistibly shape young minds to believe in freedom as both imperiled and irresistible.

To put it bluntly, E.E. Cummings was a very safe choice to serve as the prime example of an artist who challenges formal conventions, who rebels against tradition, who does something aesthetically exciting and new in the name of individual freedom of expression.  Teaching Cummings’s break from formalism was a way of gesturing toward and valorizing artistic courage—and individuality, and creativity, and anti-Totalitarian nonconformity, and all those other Cold War desiderata—without putting any Cold War pieties at risk.

It was almost an inoculation, to have all of us grapple with Cummings as the standard-bearer of aesthetic rebellion.  That wild and wacky Cummings with his peculiar diction and his daring break with the conventions of capitalization, punctuation, and stanza structure!  Talk about a rebel without a cause.

But it’s not as if they were going to have us read excerpts from “Howl” or On the Road.  At least E.E. Cummings was something—something very safe. And it makes good pedagogical sense, if you’re telling a story about American poetry as a move from traditional verse to free verse, to use Cummings as an example of what this break for freedom looked like. The formal challenge to poetic convention is something students can easily see on the page, even if they struggle to make sense of it. Asking a bunch of high school students to take a deep dive (as deep as we could) into Cummings’s artistic choices where nothing much was actually at stake was a roundabout way of telling us, It’s okay to rebel when this is what rebellion entails.

That’s probably what My Name Is Asher Lev was doing in the curriculum as well—that, and doing some work for the idea of “Judeo-Christian” America, and perhaps counting as a required “ethnic literature” reading.  Don’t get me wrong:  I’m very grateful that we read that novel; it provided me with a way to imagine what it might feel like to have to choose between being true to one’s upbringing and one’s faith and being true to oneself and one’s art.  Assigning that novel was a way of affirming and reinforcing the ideals of liberal secular pluralism, the ideals of Cold War America, by presenting such affirmation as something hard-won through rebellion.  And if that novel checked off a box for “ethnic literature,” it was a much safer text to discuss than, say, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.

I am not suggesting that my high school English teachers—bless them all—or your high school English teachers sat down and said to themselves, “What should we have these kids read that will feel very daring and edgy for them but won’t lead any of them into actual trouble or make any trouble for us.”  Indeed, I know my own teachers were very conscientious about opening our minds and enlarging our experiences.

But, again, recall Jamie Cohen-Cole’s study of The Open Mind—developing the “open-minded” citizen who was at the same time able to resist the siren song of Totalitarianism was the Cold War mission of social scientists and educational reformers, a mission that certainly continued into and through the 1980s.  How to encourage high schoolers to resist groupthink; to value independence of mind, creativity of expression; to challenge reified conventions; to champion freedom of thought without falling prey to “anti-American” thought—how to encourage high schoolers to make a break for freedom without actually breaking anything?  Have them analyze the work of E.E. Cummings.

Still, there’s no such thing as a safe or harmless call to freedom.  Along with Potok’s My Name Is Asher Lev, a poem by Cummings, assigned to me in high school, became one small stepping stone on my crooked, painful, hard-fought path away from evangelical dispensationalist fundamentalism.  Here it is; I’m sure you know it:

no time ago
or else a life
walking in the dark
i met christ

jesus)my heart
flopped over
and lay still
while he passed(as

close as i’m to you
yes closer
made of nothing
except loneliness

Upon my parochial mental horizons, those lines from my sturdy and conventional Cold War education landed like angelic bombs.