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Gillian
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E.E. Cummings: The Iconic Meta-Sonnet
and the Cultural Emblem of the American “Eye/i”
and the Cultural Emblem of the American “Eye/i”
Readers familiar with “Buffalo Bill ’s,” “in Just-,” and “anyone lived in a pretty how town” don’t often think of the sonnet when they think of E. E. Cummings, in spite of his prolific sonneteering.[1] The critical impression of Cummings is of a popular poet whose earnest poetic vision was typographic ((Re)Valuing Cummings (1996), 3-18). Cummings’s new art of the American modern sonnet, opening the orthodox sonnet to its otherness in various modernist experiments, is less known.
The sonnet’s long pedigree makes the genre culturally specific and provides a ready ground for revision or subversion. By the early twentieth century, the expectations of the sonnet perfect in the refined Italian form (8-6 or 4-4-3-3) had been elevated to a prettified lyricism by the New England genteel culture.[2] The perfection of the form excluded and precluded anything considered either offensive to the eye or jarring to the ear.[3] The sonnet perfect became disconnected from real life, in particular, the sensations of the erotic.
With “the Cambridge ladies” in mind, Cummings inverted the expectations of the established form, breaking its visual and verbal confines to reflect on culture, genre, and the self from within. The study I propose examines Cummings’s iconic meta-sonnetry through his portrait sonnets (such as “next to of course god America i”). I analyze Cummings’ variations of stanzaic groupings, rhythmic and sound arrangements, and intense sensual images as emblematic “verbal portraits” or “poempictures” (Cummings’s term). I contend that his meta-sonnetry is not just formalist experimentation, but an iconoclastic re-envisioning of genre and culture. Situating Cummings’ sonnets in the critical context of the recent reexamination of the relationship between modernist and postmodernist aesthetics in twentieth-century American culture (Altieri, Dickey, Jameson, Levenson, Rainey, Thurston, etc.), I show how Cummings turns the modern American sonnet into a cultural emblem of the American “Eye/i,” transforming a life-denying genteel sonnet into a poetic witness of a three-dimensional human embodied in a living form.
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Notes
1 Cummings himself declared, “As for the unconventionality of my writing:if you can count the sonnets in Poems 1923-1950, you have a lot more patience than the man who wrote them” (“Q&A.” MS. notes. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am1823.7, folder 104, s. 52).
2 See Gillian Huang-Tiller, “Modernism, Cummings’ Meta-Sonnets, and Chimneys,” Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society 10 (2001): 155-172.
3 Richard Kennedy, “The Harvard Experience: Verse, Friends, Rebellion,” Dreams in the Mirror (Liveright, 1980), pp. 92-96.
The sonnet’s long pedigree makes the genre culturally specific and provides a ready ground for revision or subversion. By the early twentieth century, the expectations of the sonnet perfect in the refined Italian form (8-6 or 4-4-3-3) had been elevated to a prettified lyricism by the New England genteel culture.[2] The perfection of the form excluded and precluded anything considered either offensive to the eye or jarring to the ear.[3] The sonnet perfect became disconnected from real life, in particular, the sensations of the erotic.
With “the Cambridge ladies” in mind, Cummings inverted the expectations of the established form, breaking its visual and verbal confines to reflect on culture, genre, and the self from within. The study I propose examines Cummings’s iconic meta-sonnetry through his portrait sonnets (such as “next to of course god America i”). I analyze Cummings’ variations of stanzaic groupings, rhythmic and sound arrangements, and intense sensual images as emblematic “verbal portraits” or “poempictures” (Cummings’s term). I contend that his meta-sonnetry is not just formalist experimentation, but an iconoclastic re-envisioning of genre and culture. Situating Cummings’ sonnets in the critical context of the recent reexamination of the relationship between modernist and postmodernist aesthetics in twentieth-century American culture (Altieri, Dickey, Jameson, Levenson, Rainey, Thurston, etc.), I show how Cummings turns the modern American sonnet into a cultural emblem of the American “Eye/i,” transforming a life-denying genteel sonnet into a poetic witness of a three-dimensional human embodied in a living form.
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Notes
1 Cummings himself declared, “As for the unconventionality of my writing:if you can count the sonnets in Poems 1923-1950, you have a lot more patience than the man who wrote them” (“Q&A.” MS. notes. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am1823.7, folder 104, s. 52).
2 See Gillian Huang-Tiller, “Modernism, Cummings’ Meta-Sonnets, and Chimneys,” Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society 10 (2001): 155-172.
3 Richard Kennedy, “The Harvard Experience: Verse, Friends, Rebellion,” Dreams in the Mirror (Liveright, 1980), pp. 92-96.
Gillian Huang-Tiller is Professor of English at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, where she teaches modern/contemporary poetry and fiction, Asian American/diasporic, and western literature. A contributing editor to SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, she has published extensively on Cummings and is completing a monograph on Cummings’ visual poetics and meta-sonnets.