Page:The Dial (Volume 76).djvu/83



HERE it is a question of a first rate new poet one hardly cares to count any more on poetry lovers. They swallow apparently anything and everything and seem not to know the difference between fresh asparagus and canned. To prefer canned, my father says, is only perverse, but not to know the difference And let no one think I have made up this poetry lover out of straw. There actually exist people who, having read Pound's Chinese translations, will assure you that they are much the same as Witter Bynner's or Miss Lowell's or almost anybody's.

These Chinese translations make a test or measure for literary taste, a nice instrument of precision in a field where all is usually vague. But to tackle the poetry of E. E. Cummings is to leave such things behind. He is quite the most incommensurable among modern poets. He has done so many things well, even many new things, the same thing seldom more than twice; he has rejuvenated so many verse forms, that it is hard to find any common divisor for his work. For some time his name has been a sort of symbol of extreme modernism, and his writing has lately been said to "knock literature into a cocked hat." I think however that while extreme he is only superficially "modern" and that far from knocking literature into a cocked hat, he is quite content to sharpen some very well known tendencies of that fairly inclusive body of practice. With his typographical innovations, his extraordinary and ingenious appeal to the lust of the eye, he once led the fashion, or one of them. But it is rather the satisfaction which he offers to the lust of the ear and to other old, often indecent, desires which poetry was supposed to gratify that I wish to emphasize; notably the desire for rapid unfailing lyrical invention. And I think that for any one who is still capable of being stirred up by lyric poetry, this book will appear with the same freshness and profusion as might an early book by Keats or Verlaine.