Page:The Dial (Volume 76).djvu/84

50 No study is necessary to know this poetry as poetry. One recognizes immediately the radiance of the words on the page, making the whole page luminous, a quality which Matthew Arnold's words, for example, so seldom have. And if a poem is read aloud one recognizes that here too everything is right and more than right.

These primary and striking virtues of Cummings' poetry imply in the poet much more than merely a good eye and a good ear, though by no means all the literary virtues. It is only natural for reviewers to endow the writer whom they admire with the abilities and intentions they admire, and I shall try not to make this mistake. At least two reviewers have called attention to Cummings' feeling for American speech, and one has written of his "accuracy in noting the cadences of talk and making music of it." The reviewer then quotes as an example the famous Buffalo Bill poem. Now the cadence of talk is presumably the result of feeling in the one who talks, and it can be argued that the most accurate use of a cadence is the one which carries most feeling. And of feeling, of typical recognizable feeling, I think Cummings' phrases carry surprisingly little. He does not bother with the typical. Rather it is some peculiar and particular phrase or expression which he is apt to value. Thus he wrote a sonnet, a very good one, round abslatively posolutely. The phrase about Buffalo Bill:

is accurate in the sense that it is well put together, stands on its feet, but it does not give the impression of a living voice one half so strongly as, for example, Eliot's

One would not venture to say that any person spoke or appeared in these poems who was anything but frankly a grotesque, a marionette. Cummings' lack of interest in giving the impression of a liv-