E. E. Cummings: Poetry and Ecology (Nature, Culture and Literature, 8)

By employing the modernist devices of fragmentation, recombination, and accentuated blank space, E. E. Cummings engages singularly with being on earth. This ecological achievement was largely ignored by the New Critics, and the subsequent semiotic spirit which has been holding that the sign hardly has to do with concrete existence on earth ironically perpetuated the neglect. In this book Etienne Terblanche shows that Cummings's ecology relocates his oeuvre and status in contemporary discourse. For, the poet follows, mimes, and connects with the unfolding changes of earthly existence and growth-what he views as the 'Tao' of being-in his lyricism, sex poems, satire, and visual-verbal poems. This is true especially of the elusive manner or 'how' of his poetry overall. Careful ecocritical reading of this active culture-nature integrity in his poetry brings about an imperative new understanding and placement of his project. It further serves to show that, in their different ways, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound engage with nature in a similar way, thus again accentuating the importance of Cummings's poetic project to the neglected and vital ecocritical perception of modernism in poetry. Cover 1 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Table of Contents 8 Acknowledgements 10 Preface 11 1 Cummings’s poetic status and his eco-logos 19 1. “What has happened to nature poetry?” 23 2. Cummings: ecology or environment? 27 3. Intersections, cautions, lacunae: an ecocritical overview of Cummings’s critical reception 38 2 The rise of Cummings’s ecological status 62 1. Norman Friedman’s ‘Post Script’ 64 2. Further voices 69 3. Cummings and Taoism 83 3 The scope of Cummings’s poetic ecology 102 1. The varieties of Cummings’s eco-logos 107 1.1. Sonnets and lyricism 107 1.2. Love and erotic poems 112 1.3. Satire 124 1.4. Visual-verbal poems (poempictures) 132 4 The manner and achievement of Cummings’s poetic ecology 140 1. Selected Taoist qualities of Cummings’s poetry 141 1.1. Smallness 141 1.2. Fluidity 150 1.3. Co-incidence (serendipity/ simultaneity/ co-being) 159 1.4. ‘Threeness’ 163 2. Two ecological masterpieces: the leaf and hummingbird poems 170 5 A modernist reconfiguration? Cummings, Eliot, Pound, and the modernist poetic eco-logos 186 1. Mainstream modernist ambivalence towards natural existence: the ambiguous end of the eco-logos 189 2. ‘Desarts of vast eternity’: Eliot’s searing wastelands as symbols of the ambivalent eco-logos 195 3. Eliot’s affirmative eco-logos: his ‘threeness’ 203 4. Pound’s paideuma: notes on his eco-logos 214 5. ‘Threeness’ as a key value of the modernist poetic eco-logos: Cummings, Eliot, Pound 229 Bibliography 240 Index 247