Sex And E. E. Cummings: Humanizing The Common Man

Abstract

There are two motifs in Cummings' poetry on which critics have especially remarked: sexuality and individuality. They have seen Cummings as a carpe diem poet (Marks 68) and "a kind of metropolitan Thoreau" (Fraser 265). I have shown that both of these views are somewhat limited. Cummings' love poetry fits into the carpe diem tradition only by implication. Such Cummings poems as "granted the all/ saving our young kiss only" (373) and "god gloats upon Her stunning flesh. Upon" (77) in which Cummings describes "the shovings and lovings of Her tongue" show how his verse differs from traditional carpe diem poetry (such as Marvell’s "To His Coy Mistress"): Cummings' poetry does not rely upon an awareness of our mortality as a lure. Cummings instead uses a celebration of the sexual as a way to seduce his love. Another way in which Cummings' verse differs from traditional love poetry is in its explicit sexual language. He avoids the euphemisms which we find so often in love poetry and instead uses frank language to describe sexuality. As the critical views on sexuality in Cummings' poetry are incomplete, so are the critical views on the individuals we find there. Cummings creates individuals by carefully crafting the poems. Through dialect, tortured syntax, and singular line breaks Cummings' characters become individuals. But he places these individuals in situations which we share. Such universal aspects of life as death and art make the individuals species specific enough to be representative of common human qualities. Sex is one shared aspect of life to which Cummings returns again and again in order to rebroaden and rehumanize his individuals into what Samuel Johnson calls "the genuine progeny of common humanity" (561). As “just representations of general nature" (561), these representative individuals create a "common man" motif which runs throughout Cummings' verse.