{"numero_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_sha256": "27427641c1b8fc9130cf5b9c80667914e98f290d8c0d0cb44d03e91f67747429", "source_tei": "https://github.com/Princeton-CDH/bluemountain-transcriptions/blob/main/periodicals/bmtnaay/issues/1923/07_01/bmtnaay_1923-07_01.tei.xml", "source_mets": "https://github.com/pulibrary/BlueMountain/blob/main/metadata/periodicals/bmtnaay/issues/1923/07_01/bmtnaay_1923-07_01.mets.xml", "url_numero": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01", "articles": [{"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c002", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c002", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "n. p.", "page_fin": "n. p.", "image_debut": 2, "image_fin": 2, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.2", "titre_corps": "CRUCIFIED SHADOWS Mark Turbyfill", "titre_sommaire": "CRUCIFIED SHADOWS Mark Turbyfill", "signature_source": "", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 2, "page_imprimee": "n. p.", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.2", "debut_caractere": 338, "fin_caractere_exclue": 527, "texte": "CRUCIFIED SHADOWS Mark Turbyfill\nSYRINIX Gorham B. Munson\nBOWLS Marianne Moore\nFOUR POEMS E. E. Cummings\nOLD MELODIES.\" LOVE AND DEATH Malcom Cowley\nCOMMENT j. B. W.\nCORRESPONDENCE G. B. M."}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c003", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c003", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "n. p.", "page_fin": "n. p.", "image_debut": 2, "image_fin": 2, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.3", "titre_corps": "Material for Nos. 5 and 6 was accepted and rejected with the", "titre_sommaire": "Material for Nos. 5 and 6 was accepted and rejected with the", "signature_source": "", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 2, "page_imprimee": "n. p.", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.2", "debut_caractere": 529, "fin_caractere_exclue": 739, "texte": "Material for Nos. 5 and 6 was accepted and rejected with the\nadvice of Malcom Cowley. It was printed under my direction, with\nthe kind assistance of Mr. Richard Bassett and Miss Susan Street.\nJ. B. Wheelwright."}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c004", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c004", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "1", "page_fin": "1", "image_debut": 3, "image_fin": 3, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.4", "titre_corps": "CRUCIFIED SHADOWS.", "titre_sommaire": "CRUCIFIED SHADOWS.", "signature_source": "Mark Turbyfill", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 3, "page_imprimee": "1", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.3", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 421, "texte": "CRUCIFIED SHADOWS.\nMark Turbyfill.\nI remember a dune screened in rain,\nLove in communion, its voluntary of tears\nNow my sight through a vista of years\nBeholds the pattern of formalized grief •\ni he figure ascends the lyrical mount,\nAnd the zenith of personal pain\n(Buds not blown to the wind but slain)\nIs seen as two lines, cruciform —\nPictorial balance,\nMotif of blossoms strangely illumed,\nBorne by a shadow up a hill."}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c005", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c005", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "2", "page_fin": "11", "image_debut": 4, "image_fin": 13, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.5", "titre_corps": "SYRINX.", "titre_sommaire": "SYRINX.", "signature_source": "Gorham B. Munson", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 4, "page_imprimee": "2", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.4", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 2924, "texte": "SYRINX.\n\nA complete study of Cummings should take penetrating account of his\npainting and drawing, and no estimate of his literary work can begin without\nnoting the important fact that Cummings is a painter. It has bearings, as we\nshall later see, on his written word's. Cummings creates perfect lyrics, and\na perfect lyric is indefinable and unalyzable. The nearest we can come to it\nbeyond a subjective recognition and feeling is to say, as Cummings wrote of\nthe Mountain by Gaston Lachaise and of the personality of Jean Le Negre,\nthat the perfect lyric is a verb : it is an is. But to admit the impregnability\nof the lyric is not necessarily to proclaim it as the highest manifestation of\nart. If we say that the lyric equals is, we can still say that the full develop-\nment of art equals a sentence, and thereby indicate roughly the relation\nof the lyric to more ideological forms. Nor does every sentence require an is.\nThe verb-quality of the lyric, however, throws criticism back upon the attri-\nbutes of the is that Cummings creates. The most distinguishing attribute of\nCummings' lyricism is its grace. And grace again is unanalyzable and inde-\nfinable. Even Poe, could not crystatize it. Of grace, he wrote, \" perhaps the\nelements are a vivid fancy and a quick sense of the proportionate. Grace,\nhowever, may be most satisfactorily defined as 'a term applied, in despair, to\nthat class of the impressions of Beauty which admit of no analysis. ' \".\nWhen we attack Cummings' originality, we can, however, proceed\nfurther by quoting from Poe again \" My first object (as usual) was original-\nity. The extent to which this has been neglected in versification, is one of\nthe most unaccountable things in the world. Admitting that there is little\npossibility of variety in mere rhythm, it is still clear that the possible va-\nrieties of metre and stanza are absolutely infinite — and yet, for centuries,\nno man, in verse, has ever done, or ever seemed to think of doing, an original\nthing. The fact is, that originality (unless in minds of very unusual force) is\nby no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general,\nto be found, it must be elaborately sought, and although a positive merit of\nthe highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation \" .\nToday, this statement still covers with all its primal pertinence the majority\nof poets. A minority has found in vers libre great possibility of variety in\nrhythm and of this minority, Cummings has probably accomplished more\noriginal things in rhythm, metre and stanza than any three other poets com-\nbined. And it is precisely by negation that he has attained originality. He\nhas simply cancelled out his Education (the dignified name for an unque-\nstioning acceptance of custom).\nThe result is, he sees freshly. Cummings sees words. As Dr. J. S. Watson\nnoted, his words stand 4< erect on the page with a clean violence \"."}, {"page_pdf": 5, "page_imprimee": "3", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.5", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 2306, "texte": "The originality of Cummings resolves into two elements. The first is the\naccurate choice of words. The second is the pains taken to display his ac-\ncuracy mistakably. The latter is, of course, much more uncommon in liter-\nature than the first. It is, an adaptation of advertising technic to literary\nintentions.\nTo display and force upon the reader his accuracy, Cummings has been\nobliged to reorganize punctuation and typography. Cummings makes punctuat-\nion and typography active instruments for literary expression. Here his painter's\nskill in composition aids him. Yet, in no case, does he leave the frontiers of\nliterature for the plastic arts as did Apollinaire i«\\ Calligrammes. His typo-\ngraphical design in every example reinforces his literary content. He has\nperceived that the printing-press has made poetry something to be seen as\nwell as heard : he has realized that visual notations of auditory rhythms sti-\nmulates the ears of silent readers. He is the first successful creator of cal-\nligrams. Most writers could profitably take lessons in arresting attention\nfrom American advertising experts. American advertising experts can take\nlessons from Cummings.\nI catalog below some of the means employed by Cummings to display\nhis accuracy and to indicate tempo.\n1. Capitals are used principally for emphasis. This abolishes immedia-\ntely the academic nonsense about the capitalization of the first letter in\nevery line of poetry and the capitalization of the pronoun, I. It is then a\nsimplification for the sake of pointing an unmistakable finger at emphatic\nwords. E.g.,—\nto enjoy the composed sudden body atop which always\nquivers the electric Distinct face hanghtily vital clinched\nin a swoon of synopsis.\n2. Commas are used to indicate pauses wherever the poet decides\nthat cadence requires them, even if it involves the separation of words never\npreviously divided in that manner. E.g.,—\n(if you toss him a coin he will pick it cleverly from, the\nair and stuff it seriously in, his minute pocket).\n3. Blank space is often used to isolate a word or words in a naked\n■exactitude and emphasis from the rest of the poem. E.g.,—\nwhistles far and wee.\n4. In order to indicate slow tempo, words are spread apart by hyphens\nor spaces or have extra letters added. E.g.\ngen\nteel-ly\nlugu-\nbri. otis."}, {"page_pdf": 6, "page_imprimee": "4", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.6", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 1978, "texte": "5. In order to indicate quick tempo, several words are often run to-\ngether as one word. E.g.,—\nand break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat.\n6. Stanzaic divisions, line breakage and space relationships are freely\nvaried for the display of accuracy and the indication of auditory rhythm. The\ncadences are emphatically not disjointed by such methods. On the contrary,\nCummings's sentences often begin their meaning in one stanza and jump to\nthe next before completing it. The parts of his poems do not run down,\nbut continue their operation until the final line. That is why, I conceive,\nDr. Watson likened them to a roller coaster on a scenic railway. Three Uni-\nted States Sonnets (Broom, May, 1922).\nTo illustrate how expressive punctuation can become in Cummings'\nhands, I cite from Caritas (Broom, July, 1922) a complete stanza made up\nsolely of punctuation marks. A splendidly average citizen listening to a Sal-\nvation Army meeting is asked to increase the collection by twenty-five cents\nin order to make an even dollar. His mental processes are precisely and\neconomically recorded as follows:\n> ?\n? ? ?\n!\nThis, if one likes, also makes notation of a crescendo banged on the evan-\ngelical drum and reaching its final Boom! Boom ! in the next stanza\nwhich is\nNix, kid.\nAccuracy in itself has, esthetic quality. Although it is not necessarily ele-\ngant, but Cummings has an exquisite ear. His neat successes in hitting the bulls-\neye are always accompanied by a crisp sense of verse-music. I am absolved\nfrom dilation on this by the simple expedient of quoting a stanza from Pnella\nMea. {Dial, January, 1921):\nIn her perfectest array\nmy lady, moving in the day,\nis a little stranger thing\nin the morning wandering.\nAnd to double-clinch conviction, this concluding stanza 8 of a poem from the\nDial, October, 1921 :\nThe flute of morning stilled in noon —\nnoon the implacable bassoon —\nnow Twilight seeks the thrill of moon,\nwashed with a wild and thin\ndespair of violin."}, {"page_pdf": 7, "page_imprimee": "5", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.7", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 2508, "texte": "Cummings avoids the pictorial excesses of Apollinaire with sureness.\nWith equal certainty, he escapes the \" musicality of literature \" esthetic. His\ncare for the word in its ideational meanings holds him to the moorings that\nSwinburne disastrously cut. For he remembers that if ideas are lost in pictor-\nial, or musical qualities, then writing ceases to be literature and becomes weak-\nly something else.\nOne of the essences of the pure lyric is simplicity, and simplicity requires\n(a) that it present an isolated idea as its base or (b) that it present a brief\nsummary of an ideational research. As (b), it is the incomplete and uncom-\nplicated reduction to a song of huge documents of ratiocination. As his idea-\nbase, Cummings seems to prefer the lyrical summary.\nHis topics are the again-and-again-and-again handled themes of all lyri-\ncists : and what he says about these enigmas does not differ in substance\nfrom what has been reiterated. The difference lies rather in the freshness\nwith which they are apprehended, in the novelty with which they are pre-\nsented. The old result stated in new terms regains its former glamor.\nThus, the concept that life is a brevity composed of pleasure and pain\nemerges in an appealing new coat of varnish as\n(Do you think}) the\ni do, world\nis probably made\nof roses <£ hello:\n(of solongs and\\ ashes).\nOn another occasion the concept that spring is a quickening revivifying sea-\nson is conveyed by re-creating that season as a fetching sloppy ragtime mist-\nress. Again, the statement that war is a horror which cannot drown out the\nmagnetic life of young men and women, cannot submerge the inexorable\nuprush of human tides, is equally freshly conveyed. Death is seen as a\nfaultless gentleman : death is approached in a jaunty American fashion.\nhe was a handsome man\nand what i want to know is\nhov do yon like your blneeyed boy\nMister Death.\nA particular triumph in the recreation of an old concept - that of Pan-\noccurs in an untitled poem. Cummings wisely places the poem in undefiled\nchildhood. The season is \" Just-spring \", the world is \" mud-luscious M and\n\" puddle-wonderful \", the children are playing marbles, piracies, hop-scotch\nand jump-rope, when a balloon man whistles, and off they run in quick\nresponse to his magical personality. The data of our childhoods immediately\ninforms us that the balloon vendor was our authentic Pan, that his whistle\nblew the pure strains of the joyous god.\nAnd now to render amends for these partial reductions ot Cummings'"}, {"page_pdf": 8, "page_imprimee": "6", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.8", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 2026, "texte": "lyrics, I quote one of his poems entire (Sunset, Broom, July, 1922). Note\nthe vowel and consonantal relationships, the color unity of the first stanza,\nthe bell unity of the second, the dragging tempo of the last, the live tran-\nsitions, the enchanting typographical display, the consummate magic. Cum-\nmings is right in declaring that Swinburne did not exhaust the lyric.\nSUNSET.\nstinging\ngold swarms\nupon the spires\nsilver\nchanie the litanies the\ngreat bells are ringing with rose\nthe lewd fat bells\nand a tall\nwind\nis dragging\nthe sea\nwith\ndream\n-s\nNeither of Cummings1 pieces of criticism, one devoted to the sculptor,\nGaston Lachaise, the other to T. S. Eliot, strikes me as achieved. The critique\non Eliot is unpardonably out of key with its subject. For positive criticisms,\nboth are overmuch concerned with the stupidities of other critics and inferior\nartists. Both are stalled short of developed crystallizations by a foolish disre-\nspect for criticism, a disrespect that belongs] peculiarly to the last century.\nTo write of the Mountain by Lachaise : \" Merely to contemplate its perfectly\n\" knit enormousness was to admit that analysis of, or conscious thinking on\n\" our part about, a supreme aesthetic triumph, is a very pitiful substitute for\n\" that sensation which is impossibly the equivalent of what the work itself\n\" thinks of us\": is merely to exhibit an amazing confusion. For surely it is\nnot a question of substituting analysis for the original impact, but a matter\nof adding a term to that impact, a business of still more enhancing our first\npleasure by conscious thought about it. I do not wish to imply that Cum-\nmings cannot or does not analyze his esthetic impressions: he does and\nwould do so publicly, doubtless, if he did not strangely regard that act as\nunseemly. Consequently, the contour of his criticism is impressionistic and\ntherefore incomplete.\nCummings' criticism focuses flashlights upon his own work. He states\nadmirably the approach which should be taken towards himself in particular"}, {"page_pdf": 9, "page_imprimee": "7", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.9", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 3113, "texte": "and indeed towards all primitive (technical sense) art. This art \" cannot be\ngrasped until we have accomplished the thorough destruction of the world\nHe notes certain accomplishments which \" require of us an intelligent pro-\ncess of the highest order, namely the negation on our part, by thinking, of\nthinking That is to say, our first process is the inducing of a relaxed\nsensitiveness, the opening of all our receptive pores, the complete surrender\nto what is before us. Afterwards, we can stiffen, we can call in our education,\nwe can fight back. If our reception-data survive this recovery, then we have\nwhat we must admit is a personal validity.\nComing closer, we find Cummings turning on the intention of Eliot a\npassage from Eliot on Marlowe. We may take the same passage and turn it\nback on Cummings' poetry and forward on his prose. The statement is :\n\" ....this style which secures its emphasis by always hesitating on the\nedge of caricature at the right moment....\n....this intense and serious and indubitably great poetry, which, like some\ngreat painting and sculpture, attains its effects by something not unlike\ncaricature\nCloser still, we discover statements on the personality of Lachaise which\nseem to me to encompass in a large degree the temperament of Cummings.\nLachaise, he says, is \" inherently naif, fearlessiy intelligent, utterly sincere.\nIt is accurate to say that his two greatest hates are the hate of insincerity\nand the hate of superficiality \". He desires \" to negate the myriad with the\nsingle, to annihilate the complicatednesses and prettinesses and trivialities of\nSouthern civilizations with the enormous, the solitary, the fundamental \". He\nachieves superlative esthetic victories by a \" complete intelligence, or the\nintelligence functioning at intuitional velocity \". Let us, I suggest, read the\nname, Cummings, for the name, Lachaise. And let us add this note on\nCezanne by way of understanding why Cummings can be called naif and\nprimitive. \" Cezanne became truly naif—not by superficially contemplating\nand admiring the art of primitive peoples, but by carefully misbelieving and\nviolently disunderstanding a second hand world \".\n(Evidently), we are now entangled in Cummings' temperament as a\ncondition for his work. In order to define it sufficiently, we must examine\nthe part it acts in The Enormous Room. (Boni and Liveright).\nThe subject-matter of this book consists of a brutal environment, an\nignoble set of circumstances, and an artist countering against them. Cum-\nmings was an ambulance driver in the Norton Harjes unit during the recent\nbloody squabble for markets. His friend, 8., in the same unit wrote some\nletters evincing an intelligent outlook on this mean scramble which were\nintercepted by the censor. Thereupon, both B. and Cummings were speedily\npropelled into a horrible detention camp, Ferte de la Mace, and with some\nthree score comrades ill-treated for several months. After which edification,\nCummings was released through the intervention of American authorities, and\nB. went on to a \" regular prison \" for further outrage before the incredibly"}, {"page_pdf": 10, "page_imprimee": "8", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.10", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 2921, "texte": "brilliant U. S. Government secured his release likewise. Circumstance and envi-\nronment were therefore abnormal, bizarre, filthy, degrading and wounding.\nAgainst them Cummings countered with everything he had, and that was much\nmore than the single blind rage of Dos Passos. For besides rage, Cummings\nhad scorn, irony, sarcasm, courage, and a love for simple men. Especially,\nhe had a dramatizing sense, a childlike faculty for personification and play-\nbuilding. More especially, he had an undefeatable sense of humor. Most\nespecially, he was tuned up to record in detail the slightest quiver contain-\ned in the slightest split-second of the slightest jar upon his being: that is,\nhe was intensely and every instant alive. What came to him came vividly\nand indelibly. His triumph — the triumph of artist over hostility - is The\nEnormous Room.\nOn page 249 of this brilliant work, its basis is stated. « for an educated\ngent or lady, to create is first of all to destroy — that there is and can be\nno such thing as authentic art art until the bons trues (whereby we are taught\nto see and imitate on canvass and by words this so-called world) are entirely\nand thoroughly and perfectly annihilated by that vast and painful process\nof Unthinking which may result in a minute bit of purely personal Feeling.\nWhich minute bit is Art ».\nIt took a high amout of Unthinking to produce such accuracies as for\ninstance, these : « a room about sixteen feet short and four feet narrow » ;\n< a hunk of bread and a piece of water. » But the unusual quality of Cum-\nmings' feeling resides, in two things : his painter's eye and his writer's ear.\nThat eye is keen in noting planes, angles, textures, colors, the essential\ndetermining features : that ear is expert in reducing the visual booty to ca-\ndences. Take these as instances of their cooperation.\n(1) « I had taken automatically some six or eight steps in pursuit of\n« the fleeing spectre when, right over my head, the grey stone curdled with\n« a female darkness; the hard and the angular softening in a putrescent\n« explosion of thick wriggling laughter. I started, looked up, and encountered\n« a window stuffed with four savage fragments of crowding Face : four livid,.\n« shaggy disks focussing hungrily ; four pair of uncouth eyes rapidly smoul-\n« dering; eight lips shaking in a toothless and viscous titter. Suddenly above\n« and behind these terrors rose a single horror — a crisp vital head, a young\n« ivory actual face, a night of firm, alive, icy hair, a white large frightful smile ».\n(2) « Card table : 4 stares play banque with 2 cigarettes\n« (1 dead) & A pipe the clashing faces yanked by a\n« leanness of one candle bottle-stuck (Birth of X)\n« where sits The Clever Man who pyramids, sings\n« (mornings) 'Meet Ms?... »\n« which specimen of telegraphic technique being interpreted, means: Judas,\n« Garibaldi, and The Holland Skipper (whom the reader will meet de suite) —"}, {"page_pdf": 11, "page_imprimee": "9", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.11", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 3263, "texte": "« Garibaldi's cigarette having gone out, so greatly is he absorbed — play banque\n« with four intent and highly focussed individuals who may or may not be The\n« Scoolmaster, Monsieur Auguste, The Barber, and Meme; with The Clever Man\n« (as nearly always) acting as banker. The candle by whose somewhat uncor-\n< pulent illumination the various physiognomies are yanked into a ferocious\n« unity is stuck into the mouth of a bottle. The lighting of the whole, the\n« rhythmic disposition of the figures, construct a sensuous integration suggestive\n« of The Birth of Christ by one of the Old Masters. The Clever Man, having\n« had his usual morning warble, is extremely quiet. He will win, he pyramids\n« — and he pyramids because he has the cash and can afford to make every\n« play a big one. All he needs is the rake of a croupier to complete his disin-\n« terested and wholly nerveless poise ».\nThere is another duality in Cummings' feeling that increases its special\nquality. He is both realistic and fanciful. Without a wince, he can describe\na fresh smoking turd or a brutal mauling with stove-pipes and on the next\npage evoke the most charming gnomes or fairies or fantastic attic toys. This\ncombination of hardness and fancy is not often encountered.\nBut to get back to the passage on the minute bit of purely personal\nfeeling which is art, does this not mean, in bald esthetic terms, that Com-\nmings is a partisan of content-first, form-second, writing ? Does it not mean\nthat his first stimulus comes from the emotional and perceptive materials of\nhis experiences ? And afterwards, he crystallizes them into formal beauties ?\nCertainly, that was the proceedure in The Enormous Room. Here Cummings\nhad a huge mass of experience whose energy demanded expression. This\nexperience, this dynamic reality, held his major interest. It dictated word\nby word the problems of its presentation. Whereas a form-first, content-second,\nwriter, although he started with this initial experience, would very soon shift\nhis major interest to his presentation problems, would play loose and fast\nwith his initial bits of pure feeling for the sake of his non-representative design.\nHis pure feelings would be but helpless pawns in the grip of his intellect,\nwhereas in The Enormous Room we have an intellect performing an efficient\nservitude to feeling. In Cummings1 case, neither content nor form, neither the\nrepresentative nor the non-representative, overbalance one another. There is a\nunique marriage there between form and content, that marriage — which we\nare told denotes successful art.\nLet us examine this union in The Enormous Room. No, first let us point\nout several additional interesting details of that book. One is fresh adjectival\njuxtapositions. Again and again by a simple transposition ancient couplings\nare revivified. Another is at word coinage, a game largely discontinud\nby the English speaking since the days of Queen Elizbeth. Another is a re-\npercussion from the American detective story, with its speed of narration,\nits exaggerated villain and hero types, its piling-up of exciting situations, all\nmarvellously sublimated in Cummings' mind. A fourth is the awareness of the\nknockabout vitality, vigor, raciness, authenticity, humor, poetry and vividness"}, {"page_pdf": 12, "page_imprimee": "10", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.12", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 2993, "texte": "of the American language. After reading Sandburg and Cummings, one be-\nlieves in the possibilities of this new tongue as one does not believe in it\nafter reading John V. A. Weaver. Fifth, there is splendid caricature. But back\nto the larger successes of The Enormous Room !\nOne of its large successes is its minor organisms. Sentences, paragraphs,\nincidents, chapters are all carefully built up. (Unlike most of his contempo-\nraries, Cummings can still swing a long sentence. His verbs have a remarkable\nkick : enough to keep a dozen adjectives on the move). As a minute spe-\ncimen of minor organization, take this :\n« It must have been five o'clock. Steps. A vast cluttering of the exterior\n« of the door —by whom? Whang opens the door. Turnkey-creature extending\n« a piece of chocolate with extreme and surly caution. I say « Merci » and\n« seize chocolate. Klang the door ».\nIt is a miniature, but note that its introduction creates imminence, its\nprogression rises in a crescendo, and its final sentence closes neatly the incident.\nAs a more extended minor organism, consider the portrait of the little\ndoll-like Belgian Machine-Fixer which rises to this lyrical invocation - an\nindirect reproach a hundred times more effective, it seems to me, than the\ndirect, well-chewed anger of the usual protestant against inhumanity.\n« And his ghastly and toylike wizened and minute arm would try to\n« make a pass at their lofty lives. O gonvernement frangais, I think it was not\n< very clever of you to put this terrible doll in La Ferte ; I should have left\n« him in Belgium with his little doll-wife if I had been You ; for when Gover-\n« nements are found dead there is always a little doll on top of them, pulling\n« and tweaking with his little hands to get back the microscopic knife which\n« sticks firmly in the quiet meat of their hearts ».\nIn the final chapter there is a magnificent arrangement of surprize and\ncontrast. In an abbreviated Joycian manner, the cupboards of the disagreeable\nare spilled all over the page and then as the ship enters New York harbor\ncomes this :\n« My God what an ugly island. Hope we don't stay here long. All the\n« redbloods first class much excited about land, Damned ugly, I think.\n« Hullo.\n« The tall, impossibly tall, incomparably tall, city shoulderingly upward\n« into hard sunlight leaned a little through the octaves of its parallel edges,\n« leaningly strode upward into firm hard snowy sunlight; the noises of America\n« nearingly throbbed with smokes and hurrying dots which are men and which\n« are women and which are things new and curious and hard strange and\n« vibrant and immense, lifting with a great ondulous stride firmly into immortal\n« sunlight. *\nEach chapter mounts on its own crescendo, and each crescendo relates\nto all the others. There is then a major organization. This major, roughly\nmodelled upon Bunyan's Prllgrim's Progress, must have presented great re-\nsistances to Cummings, as a glance at his plan will immediately corroborate."}, {"page_pdf": 13, "page_imprimee": "11", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.13", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 1541, "texte": "The first third of his book is a chronological narrative, the following half\nis a timeless series of final sixth is again chronological nar-\nrative, yet he has actually shifted from a narrative and time technic into a\ntimeless and descriptive technic and back again without the slightest loss of\nmovement. Indeed, the curve of his central crescendo keeps ascending from\nportrait to portrait until it seems as though its climax is certainly reached\nrn an unforgettable eulogy of Jean Le Negre, but even after that it moves\nup higher as the book changes to narrative. B. is sent by the investigating\ncommittee to Precigne. After he leaves, Cummings records :\n« I went to my bed and lay down quietly in my great pelisse. The\n« clamor and filth of the room brightened and became distant and faded. I\n« heard the voice of the jolly Alsatian saying:\n« 4 Courage, won ami% your comrade is not dead ; you will see him later '\n« and after that, nothing. In front of and within my eyes lived suddenly a\n« violent and gentle and dark silence ».\nIn that silence the arc of The Enormous Room halts its upward progress\nruns level a few seconds, and then drops rapidly down for the concluding\nchapters.\nEach page of this book is a rewarding study in mechanics ; overwhel-\nming as Cummings' subject matter was it has all been crystallized in a way\nto give the last jerk and whirret that inhered therein. Cummings has jabbed\nhis pen into life, but he has also twisted it in the wound, and it is this\ntwist of the pen that makes literature.\n\nGorham B. Munson."}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c006", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c006", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "12", "page_fin": "12", "image_debut": 14, "image_fin": 14, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.6", "titre_corps": "BOWLS.", "titre_sommaire": "BOWLS.", "signature_source": "Marianne Moore", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 14, "page_imprimee": "12", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.14", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 1300, "texte": "BOWLS.\nMarianne Moore.\non the green\nwith lignum vitae balls and ivory markers,\nthe pins planted in wild duck formation,\nand quickly dispersed:\nby this survival of ancient punctilio\nin the manner of Chinese lacquer carving,\nlayer after layer exposed by certainty of touch and unhurried incision\nso that only so much color shall be revealed as is necessary to the picture\nI learn that we are precisians —\nnot citizens of Pompeii arrested in action\nas a cross section of one's correspondence would seem to imply.\nRenouncing a policy of boorish indifference\nto everything that has been said since the days of Matilda,\nI shall purchase the Etymological Dictionary of Modern English\nthat I may understand what is written\nand like the ant and the spider\nreturning from time to headquarters,\nshall answer the question\nas to « why I like winter better than I like summer »\nand acknowledge that it does not make me sick\nto look modern playwrights and poets and novelists straight in the face —\nthat I feel just the same ;\nand I shall write to the publisher of the magazine\nwhich will « appear the first day of the month\nand disappear before one has had time to buy it\nunless one takes proper precaution, »\nand make an effort to please —\nsince he who gives quickly gives twice\nin nothing so much as in a letter."}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c007", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c007", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "13", "page_fin": "17", "image_debut": 15, "image_fin": 19, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.7", "titre_corps": "FOUR POEMS.", "titre_sommaire": "FOUR POEMS.", "signature_source": "E. E. Cummings", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 15, "page_imprimee": "13", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.15", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 784, "texte": "FOUR POEMS.\n\nI.\na man who had fallen among thieves\nlay by the roadside on his back\ndressed in fifteenthrate ideas\nwearing a round jeer for a hat\nfate per a somewhat more than less\nemancipated evening\nhad in return for consciousness\nendowed him with a changeless grin\nwhereon a dozen staunch and leal\ncitizens did graze at pause\nthen fired by hypercivic zeal\nsought newer pastures or because\nswaddled with a frozen brook\nof pinkest vomit out of eyes\nwhich noticed nobody he looked\nas if he did not care to rise\none hand did nothing on the vest\nits wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt\nwhile the mute trouserfly confessed\na button solemnly inert.\nBrushing from whom the stiffened puke\ni put him all into my arms\nand staggered banged with terror through\na million billion trillion stars"}, {"page_pdf": 16, "page_imprimee": "14", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.16", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 528, "texte": "II.\npoets yeggs and thirsties\nsince we are spanked and put to sleep by dolls let\nus not be continually astonished should\nfrom their actions and speeches\nsawdust perpetually leak\nrather is it between such beddings and\nbumpings of ourselves to be observed\nhow in this fundamental respect the well\nrecognised regime of childhood is reversed\nmeantime in dreams let us investigate\nthoroughly each one his optima rerum first\nhaving taken care to lie upon our\nabdomens for greater privacy and lest\npunished bottoms interrupt philosophy"}, {"page_pdf": 17, "page_imprimee": "15", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.17", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 894, "texte": "III.\nthe season' tis, my lovely lambs,\nof Sumner Volstead Christ and Co.\nthe epoch of Mann's righteousness\nthe age of dollars and no cents.\nWhich being quite beyond dispute\nas prove from Troy (N. Y.) to Cairo\n(Egypt) the luminous dithyrambs\nof large immaculate unmute\nantibolshevistic gents\n(each manufacturing word by word\nhis own unrivalled brand of pyro\n-technic blurb anent the (hie)\nhero dead that gladly (sic)\nin far lands perished of unheard\nof maladies including flu)\nmy little darlings, let us now\npassionately remember how —\nbraving the worst, of peril heedless,\neach braver than the other, each\n(a typewriter within his reach)\nupon his fearless derriere\nsturdily seated — Colonel Needless\nTo Name and General You know who\na string of pretty medals drew\n(while messrs jack james john and jim\nin token of their country's love\nreceived my dears the order of\nThe Artificial Arm and Limb)"}, {"page_pdf": 18, "page_imprimee": "16", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.18", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 910, "texte": "— or, since bloodshed and kindred questions\ninhibit unprepared digestions,\ncome : let us mildly contemplate\nbeginning with his wellfulled pants\nearth's biggest grafter, nothing less;\nthe Honorable Mr. (guess)\nwho, breathing on the ear of fate,\nlanded a seat in the legislat-\nure whereas tommy so and so\n(an erring child of circumstance\nwhom the bulls nabbed at 33rd)\npulled six months for selling snow\n\nIV.\nthis evangelist\nbuttons with his big gollywog voice\nthen kingdomofheaven up behind and crazily\nskating thither and hither in filthy sawdust\nchucks and rolls\nagainst the tent his thick joggling fists\nhe is persuasive\nthe editor cigarstinking hobgoblin swims\nupward in his swivelchair one fist dangling scandal while\nfive other fingers snitch\nrapidly through mist a defunct king as\nlinotypes gobblehobble\nour lightheavy twic twoc ingly attacks\nlanding a onetwo\nwhich doubles up suddenly his bunged hinging"}, {"page_pdf": 19, "page_imprimee": "17", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.19", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 410, "texte": "victim, against the\ngiving roper amid\nscreams of deeply bulging thousands\ni too omit one kelly\nin response to howjedooze the candidates new silk\nlid bounds gently from his baldness\na smile masturbates softly in the vacant\nlot of his physiognomy\nhis scientifically pressed trousers ejaculate spats\na strikingly succulent getup\nbut\nwe knew a muff hunter and he said to us Kid.\ndaze nutn like it.\n\nE. E. Cummings."}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c008", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c008", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "13", "page_fin": "13", "image_debut": 15, "image_fin": 15, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.7.1", "titre_corps": "I.", "titre_sommaire": "I.", "signature_source": "", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 15, "page_imprimee": "13", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.15", "debut_caractere": 13, "fin_caractere_exclue": 784, "texte": "I.\na man who had fallen among thieves\nlay by the roadside on his back\ndressed in fifteenthrate ideas\nwearing a round jeer for a hat\nfate per a somewhat more than less\nemancipated evening\nhad in return for consciousness\nendowed him with a changeless grin\nwhereon a dozen staunch and leal\ncitizens did graze at pause\nthen fired by hypercivic zeal\nsought newer pastures or because\nswaddled with a frozen brook\nof pinkest vomit out of eyes\nwhich noticed nobody he looked\nas if he did not care to rise\none hand did nothing on the vest\nits wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt\nwhile the mute trouserfly confessed\na button solemnly inert.\nBrushing from whom the stiffened puke\ni put him all into my arms\nand staggered banged with terror through\na million billion trillion stars"}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c009", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c009", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "14", "page_fin": "14", "image_debut": 16, "image_fin": 16, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.7.2", "titre_corps": "II.", "titre_sommaire": "II.", "signature_source": "", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 16, "page_imprimee": "14", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.16", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 528, "texte": "II.\npoets yeggs and thirsties\nsince we are spanked and put to sleep by dolls let\nus not be continually astonished should\nfrom their actions and speeches\nsawdust perpetually leak\nrather is it between such beddings and\nbumpings of ourselves to be observed\nhow in this fundamental respect the well\nrecognised regime of childhood is reversed\nmeantime in dreams let us investigate\nthoroughly each one his optima rerum first\nhaving taken care to lie upon our\nabdomens for greater privacy and lest\npunished bottoms interrupt philosophy"}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c010", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c010", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "15", "page_fin": "16", "image_debut": 17, "image_fin": 18, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.7.3", "titre_corps": "III.", "titre_sommaire": "III.", "signature_source": "", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 17, "page_imprimee": "15", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.17", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 894, "texte": "III.\nthe season' tis, my lovely lambs,\nof Sumner Volstead Christ and Co.\nthe epoch of Mann's righteousness\nthe age of dollars and no cents.\nWhich being quite beyond dispute\nas prove from Troy (N. Y.) to Cairo\n(Egypt) the luminous dithyrambs\nof large immaculate unmute\nantibolshevistic gents\n(each manufacturing word by word\nhis own unrivalled brand of pyro\n-technic blurb anent the (hie)\nhero dead that gladly (sic)\nin far lands perished of unheard\nof maladies including flu)\nmy little darlings, let us now\npassionately remember how —\nbraving the worst, of peril heedless,\neach braver than the other, each\n(a typewriter within his reach)\nupon his fearless derriere\nsturdily seated — Colonel Needless\nTo Name and General You know who\na string of pretty medals drew\n(while messrs jack james john and jim\nin token of their country's love\nreceived my dears the order of\nThe Artificial Arm and Limb)"}, {"page_pdf": 18, "page_imprimee": "16", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.18", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 401, "texte": "— or, since bloodshed and kindred questions\ninhibit unprepared digestions,\ncome : let us mildly contemplate\nbeginning with his wellfulled pants\nearth's biggest grafter, nothing less;\nthe Honorable Mr. (guess)\nwho, breathing on the ear of fate,\nlanded a seat in the legislat-\nure whereas tommy so and so\n(an erring child of circumstance\nwhom the bulls nabbed at 33rd)\npulled six months for selling snow"}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c011", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c011", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "16", "page_fin": "17", "image_debut": 18, "image_fin": 19, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.7.4", "titre_corps": "IV.", "titre_sommaire": "IV.", "signature_source": "", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 18, "page_imprimee": "16", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.18", "debut_caractere": 403, "fin_caractere_exclue": 910, "texte": "IV.\nthis evangelist\nbuttons with his big gollywog voice\nthen kingdomofheaven up behind and crazily\nskating thither and hither in filthy sawdust\nchucks and rolls\nagainst the tent his thick joggling fists\nhe is persuasive\nthe editor cigarstinking hobgoblin swims\nupward in his swivelchair one fist dangling scandal while\nfive other fingers snitch\nrapidly through mist a defunct king as\nlinotypes gobblehobble\nour lightheavy twic twoc ingly attacks\nlanding a onetwo\nwhich doubles up suddenly his bunged hinging"}, {"page_pdf": 19, "page_imprimee": "17", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.19", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 393, "texte": "victim, against the\ngiving roper amid\nscreams of deeply bulging thousands\ni too omit one kelly\nin response to howjedooze the candidates new silk\nlid bounds gently from his baldness\na smile masturbates softly in the vacant\nlot of his physiognomy\nhis scientifically pressed trousers ejaculate spats\na strikingly succulent getup\nbut\nwe knew a muff hunter and he said to us Kid.\ndaze nutn like it."}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c012", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c012", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "18", "page_fin": "19", "image_debut": 20, "image_fin": 21, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.8", "titre_corps": "OLD MELODIES. LOVE AND DEATH", "titre_sommaire": "OLD MELODIES. LOVE AND DEATH", "signature_source": "Malcolm Cowley", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 20, "page_imprimee": "18", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.20", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 682, "texte": "OLD MELODIES.\nLOVE AND DEATH\n\nI.\nThere is a moment after the embrace\nwhen happily fatigued we do not speak\nwhen still my cheek is resting on your cheek\nwhen hearts throb still and limbs still interlace\nunder the coverlet: there is a moment\nsomewhere existing out of time and space\nsomewhere\n(O tired eternity of your face)\nbetween extremes of ecstasy and torment.\nThere is a moment logical and white\nbehind the wall of flesh : it is as if\nfalling agreeably from some high cliff\nI floated in a limitless sea of light\namong impersonal forms and came to rest\nwithin the personal limits of a night\nwhere chair and bed loom comfortably trite\nwhere still my heart is beating on your chest"}, {"page_pdf": 21, "page_imprimee": "19", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.21", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 1350, "texte": "II.\nThey carry him off in a one horse hack\nand he won't be thinking of coming back.\nThey carry him off in a one horse hack\nand he won't be thinking of coming back.\nThey dump his bones in a six foot hole\nmay God have mercy upon his soul.\nThe dirt clumps down and pebbles drum on his belly\n(O sod that covers that hides the left nipple of his\nbreast and crumbs of frozen clay seeping seeping bet-\nween the stiff intestices of his legs) and the\nWorms crawl out and the worms crawl in\nto build them a dwelling beneath the skin.\n(Naturally I am growing a little hysterical and\nhe is clothed in such linen as he never wore and\nthe new black suit he bought last week at Wana-\nmakers while between him and the gravel or frozen\nrod there are thicknesses of glass, oak, lead. I am\na little hysterical naturally and imagine myself be-\nneath the glass and oak and lead with him, clutch-\ning him perhaps by the shoulder or continuing a\ndesultory conversation about and about, around\nand upon and about)\nand dirt clump-clumps against my thighs\nagainst belly and frozen eyes.\nBetween my fingers, between my knees\nfall shovelsfull of eternities.\nAnd Worms crawl in and worms crawl out\nand round and round and upon and about\nour pointless conversation grows\nand there she goes\nand there she goes and\nalldressedupinher sun daycloes\nand there she goes.\n\nMalcolm Cowley."}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c013", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c013", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "18", "page_fin": "18", "image_debut": 20, "image_fin": 20, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.8.1", "titre_corps": "I.", "titre_sommaire": "I.", "signature_source": "", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 20, "page_imprimee": "18", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.20", "debut_caractere": 30, "fin_caractere_exclue": 682, "texte": "I.\nThere is a moment after the embrace\nwhen happily fatigued we do not speak\nwhen still my cheek is resting on your cheek\nwhen hearts throb still and limbs still interlace\nunder the coverlet: there is a moment\nsomewhere existing out of time and space\nsomewhere\n(O tired eternity of your face)\nbetween extremes of ecstasy and torment.\nThere is a moment logical and white\nbehind the wall of flesh : it is as if\nfalling agreeably from some high cliff\nI floated in a limitless sea of light\namong impersonal forms and came to rest\nwithin the personal limits of a night\nwhere chair and bed loom comfortably trite\nwhere still my heart is beating on your chest"}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c014", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c014", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "19", "page_fin": "19", "image_debut": 21, "image_fin": 21, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.8.2", "titre_corps": "II.", "titre_sommaire": "II.", "signature_source": "", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 21, "page_imprimee": "19", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.21", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 1333, "texte": "II.\nThey carry him off in a one horse hack\nand he won't be thinking of coming back.\nThey carry him off in a one horse hack\nand he won't be thinking of coming back.\nThey dump his bones in a six foot hole\nmay God have mercy upon his soul.\nThe dirt clumps down and pebbles drum on his belly\n(O sod that covers that hides the left nipple of his\nbreast and crumbs of frozen clay seeping seeping bet-\nween the stiff intestices of his legs) and the\nWorms crawl out and the worms crawl in\nto build them a dwelling beneath the skin.\n(Naturally I am growing a little hysterical and\nhe is clothed in such linen as he never wore and\nthe new black suit he bought last week at Wana-\nmakers while between him and the gravel or frozen\nrod there are thicknesses of glass, oak, lead. I am\na little hysterical naturally and imagine myself be-\nneath the glass and oak and lead with him, clutch-\ning him perhaps by the shoulder or continuing a\ndesultory conversation about and about, around\nand upon and about)\nand dirt clump-clumps against my thighs\nagainst belly and frozen eyes.\nBetween my fingers, between my knees\nfall shovelsfull of eternities.\nAnd Worms crawl in and worms crawl out\nand round and round and upon and about\nour pointless conversation grows\nand there she goes\nand there she goes and\nalldressedupinher sun daycloes\nand there she goes."}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c015", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c015", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "20", "page_fin": "25", "image_debut": 22, "image_fin": 27, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.9", "titre_corps": "COMMENT.", "titre_sommaire": "COMMENT.", "signature_source": "", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 22, "page_imprimee": "20", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.22", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 1854, "texte": "COMMENT.\n\nI.\nAll is not sound.\n\nWhen somebody who advertises as an instructor in versification, recom-\nmending a long experience as poet scholar critic, accepted a sonnet of Hillyer's\nfor publication only tentatively, because forsooth the last lines did not scan,\nit was suggested that after greater familiarity with Elizabethan or Hillyer's\nown work, the Alexandrine would seem strange no longer.\nThe only successful experimenter in English polyphonic prose berated a\npoem1 of Cowley's one evening after dinner, sparing neither words breath\nnor time, going so far as to declare him no poet, (though being at the time\na literary agent for his poems), and upon the following afternoon sent for\nit to be reconsidered, because forsooth 1 if it should prove polyphonic prose\neverything would be quite different \\\nSometime later the two who were more or less responsible for No. 4,\nbowing humbly beneath the proud poetic ignorance of their bosses in\nNew York, persevered in the distasteful task of printing Ashton's poems\nmeekly to the last. Then their intelligence rebelled. Very deftly, if some-\nwhat drasticalty, they cut all but the last two lines, which thus became a\ncomment upon the preceding. The bosses in New York apologise to Ashton\nbut the Satanists can not, their injury was intentional. The complete poem\nprinted below, will make all readers meditate upon the kindness of the\nwicked, and the cruelty of the just.\nTHE JILTED MOON\nTonight the tide is coming very smooth,\nSo on the crinkled stretch the moon\nWrites Chinese characters in every groove,\nChanging with silver speed on a long path.\nAre these love-letters, moon ?\n\n1 Secession No. 3. The poem, it may be said here, is not polyphonic prose,\nnor anything like it. It is nothing but nonsense, and not heretical after all. Autho-\nrity: Bab's Ballads, « Wicked Mr. (What's his name?) Blake »."}, {"page_pdf": 23, "page_imprimee": "21", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.23", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 2294, "texte": "If so, you write too fast;\nI cannot read their sense before they pass.\nAnd is your passion strung so violent\nYou cannot be content\nTo have me see and slowly understand,\nBut must spend quickly much for all or none\nWith your too brightly writing hand ?\nThen, moon, I am not your Endymion:\nYour letters are too free to everyone.\nYou see, I am too low for your estate,\nHeart too monogamous, and thoughts too limited for these\nWhite flaming poems of your ice-cold fate.\nYour quickly-burning messages\nTo me are no more than Chinese, o moon,\nAre no more than Chinese.\nWhen No. 4 finally arrived in New York, after having lodged a month\nin the bureau drawers of an utter stranger in Berlin, our Founder delivering\nhimself of the dictum (just before luncheon): « in polyphonic prose rhymes\nbeen hitherto overcrowded and staccato, » especially recommended two poems\nsigned Ashton for attention, because forsooth their cadences were wider and\ntheir recurrent sound patterns more subtle than in any other example of\nthe medium. The poems, which it may be said here are nothing of the sort,\nmust be read to be enjoyed properly, but as they are appealing in their\nlack of grace, and as nothing lends things dignity like analysis, and as\nbesides they were recommended for especial attention, here goes :\nThe first is made up of three passages of monosyllabic conversation\nand a conclusion of commonplace free verse, the which are preceeded First,\nby a bit of triplicate meter containing a distinct metrical achievement, to\nwit, a couplet of eleven monosyllables with four beats ! The sound pattern\nof this passage is in its completeness aabbbaa, all occurring at the\ntermini of the cadencies. Hence it is to be presumed, unless art's hid\ncauses be not found, came the impression of wider polyphonies; Second.\nby a bit of polyphonic prose whose pattern is not staccato because it is\npauper, Third, by a sentence with one assonance, and that a naked beggar\nfollowed by a free verse cadence attogether too familiar; Fourth, by\nanother triplicate passage, all rhymes of which are not terminal to be sure,\nbut which give no polyphonic effect whatever.\nConsidered as modern verse, the second poem is a fake. It is in tum-\nbling meter throughout. A statement not satyric, but technical, for tumbling\n\nRichard Ashton."}, {"page_pdf": 24, "page_imprimee": "22", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.24", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 2020, "texte": "meter1 (which persisted from the Saxon decadence through the time of\nSpencer) allows four beats to a line and unaccented syllables ad lib; a\nprinciple of prosody whereunder Poe and Coleridge were successful and\nAshton pleasant to the point of unpleasantness. His precious bit of polyphonic\nprose, printed more accurately, might have done service as a theme at a\ntime where we were studying tumbling meter at Harvard, and may have\nbeen marked C—. Be this as it may, let us back to our muttons. The\nA.\nrhymes are swing, violin, snatch, catch, floor, curve, swrrve, more, men,\nlight, white, again, black, back, croon, saxophone, tones, tune, (in a line of\ntwo beats), door, one, run, coat, feet, following, cheek, face, speak, poise,\njoy, surge, proceeds, recedes. In addition as internal rhymes there are at\nvarious caesuras, lilt, wiggle, twinkle, moan, grace, urge. For full measure\na litter of illegitimate Swinburne's are thrown in:\nlift and linger and lift once more\nmingles and merges\nfollowing, flattering, following again,\nalso we have such gems as :\nrose-red shimmer\npetal-soft cheek\nhalf-open lips — « too tense to speak », these last.\nHelping us scan this difficult, intricate and subtle medium, we are\ngiven two italics up and down, the beats occuring on these very words!\nAs there is no reason to suspect that anyone who cares to write tumbling\nmeter is bothering to disguise the fact, as there is less reason why such\npistache pastiche should appear in a magazine which is devoted to new forms\nbecause of its ennui with the old, not its ignorance of the good; as fur-\nthermore Ashton has had his poem set up most modernly, breaking his lines\nnot merely at some of the possible caesuras, but even at many impossible\nones, the poem starts oif with quite a kick:\nDown\nit goes\nWith a\nlingering ,wing etc.\nPrinting on the bias in pink or green ink would improve it, but still\nit is not bad, not bad. Soon the rhymes begin to come thick and fast, and\n\n1 Authority : Dean Briggs's Course in Versification. Grade c+."}, {"page_pdf": 25, "page_imprimee": "23", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.25", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 2139, "texte": "to occur, thanks to a disobliging printer, at the beginning of every line or\nso of type. Then quick, just-like-a-flash, one is on to the little game of how\none should write wider and better polyphonic prose. God only knows how\none should read it.\nThe medium it would seem should be studied, even by those who\nwrite it, and nonsense verse as well; but never oh never should the leaders\nof literary novements study English prosody, particulary not from persons\nwho advertise themselves as adepts in that art of pain and beauty....\n\nII.\nPoor at these numbers.\n\nEveryone who is anyone is studying typography as musical notation in\nverse. Future textbooks will have chapters on the subject. Indeed it is funny\nthat Saintsbury has not dealt with it, for :\nIn a review by J. C. Squire — we were hired to read him, of course —\nof the new Cambridge edition of Shakespeare, we were delighted to find\nthis : « Mr. Pollard and Mr. Simpson have made it plain that the punctuation\n(of Shakespeare), which to the mere reader often appears absurd in its va-\ngaries, was deliberately contrived as a guide to the proper speaking of the\nwords. » Mr. Squire also extracts this note :\n« 367, be quick thou'st best. Absence of punctuation denotes rapid delivery ».\nWe therefore ask Johnny Weaver and the other rah-rah boys who can-\nnot forgive the freedoms of Mr. Cummings to attack first this deplorable\neccentricity on the part of William Shakespeare. 1\nIt is not without perturbation that I enter this subject for I shall not\neasily forget my bepuzzlement when it came to setting a poem of Cowley's 2\nup in type. I could not for the life of me decide whether certain passages\nwere free verse, verse of very long cadences, or prose, all this the more\nso without initial capitalization. It was in vain that I compared the Ms.\nwith the printed poem in Secession, in vain that I sent across the Atlantic\nfor an exact Ms. from Cowley, in vain that I motored out to the press\nthrough several of the wildest blizzards known to the memory of the oldest\n\n1 Lifted from copy sent from the bosses in New York.\n2 « Two Swans ». Eight More Harvard Poets. Brentano's 1923."}, {"page_pdf": 26, "page_imprimee": "24", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.26", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 2918, "texte": "living inhabitant of Greater Boston, in order to ensure myself that the poem\nappear as it should sound. All was over. Damon and I were congratulating\nourselves on our faithfulness to friendship and to the movement. A letter\narrived from Cowley asking, kindly but sternly, why his poem was printed\nin 15 lines when it contained only 9? Now, I had done my best to print\n12 lines, and I have done my best for a month in Giverny to get Cowley to\nteach me to count 9, but it is beyond me. I have read that poem over and\nover again, ever since then, counting its verses many times only to arrive\neach time at a different sum. To my dying day I shall be certain that it\ncontains 2 sentences, and that it is very beautiful, but I should hate to risk\nanything for which I cared much by taking a chance on the number of\nlines it has. All this argues (not only against dilettanti compilers of an-\nthologies containings modern verse, but also) for and against experiment in\ntypographical metrical notation. If a poem be beautiful it matters little how\nit be printed, yet on the other hand a reader should be permitted to loose\nnone of its subtle cadencies. Yet, again, is it not as wise to leave one's\nminor effects implicit and inherent, limiting one's hypothetical audience to\nmen of imagination and sense ? Does not Cummings miss at times a forest\nfor the trees, displaying his minor cadencies to the prejudice of his inclusive\nones ?\nI shall not enter the subject after all, at all! Being unlearned in these\nmatters, I fear least anything I have to say tend to increase the prejudice\nof readers rather than to clarify experiment by writers ; and, being unlearn-\ned, I feel keenly the need of an exact metrical notation. Robert Graves in\nan engaging little bore of a book of which I forget the name, seeks to\ndispose of « free verse » because forsooth metrical verse, like Swinburne's\nHertha, has also no exact means of indicating its essential tempo and stress!\n19th Century good usage in spelling and punctuation has deprived us of\nmany devices free to: Milton, Blake, and Co. Old means of indicating tempo\nand stress are now to be recovered with more added. That is fine. There\nis one danger. Preoccupied with experiment, blinded by success we may,\nlike Herrick or Herbert (who, with Josephson, not always gave their poems\noral movements promised the eye) deliver poetry to the tender mercy of\nprinters; depending upon means not literary but visual, like certain Persians\nwho are the less worth republication or translation because their reputations\nrest quite as much on the beauty of their handwriting as upon the niceness\nof their ears or the subtlety of their minds. Impressive as are the methods\nof advertisement its motive is essentially unaesthetic. It is not an art at\nall, but rather a point of departure for an art, which begins where adver-\ntisement leaves off and may, even, not be worth beginning. What if there"}, {"page_pdf": 27, "page_imprimee": "25", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.27", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 1209, "texte": "be idiograms in English (as for instance the word bloody, which has drips\nand drops about the look of it), is there merit in the fact ? 1\nIf a poem is written for the ear, its typographical presentation is of\nsecond importance. Better as Leaves of Grass is in its early editions, it is\nalmost as good on a double-column page. Shakespeare puts it over still\nthough anyone who has read a Folio or Quarto knows the printers have\nlittle thanks coming to them. I wonder what future editions of Cummings\nare going to look like! I do not, however, decry his line of experiment for\nits fragility, many aesthetic effects are only to be got with a loss of dura-\nbility, but one cannot improve the workmanship of a poem, as Ashton tried\nto do, by trick printing, and if one's poem would be much the worse for\nbeing set up badly, best better it. Violation, observance, and formation of\ngood usage in diction, punctuation and typography, are respectable insofar\nas they make for permanence of aesthetic effect. That chapter of the future\nprosodist will commence with, Circumambient Limitations.\n\nJ. B. W.\n\n1 Do sounds have colour ?\nHow many archangels can dance on the point of a needle V\nHow much wood a wood-chuck chuck?"}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c016", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c016", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "20", "page_fin": "23", "image_debut": 22, "image_fin": 25, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.9.1", "titre_corps": "I. All is not sound.", "titre_sommaire": "I. All is not sound.", "signature_source": "Richard Ashton", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 22, "page_imprimee": "20", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.22", "debut_caractere": 10, "fin_caractere_exclue": 1854, "texte": "I.\nAll is not sound.\n\nWhen somebody who advertises as an instructor in versification, recom-\nmending a long experience as poet scholar critic, accepted a sonnet of Hillyer's\nfor publication only tentatively, because forsooth the last lines did not scan,\nit was suggested that after greater familiarity with Elizabethan or Hillyer's\nown work, the Alexandrine would seem strange no longer.\nThe only successful experimenter in English polyphonic prose berated a\npoem1 of Cowley's one evening after dinner, sparing neither words breath\nnor time, going so far as to declare him no poet, (though being at the time\na literary agent for his poems), and upon the following afternoon sent for\nit to be reconsidered, because forsooth 1 if it should prove polyphonic prose\neverything would be quite different \\\nSometime later the two who were more or less responsible for No. 4,\nbowing humbly beneath the proud poetic ignorance of their bosses in\nNew York, persevered in the distasteful task of printing Ashton's poems\nmeekly to the last. Then their intelligence rebelled. Very deftly, if some-\nwhat drasticalty, they cut all but the last two lines, which thus became a\ncomment upon the preceding. The bosses in New York apologise to Ashton\nbut the Satanists can not, their injury was intentional. The complete poem\nprinted below, will make all readers meditate upon the kindness of the\nwicked, and the cruelty of the just.\nTHE JILTED MOON\nTonight the tide is coming very smooth,\nSo on the crinkled stretch the moon\nWrites Chinese characters in every groove,\nChanging with silver speed on a long path.\nAre these love-letters, moon ?\n\n1 Secession No. 3. The poem, it may be said here, is not polyphonic prose,\nnor anything like it. It is nothing but nonsense, and not heretical after all. Autho-\nrity: Bab's Ballads, « Wicked Mr. (What's his name?) Blake »."}, {"page_pdf": 23, "page_imprimee": "21", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.23", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 2294, "texte": "If so, you write too fast;\nI cannot read their sense before they pass.\nAnd is your passion strung so violent\nYou cannot be content\nTo have me see and slowly understand,\nBut must spend quickly much for all or none\nWith your too brightly writing hand ?\nThen, moon, I am not your Endymion:\nYour letters are too free to everyone.\nYou see, I am too low for your estate,\nHeart too monogamous, and thoughts too limited for these\nWhite flaming poems of your ice-cold fate.\nYour quickly-burning messages\nTo me are no more than Chinese, o moon,\nAre no more than Chinese.\nWhen No. 4 finally arrived in New York, after having lodged a month\nin the bureau drawers of an utter stranger in Berlin, our Founder delivering\nhimself of the dictum (just before luncheon): « in polyphonic prose rhymes\nbeen hitherto overcrowded and staccato, » especially recommended two poems\nsigned Ashton for attention, because forsooth their cadences were wider and\ntheir recurrent sound patterns more subtle than in any other example of\nthe medium. The poems, which it may be said here are nothing of the sort,\nmust be read to be enjoyed properly, but as they are appealing in their\nlack of grace, and as nothing lends things dignity like analysis, and as\nbesides they were recommended for especial attention, here goes :\nThe first is made up of three passages of monosyllabic conversation\nand a conclusion of commonplace free verse, the which are preceeded First,\nby a bit of triplicate meter containing a distinct metrical achievement, to\nwit, a couplet of eleven monosyllables with four beats ! The sound pattern\nof this passage is in its completeness aabbbaa, all occurring at the\ntermini of the cadencies. Hence it is to be presumed, unless art's hid\ncauses be not found, came the impression of wider polyphonies; Second.\nby a bit of polyphonic prose whose pattern is not staccato because it is\npauper, Third, by a sentence with one assonance, and that a naked beggar\nfollowed by a free verse cadence attogether too familiar; Fourth, by\nanother triplicate passage, all rhymes of which are not terminal to be sure,\nbut which give no polyphonic effect whatever.\nConsidered as modern verse, the second poem is a fake. It is in tum-\nbling meter throughout. A statement not satyric, but technical, for tumbling\n\nRichard Ashton."}, {"page_pdf": 24, "page_imprimee": "22", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.24", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 2020, "texte": "meter1 (which persisted from the Saxon decadence through the time of\nSpencer) allows four beats to a line and unaccented syllables ad lib; a\nprinciple of prosody whereunder Poe and Coleridge were successful and\nAshton pleasant to the point of unpleasantness. His precious bit of polyphonic\nprose, printed more accurately, might have done service as a theme at a\ntime where we were studying tumbling meter at Harvard, and may have\nbeen marked C—. Be this as it may, let us back to our muttons. The\nA.\nrhymes are swing, violin, snatch, catch, floor, curve, swrrve, more, men,\nlight, white, again, black, back, croon, saxophone, tones, tune, (in a line of\ntwo beats), door, one, run, coat, feet, following, cheek, face, speak, poise,\njoy, surge, proceeds, recedes. In addition as internal rhymes there are at\nvarious caesuras, lilt, wiggle, twinkle, moan, grace, urge. For full measure\na litter of illegitimate Swinburne's are thrown in:\nlift and linger and lift once more\nmingles and merges\nfollowing, flattering, following again,\nalso we have such gems as :\nrose-red shimmer\npetal-soft cheek\nhalf-open lips — « too tense to speak », these last.\nHelping us scan this difficult, intricate and subtle medium, we are\ngiven two italics up and down, the beats occuring on these very words!\nAs there is no reason to suspect that anyone who cares to write tumbling\nmeter is bothering to disguise the fact, as there is less reason why such\npistache pastiche should appear in a magazine which is devoted to new forms\nbecause of its ennui with the old, not its ignorance of the good; as fur-\nthermore Ashton has had his poem set up most modernly, breaking his lines\nnot merely at some of the possible caesuras, but even at many impossible\nones, the poem starts oif with quite a kick:\nDown\nit goes\nWith a\nlingering ,wing etc.\nPrinting on the bias in pink or green ink would improve it, but still\nit is not bad, not bad. Soon the rhymes begin to come thick and fast, and\n\n1 Authority : Dean Briggs's Course in Versification. Grade c+."}, {"page_pdf": 25, "page_imprimee": "23", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.25", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 528, "texte": "to occur, thanks to a disobliging printer, at the beginning of every line or\nso of type. Then quick, just-like-a-flash, one is on to the little game of how\none should write wider and better polyphonic prose. God only knows how\none should read it.\nThe medium it would seem should be studied, even by those who\nwrite it, and nonsense verse as well; but never oh never should the leaders\nof literary novements study English prosody, particulary not from persons\nwho advertise themselves as adepts in that art of pain and beauty...."}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c017", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c017", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "23", "page_fin": "25", "image_debut": 25, "image_fin": 27, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.9.2", "titre_corps": "II. Poor at these numbers.", "titre_sommaire": "II. Poor at these numbers.", "signature_source": "J. B. W", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 25, "page_imprimee": "23", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.25", "debut_caractere": 530, "fin_caractere_exclue": 2139, "texte": "II.\nPoor at these numbers.\n\nEveryone who is anyone is studying typography as musical notation in\nverse. Future textbooks will have chapters on the subject. Indeed it is funny\nthat Saintsbury has not dealt with it, for :\nIn a review by J. C. Squire — we were hired to read him, of course —\nof the new Cambridge edition of Shakespeare, we were delighted to find\nthis : « Mr. Pollard and Mr. Simpson have made it plain that the punctuation\n(of Shakespeare), which to the mere reader often appears absurd in its va-\ngaries, was deliberately contrived as a guide to the proper speaking of the\nwords. » Mr. Squire also extracts this note :\n« 367, be quick thou'st best. Absence of punctuation denotes rapid delivery ».\nWe therefore ask Johnny Weaver and the other rah-rah boys who can-\nnot forgive the freedoms of Mr. Cummings to attack first this deplorable\neccentricity on the part of William Shakespeare. 1\nIt is not without perturbation that I enter this subject for I shall not\neasily forget my bepuzzlement when it came to setting a poem of Cowley's 2\nup in type. I could not for the life of me decide whether certain passages\nwere free verse, verse of very long cadences, or prose, all this the more\nso without initial capitalization. It was in vain that I compared the Ms.\nwith the printed poem in Secession, in vain that I sent across the Atlantic\nfor an exact Ms. from Cowley, in vain that I motored out to the press\nthrough several of the wildest blizzards known to the memory of the oldest\n\n1 Lifted from copy sent from the bosses in New York.\n2 « Two Swans ». Eight More Harvard Poets. Brentano's 1923."}, {"page_pdf": 26, "page_imprimee": "24", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.26", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 2918, "texte": "living inhabitant of Greater Boston, in order to ensure myself that the poem\nappear as it should sound. All was over. Damon and I were congratulating\nourselves on our faithfulness to friendship and to the movement. A letter\narrived from Cowley asking, kindly but sternly, why his poem was printed\nin 15 lines when it contained only 9? Now, I had done my best to print\n12 lines, and I have done my best for a month in Giverny to get Cowley to\nteach me to count 9, but it is beyond me. I have read that poem over and\nover again, ever since then, counting its verses many times only to arrive\neach time at a different sum. To my dying day I shall be certain that it\ncontains 2 sentences, and that it is very beautiful, but I should hate to risk\nanything for which I cared much by taking a chance on the number of\nlines it has. All this argues (not only against dilettanti compilers of an-\nthologies containings modern verse, but also) for and against experiment in\ntypographical metrical notation. If a poem be beautiful it matters little how\nit be printed, yet on the other hand a reader should be permitted to loose\nnone of its subtle cadencies. Yet, again, is it not as wise to leave one's\nminor effects implicit and inherent, limiting one's hypothetical audience to\nmen of imagination and sense ? Does not Cummings miss at times a forest\nfor the trees, displaying his minor cadencies to the prejudice of his inclusive\nones ?\nI shall not enter the subject after all, at all! Being unlearned in these\nmatters, I fear least anything I have to say tend to increase the prejudice\nof readers rather than to clarify experiment by writers ; and, being unlearn-\ned, I feel keenly the need of an exact metrical notation. Robert Graves in\nan engaging little bore of a book of which I forget the name, seeks to\ndispose of « free verse » because forsooth metrical verse, like Swinburne's\nHertha, has also no exact means of indicating its essential tempo and stress!\n19th Century good usage in spelling and punctuation has deprived us of\nmany devices free to: Milton, Blake, and Co. Old means of indicating tempo\nand stress are now to be recovered with more added. That is fine. There\nis one danger. Preoccupied with experiment, blinded by success we may,\nlike Herrick or Herbert (who, with Josephson, not always gave their poems\noral movements promised the eye) deliver poetry to the tender mercy of\nprinters; depending upon means not literary but visual, like certain Persians\nwho are the less worth republication or translation because their reputations\nrest quite as much on the beauty of their handwriting as upon the niceness\nof their ears or the subtlety of their minds. Impressive as are the methods\nof advertisement its motive is essentially unaesthetic. It is not an art at\nall, but rather a point of departure for an art, which begins where adver-\ntisement leaves off and may, even, not be worth beginning. What if there"}, {"page_pdf": 27, "page_imprimee": "25", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.27", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 1209, "texte": "be idiograms in English (as for instance the word bloody, which has drips\nand drops about the look of it), is there merit in the fact ? 1\nIf a poem is written for the ear, its typographical presentation is of\nsecond importance. Better as Leaves of Grass is in its early editions, it is\nalmost as good on a double-column page. Shakespeare puts it over still\nthough anyone who has read a Folio or Quarto knows the printers have\nlittle thanks coming to them. I wonder what future editions of Cummings\nare going to look like! I do not, however, decry his line of experiment for\nits fragility, many aesthetic effects are only to be got with a loss of dura-\nbility, but one cannot improve the workmanship of a poem, as Ashton tried\nto do, by trick printing, and if one's poem would be much the worse for\nbeing set up badly, best better it. Violation, observance, and formation of\ngood usage in diction, punctuation and typography, are respectable insofar\nas they make for permanence of aesthetic effect. That chapter of the future\nprosodist will commence with, Circumambient Limitations.\n\nJ. B. W.\n\n1 Do sounds have colour ?\nHow many archangels can dance on the point of a needle V\nHow much wood a wood-chuck chuck?"}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c018", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c018", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "26", "page_fin": "26", "image_debut": 28, "image_fin": 28, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.10", "titre_corps": "CORRESPONDENCE.", "titre_sommaire": "CORRESPONDENCE.", "signature_source": "G. B. M", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 28, "page_imprimee": "26", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.28", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 1073, "texte": "CORRESPONDENCE.\nG. B. M.\nTo Secession.\nEvery man, is prophesied, must eventually become his own brewer.\nCertainly, every man must already import his own art from Central Europe.\nThe Dial, as official importer, lands too many dead fish.... Portrait of Ri-\nchard Strauss by Max Liebermann (geboren 1847, now President of the\nBerlin Academy of Arts), Richard Specht on Schnitzler, Stefan Zweipg on\nDickens.... we produce this sort of stuff in vast quantities on this side, too.\nI recommend as a counter-irritant the Hungarian activist review, MA, edited\nby Ludwig Kassak. MA excels in experimental typographical composition,\nreproduces the latest work of Moholy-Nagy, Raoul Haussmann, Jacques Lip-\nshitz, Picabia, Van Doesburg, Mondrian, Gleizes, Leger, Tatlin, Viking Egge-\nling, Man Ray, the Russian constructivists, and photographs of beautiful bridges,\nmachines, and New York, and publishes translations from the avant-garde\nwriters in Germany, France, Russia and America, the last being represented\nso far by Malcolm Cowley, Gorham B. Munson, and William Carlos Williams."}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c019", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c019", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "27", "page_fin": "27", "image_debut": 29, "image_fin": 29, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.11", "titre_corps": "[Publicité]", "titre_sommaire": "[Publicité]", "signature_source": "", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 29, "page_imprimee": "27", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.29", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 353, "texte": "Modern Review\nFICTION POETRY CRITICISM\nmillllnlllllliti■ ■ 111• 11111ii11111111111111ir 11111m11111111111ii111111111111111111 ■ 11niiimiiii11111111in11111111111111111111111111\nA modern magazine printing\nnothing, however, that is\nradical or clever.\nPublished quarterly at Winchester Massachusetts.\n25 cents a copy\nat Bookstands.\nSubscription\n1.00 a year."}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c020", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c020", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "28", "page_fin": "28", "image_debut": 30, "image_fin": 30, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.12", "titre_corps": "[Publicité]", "titre_sommaire": "[Publicité]", "signature_source": "", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 30, "page_imprimee": "28", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.30", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 796, "texte": "REBELS AND REACTIONARIES\nrub shoulders amiably and in perfect harmony in\nTHE DOUBLE DEALER\nPublished at New Orleans\nwhich prints good writing by youngsters or greybeards re-\ngardless of school, influence, or tradition. It shares none of\nthe prejudices of the right wing or the left wing in con-\ntemporary literature, but \" deceives them both by speaking\nthe truth It prints exhilarating creative and critical ma-\nterial by such writers as\nHart Crane Arthur Symons\nDjuna Barnes Lord Dunsany\nLouis Gilmore Lafcadio Hearn\nCarl Van Vechten Maxwell Bodenheim\nEdmund Wilson jr. Paul Eldridge\nand half a hundred others.\nYou have heard DOUBLE DEALER \"it* isT\nSingle copy 25 cents — Year's subscription . Dollars 2.50\nTrial Offer: Five Months » 1.00\nAddress: 204 Baronne Street, New Orleans, La., U. S. A."}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c021", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c021", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "[29]", "page_fin": "[29]", "image_debut": 31, "image_fin": 31, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.13", "titre_corps": "[Publicité]", "titre_sommaire": "[Publicité]", "signature_source": "", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 31, "page_imprimee": "[29]", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.31", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 853, "texte": "SECESSION\nis forming a group of writers, hardly less important, it is forming\na group of readers, a group concerned with the ends and aims of\nthe other and, by a TECHNICAL JOURNAL, brought intimately\ninto contact with their work in its EXPERIMENTAL PHASES.\nThey form, as it were, a hand-picked AUDIENCE to which the\n/• i \\ v « ; ■; • <• 'i '* ' t; \"' ' ■* r\nwriters figuratively address themselves and are so freed from the\nDILEMMA of two slaveries to which literature has been subjected\nsince the DECLINE of PATRONAGE, — the solitary slavery of the\nIVORY TOWER and the Mob Slavery of the \" PUBLIC\n•i , • >\nThe \" PUBLIC \", and WHAT IT \" WANTS \" are abstractions\nas empty for letters as for politics.\nSECESSION\nspeaks, not to a public meeting, but to a room-full of FRIENDS.\nWould you care to be one? This POST CARD can make you so.\ncut along dotted line"}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c022", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c022", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "[29]", "page_fin": "[29]", "image_debut": 31, "image_fin": 31, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.14", "titre_corps": "[Publicité]", "titre_sommaire": "[Publicité]", "signature_source": "", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 31, "page_imprimee": "[29]", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.31", "debut_caractere": 855, "fin_caractere_exclue": 1001, "texte": "3)ear Sir,\n){indly add my name and address to your mailing\nlist when you receive my payment at your published\nrates, and oblige,\nyours very truly,"}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c023", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c023", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "[30]", "page_fin": "[30]", "image_debut": 32, "image_fin": 32, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.15", "titre_corps": "[Publicité]", "titre_sommaire": "[Publicité]", "signature_source": "", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 32, "page_imprimee": "[30]", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.32", "debut_caractere": 0, "fin_caractere_exclue": 31, "texte": "Market Report\nNew York, July 5,"}]}, {"article_id": "bm-bmtnaay-1923-07-01-c024", "article_bluemountain": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01#c024", "volume": "bmtnaay_1923-07_01", "ocr_source": "OCR Blue Mountain (ALTO), transcription TEI : lignes lb/@facs", "texte_sans_correction": true, "page_debut": "[30]", "page_fin": "[30]", "image_debut": 32, "image_fin": 32, "pages_selon": "pagination imprimée relevée dans le METS Blue Mountain (ORDERLABEL) ; [n] = page sans folio restituée", "url_article": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.2.16", "titre_corps": "[Publicité]", "titre_sommaire": "[Publicité]", "signature_source": "", "controle": "bornes données par la structure logique METS/ALTO de Blue Mountain (blocs ALTO de chaque constituant)", "pages": [{"page_pdf": 32, "page_imprimee": "[30]", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.32", "debut_caractere": 33, "fin_caractere_exclue": 111, "texte": "cut along dotted line\nStamp\nGorham B. Munson, Esq.\n4, Grove St.\nNEW YORK City."}]}], "pages_ocr_originales": [{"page_pdf": 2, "page_imprimee": "n. p.", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.2", "texte": "DIRECTORS: KENNETH BURKE, GORHAM B. MUNSON\nAddress all correspondence to Gorham B. Munson.\nSUBSCRIPTION\nFor six numbers, one dollar in America, 5 shillings in England,\n15 francs in France, 25 lira in Italy. The price of this number\nis 25 cents in America,1 shilling in England,\n4 francs in France, 5 lira in Italy.\nNUMBER m 5\" JULY 1923\n\nCRUCIFIED SHADOWS Mark Turbyfill\nSYRINIX Gorham B. Munson\nBOWLS Marianne Moore\nFOUR POEMS E. E. Cummings\nOLD MELODIES.\" LOVE AND DEATH Malcom Cowley\nCOMMENT j. B. W.\nCORRESPONDENCE G. B. M.\n\nMaterial for Nos. 5 and 6 was accepted and rejected with the\nadvice of Malcom Cowley. It was printed under my direction, with\nthe kind assistance of Mr. Richard Bassett and Miss Susan Street.\nJ. B. Wheelwright."}, {"page_pdf": 3, "page_imprimee": "1", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.3", "texte": "CRUCIFIED SHADOWS.\nMark Turbyfill.\nI remember a dune screened in rain,\nLove in communion, its voluntary of tears\nNow my sight through a vista of years\nBeholds the pattern of formalized grief •\ni he figure ascends the lyrical mount,\nAnd the zenith of personal pain\n(Buds not blown to the wind but slain)\nIs seen as two lines, cruciform —\nPictorial balance,\nMotif of blossoms strangely illumed,\nBorne by a shadow up a hill."}, {"page_pdf": 4, "page_imprimee": "2", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.4", "texte": "SYRINX.\n\nA complete study of Cummings should take penetrating account of his\npainting and drawing, and no estimate of his literary work can begin without\nnoting the important fact that Cummings is a painter. It has bearings, as we\nshall later see, on his written word's. Cummings creates perfect lyrics, and\na perfect lyric is indefinable and unalyzable. The nearest we can come to it\nbeyond a subjective recognition and feeling is to say, as Cummings wrote of\nthe Mountain by Gaston Lachaise and of the personality of Jean Le Negre,\nthat the perfect lyric is a verb : it is an is. But to admit the impregnability\nof the lyric is not necessarily to proclaim it as the highest manifestation of\nart. If we say that the lyric equals is, we can still say that the full develop-\nment of art equals a sentence, and thereby indicate roughly the relation\nof the lyric to more ideological forms. Nor does every sentence require an is.\nThe verb-quality of the lyric, however, throws criticism back upon the attri-\nbutes of the is that Cummings creates. The most distinguishing attribute of\nCummings' lyricism is its grace. And grace again is unanalyzable and inde-\nfinable. Even Poe, could not crystatize it. Of grace, he wrote, \" perhaps the\nelements are a vivid fancy and a quick sense of the proportionate. Grace,\nhowever, may be most satisfactorily defined as 'a term applied, in despair, to\nthat class of the impressions of Beauty which admit of no analysis. ' \".\nWhen we attack Cummings' originality, we can, however, proceed\nfurther by quoting from Poe again \" My first object (as usual) was original-\nity. The extent to which this has been neglected in versification, is one of\nthe most unaccountable things in the world. Admitting that there is little\npossibility of variety in mere rhythm, it is still clear that the possible va-\nrieties of metre and stanza are absolutely infinite — and yet, for centuries,\nno man, in verse, has ever done, or ever seemed to think of doing, an original\nthing. The fact is, that originality (unless in minds of very unusual force) is\nby no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general,\nto be found, it must be elaborately sought, and although a positive merit of\nthe highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation \" .\nToday, this statement still covers with all its primal pertinence the majority\nof poets. A minority has found in vers libre great possibility of variety in\nrhythm and of this minority, Cummings has probably accomplished more\noriginal things in rhythm, metre and stanza than any three other poets com-\nbined. And it is precisely by negation that he has attained originality. He\nhas simply cancelled out his Education (the dignified name for an unque-\nstioning acceptance of custom).\nThe result is, he sees freshly. Cummings sees words. As Dr. J. S. Watson\nnoted, his words stand 4< erect on the page with a clean violence \"."}, {"page_pdf": 5, "page_imprimee": "3", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.5", "texte": "The originality of Cummings resolves into two elements. The first is the\naccurate choice of words. The second is the pains taken to display his ac-\ncuracy mistakably. The latter is, of course, much more uncommon in liter-\nature than the first. It is, an adaptation of advertising technic to literary\nintentions.\nTo display and force upon the reader his accuracy, Cummings has been\nobliged to reorganize punctuation and typography. Cummings makes punctuat-\nion and typography active instruments for literary expression. Here his painter's\nskill in composition aids him. Yet, in no case, does he leave the frontiers of\nliterature for the plastic arts as did Apollinaire i«\\ Calligrammes. His typo-\ngraphical design in every example reinforces his literary content. He has\nperceived that the printing-press has made poetry something to be seen as\nwell as heard : he has realized that visual notations of auditory rhythms sti-\nmulates the ears of silent readers. He is the first successful creator of cal-\nligrams. Most writers could profitably take lessons in arresting attention\nfrom American advertising experts. American advertising experts can take\nlessons from Cummings.\nI catalog below some of the means employed by Cummings to display\nhis accuracy and to indicate tempo.\n1. Capitals are used principally for emphasis. This abolishes immedia-\ntely the academic nonsense about the capitalization of the first letter in\nevery line of poetry and the capitalization of the pronoun, I. It is then a\nsimplification for the sake of pointing an unmistakable finger at emphatic\nwords. E.g.,—\nto enjoy the composed sudden body atop which always\nquivers the electric Distinct face hanghtily vital clinched\nin a swoon of synopsis.\n2. Commas are used to indicate pauses wherever the poet decides\nthat cadence requires them, even if it involves the separation of words never\npreviously divided in that manner. E.g.,—\n(if you toss him a coin he will pick it cleverly from, the\nair and stuff it seriously in, his minute pocket).\n3. Blank space is often used to isolate a word or words in a naked\n■exactitude and emphasis from the rest of the poem. E.g.,—\nwhistles far and wee.\n4. In order to indicate slow tempo, words are spread apart by hyphens\nor spaces or have extra letters added. E.g.\ngen\nteel-ly\nlugu-\nbri. otis."}, {"page_pdf": 6, "page_imprimee": "4", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.6", "texte": "5. In order to indicate quick tempo, several words are often run to-\ngether as one word. E.g.,—\nand break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat.\n6. Stanzaic divisions, line breakage and space relationships are freely\nvaried for the display of accuracy and the indication of auditory rhythm. The\ncadences are emphatically not disjointed by such methods. On the contrary,\nCummings's sentences often begin their meaning in one stanza and jump to\nthe next before completing it. The parts of his poems do not run down,\nbut continue their operation until the final line. That is why, I conceive,\nDr. Watson likened them to a roller coaster on a scenic railway. Three Uni-\nted States Sonnets (Broom, May, 1922).\nTo illustrate how expressive punctuation can become in Cummings'\nhands, I cite from Caritas (Broom, July, 1922) a complete stanza made up\nsolely of punctuation marks. A splendidly average citizen listening to a Sal-\nvation Army meeting is asked to increase the collection by twenty-five cents\nin order to make an even dollar. His mental processes are precisely and\neconomically recorded as follows:\n> ?\n? ? ?\n!\nThis, if one likes, also makes notation of a crescendo banged on the evan-\ngelical drum and reaching its final Boom! Boom ! in the next stanza\nwhich is\nNix, kid.\nAccuracy in itself has, esthetic quality. Although it is not necessarily ele-\ngant, but Cummings has an exquisite ear. His neat successes in hitting the bulls-\neye are always accompanied by a crisp sense of verse-music. I am absolved\nfrom dilation on this by the simple expedient of quoting a stanza from Pnella\nMea. {Dial, January, 1921):\nIn her perfectest array\nmy lady, moving in the day,\nis a little stranger thing\nin the morning wandering.\nAnd to double-clinch conviction, this concluding stanza 8 of a poem from the\nDial, October, 1921 :\nThe flute of morning stilled in noon —\nnoon the implacable bassoon —\nnow Twilight seeks the thrill of moon,\nwashed with a wild and thin\ndespair of violin."}, {"page_pdf": 7, "page_imprimee": "5", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.7", "texte": "Cummings avoids the pictorial excesses of Apollinaire with sureness.\nWith equal certainty, he escapes the \" musicality of literature \" esthetic. His\ncare for the word in its ideational meanings holds him to the moorings that\nSwinburne disastrously cut. For he remembers that if ideas are lost in pictor-\nial, or musical qualities, then writing ceases to be literature and becomes weak-\nly something else.\nOne of the essences of the pure lyric is simplicity, and simplicity requires\n(a) that it present an isolated idea as its base or (b) that it present a brief\nsummary of an ideational research. As (b), it is the incomplete and uncom-\nplicated reduction to a song of huge documents of ratiocination. As his idea-\nbase, Cummings seems to prefer the lyrical summary.\nHis topics are the again-and-again-and-again handled themes of all lyri-\ncists : and what he says about these enigmas does not differ in substance\nfrom what has been reiterated. The difference lies rather in the freshness\nwith which they are apprehended, in the novelty with which they are pre-\nsented. The old result stated in new terms regains its former glamor.\nThus, the concept that life is a brevity composed of pleasure and pain\nemerges in an appealing new coat of varnish as\n(Do you think}) the\ni do, world\nis probably made\nof roses <£ hello:\n(of solongs and\\ ashes).\nOn another occasion the concept that spring is a quickening revivifying sea-\nson is conveyed by re-creating that season as a fetching sloppy ragtime mist-\nress. Again, the statement that war is a horror which cannot drown out the\nmagnetic life of young men and women, cannot submerge the inexorable\nuprush of human tides, is equally freshly conveyed. Death is seen as a\nfaultless gentleman : death is approached in a jaunty American fashion.\nhe was a handsome man\nand what i want to know is\nhov do yon like your blneeyed boy\nMister Death.\nA particular triumph in the recreation of an old concept - that of Pan-\noccurs in an untitled poem. Cummings wisely places the poem in undefiled\nchildhood. The season is \" Just-spring \", the world is \" mud-luscious M and\n\" puddle-wonderful \", the children are playing marbles, piracies, hop-scotch\nand jump-rope, when a balloon man whistles, and off they run in quick\nresponse to his magical personality. The data of our childhoods immediately\ninforms us that the balloon vendor was our authentic Pan, that his whistle\nblew the pure strains of the joyous god.\nAnd now to render amends for these partial reductions ot Cummings'"}, {"page_pdf": 8, "page_imprimee": "6", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.8", "texte": "lyrics, I quote one of his poems entire (Sunset, Broom, July, 1922). Note\nthe vowel and consonantal relationships, the color unity of the first stanza,\nthe bell unity of the second, the dragging tempo of the last, the live tran-\nsitions, the enchanting typographical display, the consummate magic. Cum-\nmings is right in declaring that Swinburne did not exhaust the lyric.\nSUNSET.\nstinging\ngold swarms\nupon the spires\nsilver\nchanie the litanies the\ngreat bells are ringing with rose\nthe lewd fat bells\nand a tall\nwind\nis dragging\nthe sea\nwith\ndream\n-s\nNeither of Cummings1 pieces of criticism, one devoted to the sculptor,\nGaston Lachaise, the other to T. S. Eliot, strikes me as achieved. The critique\non Eliot is unpardonably out of key with its subject. For positive criticisms,\nboth are overmuch concerned with the stupidities of other critics and inferior\nartists. Both are stalled short of developed crystallizations by a foolish disre-\nspect for criticism, a disrespect that belongs] peculiarly to the last century.\nTo write of the Mountain by Lachaise : \" Merely to contemplate its perfectly\n\" knit enormousness was to admit that analysis of, or conscious thinking on\n\" our part about, a supreme aesthetic triumph, is a very pitiful substitute for\n\" that sensation which is impossibly the equivalent of what the work itself\n\" thinks of us\": is merely to exhibit an amazing confusion. For surely it is\nnot a question of substituting analysis for the original impact, but a matter\nof adding a term to that impact, a business of still more enhancing our first\npleasure by conscious thought about it. I do not wish to imply that Cum-\nmings cannot or does not analyze his esthetic impressions: he does and\nwould do so publicly, doubtless, if he did not strangely regard that act as\nunseemly. Consequently, the contour of his criticism is impressionistic and\ntherefore incomplete.\nCummings' criticism focuses flashlights upon his own work. He states\nadmirably the approach which should be taken towards himself in particular"}, {"page_pdf": 9, "page_imprimee": "7", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.9", "texte": "and indeed towards all primitive (technical sense) art. This art \" cannot be\ngrasped until we have accomplished the thorough destruction of the world\nHe notes certain accomplishments which \" require of us an intelligent pro-\ncess of the highest order, namely the negation on our part, by thinking, of\nthinking That is to say, our first process is the inducing of a relaxed\nsensitiveness, the opening of all our receptive pores, the complete surrender\nto what is before us. Afterwards, we can stiffen, we can call in our education,\nwe can fight back. If our reception-data survive this recovery, then we have\nwhat we must admit is a personal validity.\nComing closer, we find Cummings turning on the intention of Eliot a\npassage from Eliot on Marlowe. We may take the same passage and turn it\nback on Cummings' poetry and forward on his prose. The statement is :\n\" ....this style which secures its emphasis by always hesitating on the\nedge of caricature at the right moment....\n....this intense and serious and indubitably great poetry, which, like some\ngreat painting and sculpture, attains its effects by something not unlike\ncaricature\nCloser still, we discover statements on the personality of Lachaise which\nseem to me to encompass in a large degree the temperament of Cummings.\nLachaise, he says, is \" inherently naif, fearlessiy intelligent, utterly sincere.\nIt is accurate to say that his two greatest hates are the hate of insincerity\nand the hate of superficiality \". He desires \" to negate the myriad with the\nsingle, to annihilate the complicatednesses and prettinesses and trivialities of\nSouthern civilizations with the enormous, the solitary, the fundamental \". He\nachieves superlative esthetic victories by a \" complete intelligence, or the\nintelligence functioning at intuitional velocity \". Let us, I suggest, read the\nname, Cummings, for the name, Lachaise. And let us add this note on\nCezanne by way of understanding why Cummings can be called naif and\nprimitive. \" Cezanne became truly naif—not by superficially contemplating\nand admiring the art of primitive peoples, but by carefully misbelieving and\nviolently disunderstanding a second hand world \".\n(Evidently), we are now entangled in Cummings' temperament as a\ncondition for his work. In order to define it sufficiently, we must examine\nthe part it acts in The Enormous Room. (Boni and Liveright).\nThe subject-matter of this book consists of a brutal environment, an\nignoble set of circumstances, and an artist countering against them. Cum-\nmings was an ambulance driver in the Norton Harjes unit during the recent\nbloody squabble for markets. His friend, 8., in the same unit wrote some\nletters evincing an intelligent outlook on this mean scramble which were\nintercepted by the censor. Thereupon, both B. and Cummings were speedily\npropelled into a horrible detention camp, Ferte de la Mace, and with some\nthree score comrades ill-treated for several months. After which edification,\nCummings was released through the intervention of American authorities, and\nB. went on to a \" regular prison \" for further outrage before the incredibly"}, {"page_pdf": 10, "page_imprimee": "8", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.10", "texte": "brilliant U. S. Government secured his release likewise. Circumstance and envi-\nronment were therefore abnormal, bizarre, filthy, degrading and wounding.\nAgainst them Cummings countered with everything he had, and that was much\nmore than the single blind rage of Dos Passos. For besides rage, Cummings\nhad scorn, irony, sarcasm, courage, and a love for simple men. Especially,\nhe had a dramatizing sense, a childlike faculty for personification and play-\nbuilding. More especially, he had an undefeatable sense of humor. Most\nespecially, he was tuned up to record in detail the slightest quiver contain-\ned in the slightest split-second of the slightest jar upon his being: that is,\nhe was intensely and every instant alive. What came to him came vividly\nand indelibly. His triumph — the triumph of artist over hostility - is The\nEnormous Room.\nOn page 249 of this brilliant work, its basis is stated. « for an educated\ngent or lady, to create is first of all to destroy — that there is and can be\nno such thing as authentic art art until the bons trues (whereby we are taught\nto see and imitate on canvass and by words this so-called world) are entirely\nand thoroughly and perfectly annihilated by that vast and painful process\nof Unthinking which may result in a minute bit of purely personal Feeling.\nWhich minute bit is Art ».\nIt took a high amout of Unthinking to produce such accuracies as for\ninstance, these : « a room about sixteen feet short and four feet narrow » ;\n< a hunk of bread and a piece of water. » But the unusual quality of Cum-\nmings' feeling resides, in two things : his painter's eye and his writer's ear.\nThat eye is keen in noting planes, angles, textures, colors, the essential\ndetermining features : that ear is expert in reducing the visual booty to ca-\ndences. Take these as instances of their cooperation.\n(1) « I had taken automatically some six or eight steps in pursuit of\n« the fleeing spectre when, right over my head, the grey stone curdled with\n« a female darkness; the hard and the angular softening in a putrescent\n« explosion of thick wriggling laughter. I started, looked up, and encountered\n« a window stuffed with four savage fragments of crowding Face : four livid,.\n« shaggy disks focussing hungrily ; four pair of uncouth eyes rapidly smoul-\n« dering; eight lips shaking in a toothless and viscous titter. Suddenly above\n« and behind these terrors rose a single horror — a crisp vital head, a young\n« ivory actual face, a night of firm, alive, icy hair, a white large frightful smile ».\n(2) « Card table : 4 stares play banque with 2 cigarettes\n« (1 dead) & A pipe the clashing faces yanked by a\n« leanness of one candle bottle-stuck (Birth of X)\n« where sits The Clever Man who pyramids, sings\n« (mornings) 'Meet Ms?... »\n« which specimen of telegraphic technique being interpreted, means: Judas,\n« Garibaldi, and The Holland Skipper (whom the reader will meet de suite) —"}, {"page_pdf": 11, "page_imprimee": "9", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.11", "texte": "« Garibaldi's cigarette having gone out, so greatly is he absorbed — play banque\n« with four intent and highly focussed individuals who may or may not be The\n« Scoolmaster, Monsieur Auguste, The Barber, and Meme; with The Clever Man\n« (as nearly always) acting as banker. The candle by whose somewhat uncor-\n< pulent illumination the various physiognomies are yanked into a ferocious\n« unity is stuck into the mouth of a bottle. The lighting of the whole, the\n« rhythmic disposition of the figures, construct a sensuous integration suggestive\n« of The Birth of Christ by one of the Old Masters. The Clever Man, having\n« had his usual morning warble, is extremely quiet. He will win, he pyramids\n« — and he pyramids because he has the cash and can afford to make every\n« play a big one. All he needs is the rake of a croupier to complete his disin-\n« terested and wholly nerveless poise ».\nThere is another duality in Cummings' feeling that increases its special\nquality. He is both realistic and fanciful. Without a wince, he can describe\na fresh smoking turd or a brutal mauling with stove-pipes and on the next\npage evoke the most charming gnomes or fairies or fantastic attic toys. This\ncombination of hardness and fancy is not often encountered.\nBut to get back to the passage on the minute bit of purely personal\nfeeling which is art, does this not mean, in bald esthetic terms, that Com-\nmings is a partisan of content-first, form-second, writing ? Does it not mean\nthat his first stimulus comes from the emotional and perceptive materials of\nhis experiences ? And afterwards, he crystallizes them into formal beauties ?\nCertainly, that was the proceedure in The Enormous Room. Here Cummings\nhad a huge mass of experience whose energy demanded expression. This\nexperience, this dynamic reality, held his major interest. It dictated word\nby word the problems of its presentation. Whereas a form-first, content-second,\nwriter, although he started with this initial experience, would very soon shift\nhis major interest to his presentation problems, would play loose and fast\nwith his initial bits of pure feeling for the sake of his non-representative design.\nHis pure feelings would be but helpless pawns in the grip of his intellect,\nwhereas in The Enormous Room we have an intellect performing an efficient\nservitude to feeling. In Cummings1 case, neither content nor form, neither the\nrepresentative nor the non-representative, overbalance one another. There is a\nunique marriage there between form and content, that marriage — which we\nare told denotes successful art.\nLet us examine this union in The Enormous Room. No, first let us point\nout several additional interesting details of that book. One is fresh adjectival\njuxtapositions. Again and again by a simple transposition ancient couplings\nare revivified. Another is at word coinage, a game largely discontinud\nby the English speaking since the days of Queen Elizbeth. Another is a re-\npercussion from the American detective story, with its speed of narration,\nits exaggerated villain and hero types, its piling-up of exciting situations, all\nmarvellously sublimated in Cummings' mind. A fourth is the awareness of the\nknockabout vitality, vigor, raciness, authenticity, humor, poetry and vividness"}, {"page_pdf": 12, "page_imprimee": "10", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.12", "texte": "of the American language. After reading Sandburg and Cummings, one be-\nlieves in the possibilities of this new tongue as one does not believe in it\nafter reading John V. A. Weaver. Fifth, there is splendid caricature. But back\nto the larger successes of The Enormous Room !\nOne of its large successes is its minor organisms. Sentences, paragraphs,\nincidents, chapters are all carefully built up. (Unlike most of his contempo-\nraries, Cummings can still swing a long sentence. His verbs have a remarkable\nkick : enough to keep a dozen adjectives on the move). As a minute spe-\ncimen of minor organization, take this :\n« It must have been five o'clock. Steps. A vast cluttering of the exterior\n« of the door —by whom? Whang opens the door. Turnkey-creature extending\n« a piece of chocolate with extreme and surly caution. I say « Merci » and\n« seize chocolate. Klang the door ».\nIt is a miniature, but note that its introduction creates imminence, its\nprogression rises in a crescendo, and its final sentence closes neatly the incident.\nAs a more extended minor organism, consider the portrait of the little\ndoll-like Belgian Machine-Fixer which rises to this lyrical invocation - an\nindirect reproach a hundred times more effective, it seems to me, than the\ndirect, well-chewed anger of the usual protestant against inhumanity.\n« And his ghastly and toylike wizened and minute arm would try to\n« make a pass at their lofty lives. O gonvernement frangais, I think it was not\n< very clever of you to put this terrible doll in La Ferte ; I should have left\n« him in Belgium with his little doll-wife if I had been You ; for when Gover-\n« nements are found dead there is always a little doll on top of them, pulling\n« and tweaking with his little hands to get back the microscopic knife which\n« sticks firmly in the quiet meat of their hearts ».\nIn the final chapter there is a magnificent arrangement of surprize and\ncontrast. In an abbreviated Joycian manner, the cupboards of the disagreeable\nare spilled all over the page and then as the ship enters New York harbor\ncomes this :\n« My God what an ugly island. Hope we don't stay here long. All the\n« redbloods first class much excited about land, Damned ugly, I think.\n« Hullo.\n« The tall, impossibly tall, incomparably tall, city shoulderingly upward\n« into hard sunlight leaned a little through the octaves of its parallel edges,\n« leaningly strode upward into firm hard snowy sunlight; the noises of America\n« nearingly throbbed with smokes and hurrying dots which are men and which\n« are women and which are things new and curious and hard strange and\n« vibrant and immense, lifting with a great ondulous stride firmly into immortal\n« sunlight. *\nEach chapter mounts on its own crescendo, and each crescendo relates\nto all the others. There is then a major organization. This major, roughly\nmodelled upon Bunyan's Prllgrim's Progress, must have presented great re-\nsistances to Cummings, as a glance at his plan will immediately corroborate."}, {"page_pdf": 13, "page_imprimee": "11", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.13", "texte": "The first third of his book is a chronological narrative, the following half\nis a timeless series of final sixth is again chronological nar-\nrative, yet he has actually shifted from a narrative and time technic into a\ntimeless and descriptive technic and back again without the slightest loss of\nmovement. Indeed, the curve of his central crescendo keeps ascending from\nportrait to portrait until it seems as though its climax is certainly reached\nrn an unforgettable eulogy of Jean Le Negre, but even after that it moves\nup higher as the book changes to narrative. B. is sent by the investigating\ncommittee to Precigne. After he leaves, Cummings records :\n« I went to my bed and lay down quietly in my great pelisse. The\n« clamor and filth of the room brightened and became distant and faded. I\n« heard the voice of the jolly Alsatian saying:\n« 4 Courage, won ami% your comrade is not dead ; you will see him later '\n« and after that, nothing. In front of and within my eyes lived suddenly a\n« violent and gentle and dark silence ».\nIn that silence the arc of The Enormous Room halts its upward progress\nruns level a few seconds, and then drops rapidly down for the concluding\nchapters.\nEach page of this book is a rewarding study in mechanics ; overwhel-\nming as Cummings' subject matter was it has all been crystallized in a way\nto give the last jerk and whirret that inhered therein. Cummings has jabbed\nhis pen into life, but he has also twisted it in the wound, and it is this\ntwist of the pen that makes literature.\n\nGorham B. Munson."}, {"page_pdf": 14, "page_imprimee": "12", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.14", "texte": "BOWLS.\nMarianne Moore.\non the green\nwith lignum vitae balls and ivory markers,\nthe pins planted in wild duck formation,\nand quickly dispersed:\nby this survival of ancient punctilio\nin the manner of Chinese lacquer carving,\nlayer after layer exposed by certainty of touch and unhurried incision\nso that only so much color shall be revealed as is necessary to the picture\nI learn that we are precisians —\nnot citizens of Pompeii arrested in action\nas a cross section of one's correspondence would seem to imply.\nRenouncing a policy of boorish indifference\nto everything that has been said since the days of Matilda,\nI shall purchase the Etymological Dictionary of Modern English\nthat I may understand what is written\nand like the ant and the spider\nreturning from time to headquarters,\nshall answer the question\nas to « why I like winter better than I like summer »\nand acknowledge that it does not make me sick\nto look modern playwrights and poets and novelists straight in the face —\nthat I feel just the same ;\nand I shall write to the publisher of the magazine\nwhich will « appear the first day of the month\nand disappear before one has had time to buy it\nunless one takes proper precaution, »\nand make an effort to please —\nsince he who gives quickly gives twice\nin nothing so much as in a letter."}, {"page_pdf": 15, "page_imprimee": "13", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.15", "texte": "FOUR POEMS.\n\nI.\na man who had fallen among thieves\nlay by the roadside on his back\ndressed in fifteenthrate ideas\nwearing a round jeer for a hat\nfate per a somewhat more than less\nemancipated evening\nhad in return for consciousness\nendowed him with a changeless grin\nwhereon a dozen staunch and leal\ncitizens did graze at pause\nthen fired by hypercivic zeal\nsought newer pastures or because\nswaddled with a frozen brook\nof pinkest vomit out of eyes\nwhich noticed nobody he looked\nas if he did not care to rise\none hand did nothing on the vest\nits wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt\nwhile the mute trouserfly confessed\na button solemnly inert.\nBrushing from whom the stiffened puke\ni put him all into my arms\nand staggered banged with terror through\na million billion trillion stars"}, {"page_pdf": 16, "page_imprimee": "14", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.16", "texte": "II.\npoets yeggs and thirsties\nsince we are spanked and put to sleep by dolls let\nus not be continually astonished should\nfrom their actions and speeches\nsawdust perpetually leak\nrather is it between such beddings and\nbumpings of ourselves to be observed\nhow in this fundamental respect the well\nrecognised regime of childhood is reversed\nmeantime in dreams let us investigate\nthoroughly each one his optima rerum first\nhaving taken care to lie upon our\nabdomens for greater privacy and lest\npunished bottoms interrupt philosophy"}, {"page_pdf": 17, "page_imprimee": "15", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.17", "texte": "III.\nthe season' tis, my lovely lambs,\nof Sumner Volstead Christ and Co.\nthe epoch of Mann's righteousness\nthe age of dollars and no cents.\nWhich being quite beyond dispute\nas prove from Troy (N. Y.) to Cairo\n(Egypt) the luminous dithyrambs\nof large immaculate unmute\nantibolshevistic gents\n(each manufacturing word by word\nhis own unrivalled brand of pyro\n-technic blurb anent the (hie)\nhero dead that gladly (sic)\nin far lands perished of unheard\nof maladies including flu)\nmy little darlings, let us now\npassionately remember how —\nbraving the worst, of peril heedless,\neach braver than the other, each\n(a typewriter within his reach)\nupon his fearless derriere\nsturdily seated — Colonel Needless\nTo Name and General You know who\na string of pretty medals drew\n(while messrs jack james john and jim\nin token of their country's love\nreceived my dears the order of\nThe Artificial Arm and Limb)"}, {"page_pdf": 18, "page_imprimee": "16", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.18", "texte": "— or, since bloodshed and kindred questions\ninhibit unprepared digestions,\ncome : let us mildly contemplate\nbeginning with his wellfulled pants\nearth's biggest grafter, nothing less;\nthe Honorable Mr. (guess)\nwho, breathing on the ear of fate,\nlanded a seat in the legislat-\nure whereas tommy so and so\n(an erring child of circumstance\nwhom the bulls nabbed at 33rd)\npulled six months for selling snow\n\nIV.\nthis evangelist\nbuttons with his big gollywog voice\nthen kingdomofheaven up behind and crazily\nskating thither and hither in filthy sawdust\nchucks and rolls\nagainst the tent his thick joggling fists\nhe is persuasive\nthe editor cigarstinking hobgoblin swims\nupward in his swivelchair one fist dangling scandal while\nfive other fingers snitch\nrapidly through mist a defunct king as\nlinotypes gobblehobble\nour lightheavy twic twoc ingly attacks\nlanding a onetwo\nwhich doubles up suddenly his bunged hinging"}, {"page_pdf": 19, "page_imprimee": "17", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.19", "texte": "victim, against the\ngiving roper amid\nscreams of deeply bulging thousands\ni too omit one kelly\nin response to howjedooze the candidates new silk\nlid bounds gently from his baldness\na smile masturbates softly in the vacant\nlot of his physiognomy\nhis scientifically pressed trousers ejaculate spats\na strikingly succulent getup\nbut\nwe knew a muff hunter and he said to us Kid.\ndaze nutn like it.\n\nE. E. Cummings."}, {"page_pdf": 20, "page_imprimee": "18", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.20", "texte": "OLD MELODIES.\nLOVE AND DEATH\n\nI.\nThere is a moment after the embrace\nwhen happily fatigued we do not speak\nwhen still my cheek is resting on your cheek\nwhen hearts throb still and limbs still interlace\nunder the coverlet: there is a moment\nsomewhere existing out of time and space\nsomewhere\n(O tired eternity of your face)\nbetween extremes of ecstasy and torment.\nThere is a moment logical and white\nbehind the wall of flesh : it is as if\nfalling agreeably from some high cliff\nI floated in a limitless sea of light\namong impersonal forms and came to rest\nwithin the personal limits of a night\nwhere chair and bed loom comfortably trite\nwhere still my heart is beating on your chest"}, {"page_pdf": 21, "page_imprimee": "19", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.21", "texte": "II.\nThey carry him off in a one horse hack\nand he won't be thinking of coming back.\nThey carry him off in a one horse hack\nand he won't be thinking of coming back.\nThey dump his bones in a six foot hole\nmay God have mercy upon his soul.\nThe dirt clumps down and pebbles drum on his belly\n(O sod that covers that hides the left nipple of his\nbreast and crumbs of frozen clay seeping seeping bet-\nween the stiff intestices of his legs) and the\nWorms crawl out and the worms crawl in\nto build them a dwelling beneath the skin.\n(Naturally I am growing a little hysterical and\nhe is clothed in such linen as he never wore and\nthe new black suit he bought last week at Wana-\nmakers while between him and the gravel or frozen\nrod there are thicknesses of glass, oak, lead. I am\na little hysterical naturally and imagine myself be-\nneath the glass and oak and lead with him, clutch-\ning him perhaps by the shoulder or continuing a\ndesultory conversation about and about, around\nand upon and about)\nand dirt clump-clumps against my thighs\nagainst belly and frozen eyes.\nBetween my fingers, between my knees\nfall shovelsfull of eternities.\nAnd Worms crawl in and worms crawl out\nand round and round and upon and about\nour pointless conversation grows\nand there she goes\nand there she goes and\nalldressedupinher sun daycloes\nand there she goes.\n\nMalcolm Cowley."}, {"page_pdf": 22, "page_imprimee": "20", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.22", "texte": "COMMENT.\n\nI.\nAll is not sound.\n\nWhen somebody who advertises as an instructor in versification, recom-\nmending a long experience as poet scholar critic, accepted a sonnet of Hillyer's\nfor publication only tentatively, because forsooth the last lines did not scan,\nit was suggested that after greater familiarity with Elizabethan or Hillyer's\nown work, the Alexandrine would seem strange no longer.\nThe only successful experimenter in English polyphonic prose berated a\npoem1 of Cowley's one evening after dinner, sparing neither words breath\nnor time, going so far as to declare him no poet, (though being at the time\na literary agent for his poems), and upon the following afternoon sent for\nit to be reconsidered, because forsooth 1 if it should prove polyphonic prose\neverything would be quite different \\\nSometime later the two who were more or less responsible for No. 4,\nbowing humbly beneath the proud poetic ignorance of their bosses in\nNew York, persevered in the distasteful task of printing Ashton's poems\nmeekly to the last. Then their intelligence rebelled. Very deftly, if some-\nwhat drasticalty, they cut all but the last two lines, which thus became a\ncomment upon the preceding. The bosses in New York apologise to Ashton\nbut the Satanists can not, their injury was intentional. The complete poem\nprinted below, will make all readers meditate upon the kindness of the\nwicked, and the cruelty of the just.\nTHE JILTED MOON\nTonight the tide is coming very smooth,\nSo on the crinkled stretch the moon\nWrites Chinese characters in every groove,\nChanging with silver speed on a long path.\nAre these love-letters, moon ?\n\n1 Secession No. 3. The poem, it may be said here, is not polyphonic prose,\nnor anything like it. It is nothing but nonsense, and not heretical after all. Autho-\nrity: Bab's Ballads, « Wicked Mr. (What's his name?) Blake »."}, {"page_pdf": 23, "page_imprimee": "21", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.23", "texte": "If so, you write too fast;\nI cannot read their sense before they pass.\nAnd is your passion strung so violent\nYou cannot be content\nTo have me see and slowly understand,\nBut must spend quickly much for all or none\nWith your too brightly writing hand ?\nThen, moon, I am not your Endymion:\nYour letters are too free to everyone.\nYou see, I am too low for your estate,\nHeart too monogamous, and thoughts too limited for these\nWhite flaming poems of your ice-cold fate.\nYour quickly-burning messages\nTo me are no more than Chinese, o moon,\nAre no more than Chinese.\nWhen No. 4 finally arrived in New York, after having lodged a month\nin the bureau drawers of an utter stranger in Berlin, our Founder delivering\nhimself of the dictum (just before luncheon): « in polyphonic prose rhymes\nbeen hitherto overcrowded and staccato, » especially recommended two poems\nsigned Ashton for attention, because forsooth their cadences were wider and\ntheir recurrent sound patterns more subtle than in any other example of\nthe medium. The poems, which it may be said here are nothing of the sort,\nmust be read to be enjoyed properly, but as they are appealing in their\nlack of grace, and as nothing lends things dignity like analysis, and as\nbesides they were recommended for especial attention, here goes :\nThe first is made up of three passages of monosyllabic conversation\nand a conclusion of commonplace free verse, the which are preceeded First,\nby a bit of triplicate meter containing a distinct metrical achievement, to\nwit, a couplet of eleven monosyllables with four beats ! The sound pattern\nof this passage is in its completeness aabbbaa, all occurring at the\ntermini of the cadencies. Hence it is to be presumed, unless art's hid\ncauses be not found, came the impression of wider polyphonies; Second.\nby a bit of polyphonic prose whose pattern is not staccato because it is\npauper, Third, by a sentence with one assonance, and that a naked beggar\nfollowed by a free verse cadence attogether too familiar; Fourth, by\nanother triplicate passage, all rhymes of which are not terminal to be sure,\nbut which give no polyphonic effect whatever.\nConsidered as modern verse, the second poem is a fake. It is in tum-\nbling meter throughout. A statement not satyric, but technical, for tumbling\n\nRichard Ashton."}, {"page_pdf": 24, "page_imprimee": "22", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.24", "texte": "meter1 (which persisted from the Saxon decadence through the time of\nSpencer) allows four beats to a line and unaccented syllables ad lib; a\nprinciple of prosody whereunder Poe and Coleridge were successful and\nAshton pleasant to the point of unpleasantness. His precious bit of polyphonic\nprose, printed more accurately, might have done service as a theme at a\ntime where we were studying tumbling meter at Harvard, and may have\nbeen marked C—. Be this as it may, let us back to our muttons. The\nA.\nrhymes are swing, violin, snatch, catch, floor, curve, swrrve, more, men,\nlight, white, again, black, back, croon, saxophone, tones, tune, (in a line of\ntwo beats), door, one, run, coat, feet, following, cheek, face, speak, poise,\njoy, surge, proceeds, recedes. In addition as internal rhymes there are at\nvarious caesuras, lilt, wiggle, twinkle, moan, grace, urge. For full measure\na litter of illegitimate Swinburne's are thrown in:\nlift and linger and lift once more\nmingles and merges\nfollowing, flattering, following again,\nalso we have such gems as :\nrose-red shimmer\npetal-soft cheek\nhalf-open lips — « too tense to speak », these last.\nHelping us scan this difficult, intricate and subtle medium, we are\ngiven two italics up and down, the beats occuring on these very words!\nAs there is no reason to suspect that anyone who cares to write tumbling\nmeter is bothering to disguise the fact, as there is less reason why such\npistache pastiche should appear in a magazine which is devoted to new forms\nbecause of its ennui with the old, not its ignorance of the good; as fur-\nthermore Ashton has had his poem set up most modernly, breaking his lines\nnot merely at some of the possible caesuras, but even at many impossible\nones, the poem starts oif with quite a kick:\nDown\nit goes\nWith a\nlingering ,wing etc.\nPrinting on the bias in pink or green ink would improve it, but still\nit is not bad, not bad. Soon the rhymes begin to come thick and fast, and\n\n1 Authority : Dean Briggs's Course in Versification. Grade c+."}, {"page_pdf": 25, "page_imprimee": "23", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.25", "texte": "to occur, thanks to a disobliging printer, at the beginning of every line or\nso of type. Then quick, just-like-a-flash, one is on to the little game of how\none should write wider and better polyphonic prose. God only knows how\none should read it.\nThe medium it would seem should be studied, even by those who\nwrite it, and nonsense verse as well; but never oh never should the leaders\nof literary novements study English prosody, particulary not from persons\nwho advertise themselves as adepts in that art of pain and beauty....\n\nII.\nPoor at these numbers.\n\nEveryone who is anyone is studying typography as musical notation in\nverse. Future textbooks will have chapters on the subject. Indeed it is funny\nthat Saintsbury has not dealt with it, for :\nIn a review by J. C. Squire — we were hired to read him, of course —\nof the new Cambridge edition of Shakespeare, we were delighted to find\nthis : « Mr. Pollard and Mr. Simpson have made it plain that the punctuation\n(of Shakespeare), which to the mere reader often appears absurd in its va-\ngaries, was deliberately contrived as a guide to the proper speaking of the\nwords. » Mr. Squire also extracts this note :\n« 367, be quick thou'st best. Absence of punctuation denotes rapid delivery ».\nWe therefore ask Johnny Weaver and the other rah-rah boys who can-\nnot forgive the freedoms of Mr. Cummings to attack first this deplorable\neccentricity on the part of William Shakespeare. 1\nIt is not without perturbation that I enter this subject for I shall not\neasily forget my bepuzzlement when it came to setting a poem of Cowley's 2\nup in type. I could not for the life of me decide whether certain passages\nwere free verse, verse of very long cadences, or prose, all this the more\nso without initial capitalization. It was in vain that I compared the Ms.\nwith the printed poem in Secession, in vain that I sent across the Atlantic\nfor an exact Ms. from Cowley, in vain that I motored out to the press\nthrough several of the wildest blizzards known to the memory of the oldest\n\n1 Lifted from copy sent from the bosses in New York.\n2 « Two Swans ». Eight More Harvard Poets. Brentano's 1923."}, {"page_pdf": 26, "page_imprimee": "24", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.26", "texte": "living inhabitant of Greater Boston, in order to ensure myself that the poem\nappear as it should sound. All was over. Damon and I were congratulating\nourselves on our faithfulness to friendship and to the movement. A letter\narrived from Cowley asking, kindly but sternly, why his poem was printed\nin 15 lines when it contained only 9? Now, I had done my best to print\n12 lines, and I have done my best for a month in Giverny to get Cowley to\nteach me to count 9, but it is beyond me. I have read that poem over and\nover again, ever since then, counting its verses many times only to arrive\neach time at a different sum. To my dying day I shall be certain that it\ncontains 2 sentences, and that it is very beautiful, but I should hate to risk\nanything for which I cared much by taking a chance on the number of\nlines it has. All this argues (not only against dilettanti compilers of an-\nthologies containings modern verse, but also) for and against experiment in\ntypographical metrical notation. If a poem be beautiful it matters little how\nit be printed, yet on the other hand a reader should be permitted to loose\nnone of its subtle cadencies. Yet, again, is it not as wise to leave one's\nminor effects implicit and inherent, limiting one's hypothetical audience to\nmen of imagination and sense ? Does not Cummings miss at times a forest\nfor the trees, displaying his minor cadencies to the prejudice of his inclusive\nones ?\nI shall not enter the subject after all, at all! Being unlearned in these\nmatters, I fear least anything I have to say tend to increase the prejudice\nof readers rather than to clarify experiment by writers ; and, being unlearn-\ned, I feel keenly the need of an exact metrical notation. Robert Graves in\nan engaging little bore of a book of which I forget the name, seeks to\ndispose of « free verse » because forsooth metrical verse, like Swinburne's\nHertha, has also no exact means of indicating its essential tempo and stress!\n19th Century good usage in spelling and punctuation has deprived us of\nmany devices free to: Milton, Blake, and Co. Old means of indicating tempo\nand stress are now to be recovered with more added. That is fine. There\nis one danger. Preoccupied with experiment, blinded by success we may,\nlike Herrick or Herbert (who, with Josephson, not always gave their poems\noral movements promised the eye) deliver poetry to the tender mercy of\nprinters; depending upon means not literary but visual, like certain Persians\nwho are the less worth republication or translation because their reputations\nrest quite as much on the beauty of their handwriting as upon the niceness\nof their ears or the subtlety of their minds. Impressive as are the methods\nof advertisement its motive is essentially unaesthetic. It is not an art at\nall, but rather a point of departure for an art, which begins where adver-\ntisement leaves off and may, even, not be worth beginning. What if there"}, {"page_pdf": 27, "page_imprimee": "25", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.27", "texte": "be idiograms in English (as for instance the word bloody, which has drips\nand drops about the look of it), is there merit in the fact ? 1\nIf a poem is written for the ear, its typographical presentation is of\nsecond importance. Better as Leaves of Grass is in its early editions, it is\nalmost as good on a double-column page. Shakespeare puts it over still\nthough anyone who has read a Folio or Quarto knows the printers have\nlittle thanks coming to them. I wonder what future editions of Cummings\nare going to look like! I do not, however, decry his line of experiment for\nits fragility, many aesthetic effects are only to be got with a loss of dura-\nbility, but one cannot improve the workmanship of a poem, as Ashton tried\nto do, by trick printing, and if one's poem would be much the worse for\nbeing set up badly, best better it. Violation, observance, and formation of\ngood usage in diction, punctuation and typography, are respectable insofar\nas they make for permanence of aesthetic effect. That chapter of the future\nprosodist will commence with, Circumambient Limitations.\n\nJ. B. W.\n\n1 Do sounds have colour ?\nHow many archangels can dance on the point of a needle V\nHow much wood a wood-chuck chuck?"}, {"page_pdf": 28, "page_imprimee": "26", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.28", "texte": "CORRESPONDENCE.\nG. B. M.\nTo Secession.\nEvery man, is prophesied, must eventually become his own brewer.\nCertainly, every man must already import his own art from Central Europe.\nThe Dial, as official importer, lands too many dead fish.... Portrait of Ri-\nchard Strauss by Max Liebermann (geboren 1847, now President of the\nBerlin Academy of Arts), Richard Specht on Schnitzler, Stefan Zweipg on\nDickens.... we produce this sort of stuff in vast quantities on this side, too.\nI recommend as a counter-irritant the Hungarian activist review, MA, edited\nby Ludwig Kassak. MA excels in experimental typographical composition,\nreproduces the latest work of Moholy-Nagy, Raoul Haussmann, Jacques Lip-\nshitz, Picabia, Van Doesburg, Mondrian, Gleizes, Leger, Tatlin, Viking Egge-\nling, Man Ray, the Russian constructivists, and photographs of beautiful bridges,\nmachines, and New York, and publishes translations from the avant-garde\nwriters in Germany, France, Russia and America, the last being represented\nso far by Malcolm Cowley, Gorham B. Munson, and William Carlos Williams."}, {"page_pdf": 29, "page_imprimee": "27", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.29", "texte": "Modern Review\nFICTION POETRY CRITICISM\nmillllnlllllliti■ ■ 111• 11111ii11111111111111ir 11111m11111111111ii111111111111111111 ■ 11niiimiiii11111111in11111111111111111111111111\nA modern magazine printing\nnothing, however, that is\nradical or clever.\nPublished quarterly at Winchester Massachusetts.\n25 cents a copy\nat Bookstands.\nSubscription\n1.00 a year."}, {"page_pdf": 30, "page_imprimee": "28", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.30", "texte": "REBELS AND REACTIONARIES\nrub shoulders amiably and in perfect harmony in\nTHE DOUBLE DEALER\nPublished at New Orleans\nwhich prints good writing by youngsters or greybeards re-\ngardless of school, influence, or tradition. It shares none of\nthe prejudices of the right wing or the left wing in con-\ntemporary literature, but \" deceives them both by speaking\nthe truth It prints exhilarating creative and critical ma-\nterial by such writers as\nHart Crane Arthur Symons\nDjuna Barnes Lord Dunsany\nLouis Gilmore Lafcadio Hearn\nCarl Van Vechten Maxwell Bodenheim\nEdmund Wilson jr. Paul Eldridge\nand half a hundred others.\nYou have heard DOUBLE DEALER \"it* isT\nSingle copy 25 cents — Year's subscription . Dollars 2.50\nTrial Offer: Five Months » 1.00\nAddress: 204 Baronne Street, New Orleans, La., U. S. A."}, {"page_pdf": 31, "page_imprimee": "[29]", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.31", "texte": "SECESSION\nis forming a group of writers, hardly less important, it is forming\na group of readers, a group concerned with the ends and aims of\nthe other and, by a TECHNICAL JOURNAL, brought intimately\ninto contact with their work in its EXPERIMENTAL PHASES.\nThey form, as it were, a hand-picked AUDIENCE to which the\n/• i \\ v « ; ■; • <• 'i '* ' t; \"' ' ■* r\nwriters figuratively address themselves and are so freed from the\nDILEMMA of two slaveries to which literature has been subjected\nsince the DECLINE of PATRONAGE, — the solitary slavery of the\nIVORY TOWER and the Mob Slavery of the \" PUBLIC\n•i , • >\nThe \" PUBLIC \", and WHAT IT \" WANTS \" are abstractions\nas empty for letters as for politics.\nSECESSION\nspeaks, not to a public meeting, but to a room-full of FRIENDS.\nWould you care to be one? This POST CARD can make you so.\ncut along dotted line\n\n3)ear Sir,\n){indly add my name and address to your mailing\nlist when you receive my payment at your published\nrates, and oblige,\nyours very truly,"}, {"page_pdf": 32, "page_imprimee": "[30]", "url_page": "https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaay192307-01.1.32", "texte": "Market Report\nNew York, July 5,\n\ncut along dotted line\nStamp\nGorham B. Munson, Esq.\n4, Grove St.\nNEW YORK City."}]}