Review E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962

 E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962  Revised, Corrected, and Expanded by E.E. Cummings, George J. Firmage, Editor (Liveright 1994) 1136 pages

I should begin with a disclaimer: though e e cummings is by all the standard measures (prizes, books in print, appearances in anthologies, critical attention) a major poet, he has always seemed to me a distinctly minor one. His major technical innovation, the use of wildly non-standard typography to explore how a poem could be constructed from type which didn't form words in the conventional sense, did have the merit of helping to open up mainstream modernist poetry to this sort of experimentation. But ultimately, I think that technique has proved to be a frill, and I've always felt that cummings most attractive poems were his most conventional -- pieces like "All in green went my love riding" or "My father moved through dooms of love" -- which, while too often tinged with adolescent sentimentality, at their best achieve a charmingly naive romanticism.

E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems in its over 1000 pages includes corrected versions of all cummings' published poems and a significant number of unpublished ones. The only ancillary matter is a one page Editor's Note and an index of first lines: there is no critical or biographical introduction or commentary or footnotes. The book has some physical production flaws surprising in what is clearly intended to be a major scholarly work: in some places for instance the print seems slightly smudged (at least in the copy I am looking at as I write this,) and the bottom margin is uncomfortably narrow, giving a cramped look to pages where a poem runs over to the next page.

At any rate, I would have different recommendations of this book for different audiences. If you are really seriously interested in cummings, you must have it, since it is undoubtedly a standard complete edition of his verse. For this reason, I also think any public or college library should have it. If you are not big on cummings but are a serious student of twentieth century modernist poetry, it may be worth your while to invest in this volume, given cummings's generally acknowledged importance to that poetry. For the average reader, though, who knows little of cummings but his name or who has only read a few of his poems and wants to see more, this book would be seriously too much: such readers would be better off getting something like the 100 Selected Poems (Grove Press 1994 128 pages.)

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