A common modern anxiety concerns the inability to communicate meaningfully with surrounding individuals, even loved ones. This fear for the fragmentation of human community is prevalent in the poetry of modern Americans such as Ezra Pound, who created the notoriously impotent "J Alfred Prufrock." T.S. Eliot exemplified this tension by penning the baron post-war "Wasteland." The same fear can be found in the poetry of the two poets this paper now will examine, E.E. Cummings and Robert Frost.
The fractured words (and perspectives) in Cummings' poems "r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r" and "sh estiffl" are like the fractured tones (and fractured relationships) in Frost's poems, "Home Burial" and "Mending Wall," in that they are indicative of the poets' desire to break through the limitations of language. Their goal in this endeavor is to simulate an objective form of communication between their audiences and them. This is to suggest that Cummings (wittingly or not) is building on Frost's idea that "a sentence is not interesting merely in conveying a meaning of words; it must do something more" (Newdick pp. 293). While Frost experiments with the meaningful effects created by altering the auditory construction of his poem's words, Cummings experiments with the meaningful effects created by altering the visual construction of his poem's words.
In Frost's poem, "Home Burial," a word that appears frequently is "oh." This is significant because this monosyllabic exclamation appears to hold within it very little meaning, but depending on its context and delivery -- on the tone in which it is spoken -- it has the potential to hold within it more meaning than a page filled with words. In 1935 in Amherst, Frost told an audience that his poetry might be summarized as "oh," and the varying emotional intonation and context surrounding it (On Sound of Sense). That is a perfect example of what Frost means by the "sound of sense." What is important is not the word "oh" itself, but rather the use of the word. Frost notes in another lecture that there is the "'oh' of scorn, the 'oh' of amusement, the 'oh' of surprise, the 'oh' of doubt," and endless more to fit the full spectrum of human emotion, and it is the poet's job to define just what sense should be related to that sound (On Sound of Sense). In this way, Frost is giving life to his poetry -- it cannot be fully understood if it is read monotonously -- it is full of emotion and begs to be expressed dynamically.
In one Boston Evening Transcript, Frost says:
What we get in life and miss so often in literature is the
sentence sounds that underlie the words.... [L]et us take the example of two people who are talking to each other on the other side of a closed door, whose voices can be heard but whose words cannot be distinguished. Even though the words do not carry, the sound of them does, and the listener can catch the meaning of the conversation. This is because every meaning has a particular sound-posture, or, to put it in another way, the sense of every meaning has a particular sound which each individual is instinctively familiar with. (Newdick pp. 292, footnote 1)
To illustrate this point, take for example the scene in line 30 of "Home Burial," when the man first brings the child's grave into the conversation. He cannot even finish his sentence before his wife interrupts him with "'Don't, don't, don't, don't,' she cried." If this line is read dully with no regard to context, then the word "don't" is made redundant and the wife's intentions are made dubious.
Conversely, the repetition of this word allows its meaning to alter if it undergoes changes in intonation. She interrupts her husband's speech with an aggressive, capital-D "don't," but by the fourth repetition of the word, it seems to have lost its power. After she cries out these exclamations she "with[draws]" and shrinks "from beneath his arm / that rested on the banister" (line 32-3). Because the word "arm" is the final word before the line cut, the suggestion is that the wife is submitting to the strong hand--or the strong "will" (the final word of the poem)--of her husband. The strength held within the first "don't" crumbles into a vulnerable and finally fearful whimper of a "don't."
Another example in the poem of meaning transcending the text can be found in line 45, when the husband says: "‘my words are nearly always an offense.'" The final word in that line, "offense," takes on new meaning when considering the poem as a whole, and its examination of the inability of these two human souls to meaningfully communicate, though both are plagued by similar grief of a lost child; divided into its two syllables, the word can become the words "a fence." This image of a fence serves to emphasize the barrier of tension between them and although the barrier is not physical, just as "a fence" is not physically in the text of the poem, it is nonetheless communicated through the "sound of sense" -- through the emotion intonated in their dialogue -- that this barrier of tension will not be broken within this dialogue, for words seem unable to fully grasp the reality that the wife and husband are facing, as grieving parents.
That very same image of the barrier of tension occurs, and more obviously so, in Frost's poem "Mending Wall," when the narrator imagines saying to his neighbor, whom he speaks of sarcastically and resentfully: "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know / what I was walling in or walling out, / and to whom I was like to give offense" (line 32). In this poem, the physical wall that keeps the narrator separated from his neighbor is like the ironic tone that serves to alienate his neighbor as a "savage" (line 40). The narrator's desire to condescend to his neighbor comes out not merely in the language, but in the language's "sound-posture." These examples are to show that Frost plays with the auditory elements of human language to emphasize that although it can unite human beings, language can just as easily keep human beings divided.
The poetry of E.E. Cummings, like that of Frost, aims to get at the true "feeling" of the experience the poem is meant to relay. Critic WM. Van O'Connor suggests in his book, Sense and Sensibility in Modern Poetry, that the "esthetic concern of the moderns," such as Frost and Cummings, is in response to "several kinds of poetry: against solely denotative statement, the loose accumulation of many details, as well as the careful organization of homogeneous 'poetic' elements" (pp. 159). Those poems are dealing with merely superficial truths. The moderns instead give to their poems an Imagistic element, in which every word is essential to the poem's meaning. In A Miscellany Cummings describes a poet as "somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words." He goes on to suggest, "a lot of people think or believe or know they feel--but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling--not knowing or believing or thinking." Cummings hopes to present reality through his poetry without any personal bias whatsoever--as if he could penetrate through the very limitations of his perspective for a second, and achieve some epiphany. He is aiming to avoid the reflection and imposition of meaning, to relay solely the experience of interacting with the real world.
The one catch is just that the experience must be translated from feeling into words, so he experiments with the words' construction, dissecting the word's parts (letters) to get at the word's essence. It is natural that he would experiment with the construction of the words themselves because words are a means for humans to organize reality--so he is rearranging the building blocks of his perspective to achieve some revelation about the act of human perception. The poem of the grasshopper, to which no mere summary can do justice, serves as a great example of this idea:
r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
who
a)s w(e loo)k
upnowgath
PPEGORHRASS
eringint(o-
aThe):l
eA
!p:
S a
(r
rIvInG .gRrEaPsPhOs)
to
rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly
,grasshopper;
This poem, which immediately seems quite bizarre, is best explained by L.S. Dembo in his 1966 book, Conceptions of Reality in Modern American Poetry, when he says that the act of figuring out just what the poem's subject is, is like the act of perceiving a leaping grasshopper in the real world. He suggests that "just as the grasshopper is out of focus in the process, and comes into focus only after he has come to rest, so the word that signifies him, suddenly regarded ('as we look up'), is jumbled throughout the poem, finally to 'become rearrangingly, 'grasshopper''" (Dembo 125). Cummings is using language to not merely illustrate a grasshopper, but to illustrate the pure experience of perceiving a grasshopper in action.
To see another example of Cummings' attempt at giving his poems a sense of motion -- which itself suggests that world presented through Cummings' poetry is one that is ever changing, and never static -- look at his poem about a striptease dancer:
sh estiffl
ystrut sal
lif san
dbut sth
epoutin (gWh.ono:w
s li psh ergo
wnd ow n,
r
Eve
aling 2 a
-sprout (eyelands)....
If one were to "translate" this poem, that is to say to write it out with proper spacing between the letters and to add punctuation, it might look like this: "She stiffly struts, all ifs and buts; the pouting Who now slips her gown down, revealing two asprout islands." Dembo, in his book, claims that the striptease dancer is, like the grasshopper, a "chaos of broken movements transformed into broken words." He goes on to note that "as a beholder, the poet in Cummings' world is, like the objectivist, the man who apprehends and recreates the true nature of the object, the true nature here being 'growth,' 'vitality,' 'rhythm'" (Dembo 125). He is condensing the experience of the poem into its most concentrated form and revealing its subjects to be always in motion, even on paper reflected in the poem's language. It is no coincidence that the word "now" appears in both of these poems. Cummings is creating poetry that appears to the reader like a flash of lightening, to communicate meaning without defined sentence structure or even defined words.
This idea of perpetual motion is another common theme in modern poetry. Everything alive in reality is necessarily in motion otherwise it would be dead. Even when a human body appears to be at rest, are not the internal organs and cells still in motion? Because of this, Frost believes that humans should remain in labor, or else they might fall into despair for feeling under utilized. Perhaps that is just what Cummings is doing with his poetry: remaining in labor. Although his poetry never will directly portray the sensory world, no poetry will perfectly; at least his is an admirable attempt at breaking through the human constructs that bind him to his very limited human perspective, to see what is at the heart of reality -- at the heart of what human language may articulate.
The Moderns are quite wary of imposing their own biases on their poetry than their predecessors. In this way, modern poetry itself is often a barrier between the modern poet and the modern reader; and many modern poems are reflections of the reader rather than the poet. With Frost and Cummings, however, they use the imposition of the human senses in the experience of reading their poetry to give their poems life, or motion. There is no barrier between the poet and the reader because the poet barely makes himself known. The poems of Frost are like scenes one might naturally hear in any American neighborhood, and are spoken with the voices of real (dynamic) folk, not of a single poet; and the poems of Cummings appear like natural epiphanies that might be achieved in the natural world, but without the bias of human construction. The meanings of these poems transcend the words that represent them and are revealed either through the sight or sound of sense.
Works Cited
Dembo, L.S.. "E.E. Cummings: The Now Man.” Conceptions of Reality in Modern
American Poetry. LosAngeles, CA: University of California Press, 1966. 118-128. Print.
Newdick, Robert. "American Literature." American Literature. 9.3 (1937): 289-300.
Web. 5 Nov. 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2919660>
O'Connor, WM. Van. Sense and Sensibility in Modern Poetry. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1948. Print.
"Robert Frost On 'The Sound of Sense' And On 'Sentence Sounds'." Web. 5 Nov
2012. <http://udallasclassics.org/maurer_files/Frost.pdf>