Papers by Michael Webster
Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 2020
I Cummings wrote "The Poetry of Silence" in the spring of 1915, the second semester of his senior... more I Cummings wrote "The Poetry of Silence" in the spring of 1915, the second semester of his senior year, for Dean Le Baron Russell Briggs' Advanced Composition class, English 5 (see Kennedy, Dreams 69-71). This essay is noteworthy as the first sign of the poet's continuing interest in Chinese and Japanese poetry. The essay also shows that Cummings was participating in the then-current practice among advanced British and American poets to study Chinese and Japanese poetry in order to find models for creating a "New Poetry" that could directly and simply address the actualities of the modern world. These poets were handicapped in their search for models by their lack of knowledge of Chinese and Japanese language and culture, and by the lack of direct and clear translations, free from Victorian poetic diction. For example, in a 1908 review of a translation of the Kokinshu Anthology, British poet F. S. Flint lamented the way in which the 31syllable Japanese tanka poems had been "done into English verse" in the "heavy English rhymed quatrain" ("Recent" 213, 212). Flint showed how one might better convey the "spontaneity" and suggestiveness of the originals by translating two haiku from a French translation and thus incidentally demonstrated how Japanese poetry might be instrumental in creating a new kind of modern verse, later labelled "imagism" by poet Ezra Pound. (The first of Flint's translations: "Alone in a room / Deserted-/ A peony.") Flint concluded his brief review, saying: "To the poet who can catch and render, like these Japanese, the brief fragments of his soul's music, the future lies open.. .. The day of the lengthy poem is over-at least, for this troubled age" (Flint, "Recent" 213; Carr, Verse 69-71). Harriet Monroe perceived a similar understated directness when she visited Beijing in 1911, a year before she founded Poetry Magazine in October 1912. She felt that the "quiet authority" and "arresting power" of Chinese art made the "realism" of Western art seem "over-emphatic and unrefined" (qtd. in Carr, Verse 483). Before undertaking the long journey to China across Siberia, Monroe visited London and picked up at the Poetry Bookshop the 1909 editions of Ezra Pound's Personae and Exultations. These poems, she wrote, "recapture primitive simplicities" (qtd. in Carr, Verse 483). Before Pound attempted to translate Chinese poems in Cathay (1915), his poetry and his concept of imagism were influenced by correspondence and meeting with Japanese Anglo-American poet Yone Noguchi, who wrote poems in both English and Japanese.
Grand Valley Review, 1989
Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 2004
A Companion to Modernist Poetry, 2014
Grand Valley Review, 1990
Cahiers Charles V, 2003
Cummings' collage-poems exhibit an extremely fragmented visual-verbal surface that must be "playe... more Cummings' collage-poems exhibit an extremely fragmented visual-verbal surface that must be "played" and in some sense reconstructed by the reader. But this fragmenting also enables and reveals symmetrical mathematical and rhetorical structures. Some of his poems incorporate reality fragments or overheard conversation, as in Guillaume Apollinaire's poèmes conversation but embedded within a tightly-controlled verbal-visual structure. The aim of these structural devices is to create aesthetic wholes, but also to create life or movement. This paper will examine several collage poems that illustrate how this movement is created.
Résumé "Floating particles of paper" : les poèmes collage de E.E. Cummings Les poèmes collage de Cummings présentent une surface visuelle-verbale extrêmement fragmentée qui doit être "jouée" et en un certain sens reconstituée par le lecteur. Mais cette fragmentation permet et révèle également des structures symétriques, mathématiques et rhétoriques. Certains de ses poèmes incorporent des fragments de la réalité ou de conversations, comme dans les poèmes conversation de Guillaume Apollinaire mais noyés dans une structure verbale-visuelle étroitement contrôlée. Le but de ces procédés structurés étant de créer des ensembles esthétiques, mais aussi de créer vie ou mouvement. Cet article examinera plusieurs poèmes collages qui montrent la manière dont ce mouvement est créé.
Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 2010
Cummings' explication of his own short blurb for his drama Him reveals the thought and erudition ... more Cummings' explication of his own short blurb for his drama Him reveals the thought and erudition that lie behind his light nonsense, showing us that nothing alive is trivial and alerting us to one of the fundamental thought-worlds that structure his work: the notion of "the third voice of 'life' " (quoted in i: six nonlectures 64).
Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 2000
This essay takes its title from a 1959 essay by Robert Langbaum called "The New Nature Poetry." L... more This essay takes its title from a 1959 essay by Robert Langbaum called "The New Nature Poetry." Langbaum's essay was a pioneering foray into the vast and complex topic of modernist nature poetry: as such, it provides us with a convenient and logical starting point for an investigation into Cummings' nature poetry. Langbaum's essay makes two large claims: first, that in contrast to the Romantics' religious veneration of nature as teacher, guide, and nurse, the nature poetry of modernists like Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, and D. H. Lawrence stressed "the mindlessness of nature, its nonhuman otherness" (102). To that end, modernist poets avoided projecting "human feelings into natural objects" (104). In other words, they avoided what critics call the pathetic fallacy. The paper explores ways in which Cummings' nature poetry fits (or doesn't fit) Langbaum's paradigm of the nature poetry of American modernists.
Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 2004
In a 1955 letter to Norman Friedman, Cummings declared that a poem “IS immeasurably alive” ("Lett... more In a 1955 letter to Norman Friedman, Cummings declared that a poem “IS immeasurably alive” ("Letter" 147). Nevertheless, he constructed his poetry in “measurable” (and presumably un-alive?) symmetrical and mathematical units and patterns. These patterns place Cummings in good modernist company. Even William Carlos Williams, a less rigorous formalist than Cummings, could famously write that “a poem is a small (or large) machine made of words” (Collected II 54). While he avoided machine metaphors, Cummings somewhat paradoxically praised art as “meaningless precision” (CP 402). For Cummings, the life the poem creates, like all life, cannot really be said to “mean,” while its art lies in its precision. This precision, as readers of Cummings know, “creates movement” (CP 221), but, I contend, it also creates meaning. Obviously, the “movement” that precision creates may happen both in the mind and the eye. The life or the IS that every poem releases is not something divorced from the brain.
Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 2002
Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society 20 (2013): 116-143.
A short paper on E. E. Cummings and the ampersand.
Lugete: The Divine Lost and Found Child in Cummings, Oct 2012
Notes for Cummings: A Resource for Students and Teachers, Oct 2010
Other by Michael Webster
Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, 2015
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Papers by Michael Webster
Résumé "Floating particles of paper" : les poèmes collage de E.E. Cummings Les poèmes collage de Cummings présentent une surface visuelle-verbale extrêmement fragmentée qui doit être "jouée" et en un certain sens reconstituée par le lecteur. Mais cette fragmentation permet et révèle également des structures symétriques, mathématiques et rhétoriques. Certains de ses poèmes incorporent des fragments de la réalité ou de conversations, comme dans les poèmes conversation de Guillaume Apollinaire mais noyés dans une structure verbale-visuelle étroitement contrôlée. Le but de ces procédés structurés étant de créer des ensembles esthétiques, mais aussi de créer vie ou mouvement. Cet article examinera plusieurs poèmes collages qui montrent la manière dont ce mouvement est créé.
Other by Michael Webster
Résumé "Floating particles of paper" : les poèmes collage de E.E. Cummings Les poèmes collage de Cummings présentent une surface visuelle-verbale extrêmement fragmentée qui doit être "jouée" et en un certain sens reconstituée par le lecteur. Mais cette fragmentation permet et révèle également des structures symétriques, mathématiques et rhétoriques. Certains de ses poèmes incorporent des fragments de la réalité ou de conversations, comme dans les poèmes conversation de Guillaume Apollinaire mais noyés dans une structure verbale-visuelle étroitement contrôlée. Le but de ces procédés structurés étant de créer des ensembles esthétiques, mais aussi de créer vie ou mouvement. Cet article examinera plusieurs poèmes collages qui montrent la manière dont ce mouvement est créé.