A day or two ago I got the sad news that Norman Friedman died on the 6th of November.  He for many years was probably the foremost critic of E. E. Cummings, one of my three favorite pre-1960 American poets.  Certainly I learned more than a little about Cummings (and poetics) from his writings over the years.  He was also a very nice man, as I found out when I met him at a literary conference where I presented a paper on Cummings several years ago.

This  morning curiosity about him sent me to Wikipedia where, to my shock, I was unable to find an entry on him.  Along the way, though, I found an essay of his on Cummings at jstor.org, a site you can read academic writings at for a fee. The fees are way more than I can afford but I took advantage of an offer allowing me to read three essays for free, so am now midway through Friedman’s “E. E. Cummings and His Critics,” (1962).

In his essay, Friedman is making an excellent case for Cummings as what academics should consider a serious poet–i.e., one with a serious outlook on life that he expresses in his poetry.  I suppose he is right but for me, “all” Cummings did was celebrate existence, using all the verbal means he could think of in order to able to do that maximally.

Oh, sure, he was diverted from this central concern to take on collectivism (which I applaud) and science (which I don’t applaud) but at his best he did the only thing I believe poets should do, which is use the whole of their language to celebrate existence–which I think requires them at the same time to show by contrast what’s wrong with it.  I think what I mean is that a poet should side with, and celebrate, beauty in his poetry, which he can’t do without opposing, and condemning, ugliness (at least implicitly) as when Basho celebrates the beauty of the many moments existence’s best moments combine in his old pond haiku while at the same time implicitly rejects–and I should have used “rejecting: instead of “condemning” earlier in this sentence–existence’s lesser moments, the one’s with only the present in them, or–worse–only some solely intellectual or solely unintellectual present in them.  Or nothing at all, unless the nothing that includes all isn’t what many of the greatest minimalist poems are about.  (Yeah, I’m going a little over-mystical there.)

You’re in luck.  I don’t have time right now to knock out several thousand words on the poetic moment I’m talking about.  The traditional haiku moment is an instance of it, but only one instance, whatever the wacked-out anti-Western idolizers of the Far East maintain.
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