dumbfoundry

CLASSIC REVIEW: Wallace Stevens and E. E. Cummings by Edmund Wilson:

[Serious literature, or at least American consumption of it, is truly dying. This alarming conclusion is based on a recent National Endowment for the Arts survey, "Reading at Risk," which found that fewer than half of adult Americans read any form of written literature and that only 12 percent read poetry. Furthermore, not only are people reading less, but what they are substituting for novels and poetry--books-on-tape, supermarket romances, video games, Ten Things I Hate About You as the summation of Shakespeare--points to an "imminent cultural crisis," a "rising tide of mediocrity." The study asserts that "literary culture, and in turn, literacy in general, will continue to worsen" in view of the dumbing down of both readers and what is read. We might note that this panic over the quality of American literature through the loss of traditional forms is hardly new. In this 1924 essay by a frustrated Edmund Wilson, the critic wonders whether contemporary poetry--even by its finest practitioners, E. E. Cummings and Wallace Stevens--comes close to measuring up to the formal beauty of the past. --Nora Khan]

March 19, 1924

Tulips and Chimneys, by E. E. Cummings. New York: Thomas Seltzer. $2.00.

Harmonium, by Wallace Stevens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $2.00.

Mr. Wallace Stevens is the master of a style: that is the most remarkable thing about him. His gift for combining words is fantastic but sure: even when you do not know what he is saying, you know that he is saying it well. [...]

Mr. E. E. Cummings, on the other hand, is not, like Mr. Stevens, a master in a peculiar vein; a master is precisely what he is not. Cummings's style is an eternal adolescent, as fresh and often as winning but as half-baked as boyhood. [...]

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