The Letters of Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings

A curious correspondence

The letter is dead. Email killed the epistler. And yet, for a thousand years, and a thousand years more, the letter was the pre-eminent form of literature. We all know what a letter does; but what is it? What purpose does it serve? What can we take from letter collections? A letter is a lattice of cross-purposes. The sender and receiver engaged in the art of symbol. Ever-multiplying layers of meaning thoroughly coat each masterwork. There is a craftsmanship that encodes every aspect; even the ‘technical’ elements form a frame. The envelope is the fabric; the address the rivets; the letterhead the joints. The text itself takes up that mantle of meaning: the words are the work’s many patterns and frets—function and form.

Signs of intent litter the page. The ancients, better than any, recognised this literary quality. Collections of the greatest writers, philosophers, and orators were published, and circulated widely. Cicero, Seneca and Pliny, among others, were the prose standard, used as models for school-boys and statesmen alike. Their letters were edited and perfected, not just for the recipient, but for the wider world. Some were never even sent to anyone at all. The form was, in most cases, confected; yet that fiction did not cause a decline in popularity. In careful curation and dignified duplication, the medium thrived as an intellectual and didactic genre. No wonder a majority of the books of the New Testament are epistles. No wonder Goethe employed the form in his legendary debut, the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Letter-writing is an art, and art for public display.

The correspondence between Ezra Pound and Edward Estlin Cummings was intended for their personal communication; and, as with the great epistolographers of the past, displays an intrinsic literary awareness. What motivates their allusions, their references, their coded words? At a basic level: fun. Both clearly took a certain satisfaction from the intellectual challenges engrained in writing letters of such a character. But a more vain motive likely lurked in the back of these men’s minds. Who wouldn’t want to study their personal and intellectual confluence? Certainly Ezra Pound, who was known for, and officially diagnosed with, a “profound, incredible, over-weaning [sic] narcissism”.¹ E. E. Cummings, or shall we say, e e cummings, with his ‘ungrammar’, definitely had the bravado of unconventionality. After all, both were essential to the modernist revolution against the poetic canon. As the God Emperor Leto II Atreides notes, “all rebels are closet aristocrats.”²

i sing of Ez and Estlin

Pound and Cummings first met in Paris, when Cummings lived there between 1921 and 1923. As Barry Ahearn, whose edition I use, writes, the two seem to have been in “infrequent contact”, that is, contemporaries, but not close friends by any measure.³ Their correspondence until the 1930s comprised mainly requests by Pound for poems to publish in his various editions. Curiously, Pound often seemed to prefer the prose works of Cummings, such as the Enormous Room, rather than his radical poetics. The publication of EIMI, Cummings’ anti-Soviet satire, seems to have had a defining impact on Pound’s view of the man . Of the poems, the anti-war / pro-conscientious objector poems i sing of Olaf glad and big and plato told are often highlighted by Pound. On this topic, Pound consistently urged Cummings to write an anti-US tractate much like EIMI: “Since the victory at the pollparrots, the COUNTRY needs (hell yes) an historian. than which none other than the late Kumrad Kcz/ is an any way qualified.”⁴

Cummings was reluctant, and preferred to compose his radical poetry. Yet, Pound did put some pressure on him: Cummings, so it seems, was the junior figure in the friendship. He noted himself in a letter to his mother, dated 24th October 1923, “As you may know,I have for some years been an admirer of Pound’s poetry:personally,he sometimes gives me a FatherComplex.” This reverence was maintained throughout the man’s life, writing in 1957, “& please let me make something onceforall clear:from my standpoint, not EEC but EP is the authentic ‘innovator’;the true trailblazer of an epoch;‘this selfstyled world’s greatest and most generous literary figure’”.⁵ Nevertheless, in the face of Poundian criticism, Cummings stood firm. In reviewing Cummings’ Collected Poems (1938), Pound saw that the poet had not followed his advice in maintaining an exactitude of language, writing, on 21st March 1938, “you WUZ in to much of a hurry to write… ef you hadda listened to papa you wd NOT have written better poetry / BUT some of youh poetry would have been BETTER WRITTEN.” Cummings’ next letter (succeeding three more, in between, from EP) contains no direct response.

From the 1930s until Cummings’ death in 1962, letters were exchanged frequently, only ever halted by the war. In form, the letters are varied, though Ahearn notes that those “written by Cummings between 1926 and 1941 are generally longer than those written after 1945.”⁶ In topic, they touch upon practically everything, though, of course, poetry and politics are prominent. Through everything, they became true and genuine friends, who “happily share anecdotes, jokes, odd newspaper clippings, news of their great contemporaries, family gossip, and recollections.”⁷ In times of need, each gave generously to the other, most notably Cummings’ $1000 gift to Pound for the legal bills brought about by his collaboration with Fascist Italy during the war. As always, Pound vigorously promoted Cummings to magazines, journals, and literary agents. Ahearn attaches one of Cummings’ undated draft notes about his friends:

“Ezra Pound is a damned fool, according to those who know their economics. 

He is a great poet,according to those who know their literatures. 

          I don't know anything. Quite the contrary. 

          According to my way of feeling,there’s no such thing as a great poet. 

There’s only a true poet;that is to say,a poet. This poet might very well be a
fool. And he might be not merely a fool; he might be a fool who is damned.
But he might be not merely a fool who is merely damned:he might be a noble
fool who is God damned ... I take off my hat to the sole and singular Ezra
Pound.

           May God bless him.”

Portraits of the artists

The extant collection comprises 427 letters and telegrams; of these, I shall select my favourites, among those that I think encapsulate the correspondence best. As you have already seen, both poets had rather idiosyncratic writing styles, even to more ‘ordinary’ people, such as their parents. As Ahearn notes, “Pound had a tendency to write in code despite the fact that he was quite obsessed with exact definition in language.”⁸ But Pound’s preference for sound and the importance of spoken poetry (see his ABC of Reading: “Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music”⁹) can assist us: reading the letters out loud often reveals the many hidden puns. With all this in mind, the first letters I nominate form a diptych of intellectual realisation. Dated 1 March 1930 and 25 March 1930, respectively, they seem to mark the beginning of the two’s bizarre, encoded correspondence. eec for the first time plays his hand. EP excitedly responds.

(Apologies for the large size on desktop; it makes it much easier to read on mobile)

3. Cummings to Pound

4. Pound to Cummings

Huh?

On first glance, this looks like utter gibberish—eat your heart out James Joyce! Yet, if you examine each odd word and consider the vague meaning of the sentence, some sort of understanding emerges.

(3.) ‘Sir Oral’ is Joseph Ferdinand Gould (1889-1957), the subject of Cummings’ poem little joe gould has lost his teeth and doesn’t know where. Hence, ‘oral’. Joe Gould was an eccentric ‘Greenwich Village Bohemian’ (where eec lived=Patchin Place), who was apparently simultaneously insane, a troll, and a great writer. His An Oral History of Our Time was intended to be a word-for-word account of people’s lives in New York. EP had seen a part of it (seemingly never fully published or existent) and thought Gould warranted patronage. Accordingly, Gould would appear daily at eec’s doorstep, where he would receive a 50c. dole. Of course, EP was in Italy, where he could suffer nothing from the effects of his patronage! The sentence in brackets describes Gould and his works, that eec does not seem to rate too highly (if he is being serious, which he may not be, for he maintained a friendship with Joe Gould for decades): ‘disarmed to the nonteeth’ inverts the traditional idiom; the scripture is ‘loseable’; the situation is thanks to / befitting of Ezra Pound; who has subjected (subjecting + digesting = subjesting?), etc. (etsemina = etcetera? or maybe latin et semina = and seeds (of knowledge? / semen?=creative impulses?)), eec and thus his ‘lightwrittens’ (poetry?) to digesting Gould’s insanity.

E. E. Cummings continues by referencing his artistic work CIOPW, which contained 27 drawings and 72 paintings. Published in 1931, the book was evidently still under works. I imagine eec’s request for ‘your portrait of you and your portrait of me’, ‘in the name of Adver the Tisement’ (advertisement), in direct response to Pound’s request for a photo of eec for submissions of poetry to Variétés magazine (published in Brussels—hence the reference; on second thought, perhaps this is an expression of indignation/annoyance by eec at having to provide a photograph?) might have been an attempt to solicit a contribution from Pound.¹⁰ As noted by eec, CIOPW contained a portrait of Joe Gould, as well as some eec portrait-selfs, and more (see below).¹¹

eec continues by referencing his play Him and his dealings with Horace Liveright (1886-1933), the publisher of The Enormous Room, Is 5 and Him. Pound should keep this a secret (sub rosa = under the rose = under secrecy (Cupid gave a rose to Harpocrates, the Hellenistic god of silence, to not give away the secrets of love); s.v.p. = s’il vous plait). The intervening references between ‘pub-’ and ‘-lish’ mention ‘the importance of being arnnest’, so may be a reference to other plays being performed at the time or famous plays in general. Unfortunately I cannot figure out any others. William Bleats = William Blake?? There is also something going on with ‘Achilles Is Only A heel’. Argh. eec explains quarrels with Brandt&Brandt’s, his literary agent, and quotes T. S. Eliot (Tears Lyut), ‘What Comma Indeed comma is civileyesehshun’?

At last the topic in question: submissions to Variétés magazine. Another reference to Eliot: ‘I hope Variétés won’t feel unitied, under the waistland or viceversa’. United/unified + tied = unitied? Or just unity made into a verb. Wasteland —> waistland. Perhaps intentional clothing/trousers imagery. Hard to tell. Context: eec’s father was a unitarian minister. Probably not relevant. The American first publication of The Waste Land was in The Dial¹², edited by eec’s rich good friend Schofield Thayer, who published TWL on EP’s urging, and on account of the fact that he had been fellow postgrads at Oxford together. eec certainly engaged with Eliot: the first poem of his first collection Tulips and Chimneys (think April is the cruellest month):

“the mad magnificent herald Spring

assembles beauty from forgetfulness

with the wild trump of April”

Does eec feel intimidated by TWL, suffering from an ‘anxiety of influence’ (hah)? No: for eec spring was the most beautiful season; he obsessed over spring more than the other seasons, e.g. Spring is like a perhaps hand, [in Just-], etc.¹³ A rejection of Eliot? Who knows.

eec finishes off by answering EP’s request in the previous letter (2. 17 Feb 1930) for ‘a photo of a Cigar Store Indian’, since America’s ‘autocthonous sculpture is comparatively unknown in yourup.’ This is a classic EP parody, both serious and humorous. eec notes in response that the American sculptor William Zorach (1887-1966) may own ‘one piece nicotine redman’ and someone (an ‘angel’) will be sent ‘for closeup’. He ends with his bibliography, also requested by EP for publishing in Variétés. ‘one three thirty’ is the date.

(4.) EP replies with excitement to eec’s transformation in style. Thanks is given for the received pictures of the Cigar Store Indian. In return, it seems eec’s play Him has been given priority in the theatres / for publication somehow (or just for EP’s reading/editing?). The key line: ‘Ever a pleasure to have something to decipher that AINT dear Jim or oedipous Gertie.’ ‘dear Jim’ in this case is James Joyce and ‘oedipous Gertie’ Gertrude Stein, the famous novelist, art collector and poet who hosted a salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris. The moniker ‘oedipous’ is a curious one. I have a couple of theories: the first that Gertrude is the name of Hamlet’s mother. Freud had explored his theory of the Oedipus complex in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), at one point using Hamlet as an example, analysing the character’s relationship with his mother and with Claudius, his stand-in father.¹⁴ This idea was later developed by Ernest Jones in a number of essays leading up to his monograph Hamlet and Oedipus (1949). Though a controversial theory (and it remains so), it was certainly circulating, and EP is the exact type of person to reference it for fun and/or literary satisfaction.

The second would be Stein’s general psycho-sexual character, which was complicated, to say the least. An interesting article by Israel Shenker in the New York Times (27 November 1977), which quotes our letter, records that Stein’s Everybody's Autobiography (1937), the continuation of her famous memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), was, by her friend Elliot Paul,¹⁵ “[panned as] her way of spreading Oedipus thin.”¹⁶ Stein was a masculine lesbian who treated her aforementioned partner Alice B. Toklas as her ‘wife’. In hosting the salon, Stein was utterly dominant, “when guests showed up, Alice was called upon to entertain their wives. The ladies were, of course, “second‐class citizens”.”¹⁷ Toklas famously described herself as “a person acted upon, not a person who acts.”¹⁸ Various academics have argued that “Stein equated the mind, especially that of a genius, with masculinity… which makes her identity as both a genius and a woman difficult to synthesize.”¹⁹ Even her famous magnus opus The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is, in a sense, a fraud. The supposed autobiography of her lesbian lover became a “way to affirm Stein’s ego, and self-declared genius, rather than as a way to affirm Stein’s female gender or lesbian relationship.”²⁰

Stein was also a follower of Otto Weininger, whose Sex and Character (1903) was simultaneously influential and highly controversial. Weininger writes:

“My law of sexual affinity ... [applied] to the facts of homo-sexuality showed that the woman who attracts and is attracted by other women is herself half male. .... Sappho was only the forerunner of a long line of famous women who were either homo-sexually or bisexually inclined ... homo-sexuality in a woman is the outcome of her masculinity and presupposes a higher degree of development.”²¹

Weininger and Stein also shared a self-hating Jewishness that associated Jewishness with femininity. As such, Stein seems to have a certain level of what the modern feminist might call internalised misogyny, in addition to internalised anti-semitism. This is probably reductive for such a complicated psychological profile as Stein’s, but it kinda works. To reduce it further, perhaps she suffered from a sort of penis envy, or rather, ‘male brain’ envy. Is this what EP was referring to? Or Hamlet’s Gertrude? I choose both.

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, painted 1905-6.

To finish letter 4—’HELLass’=Alas (cf. French, hélas).²²

The picture itself is of some sort of national committee at the White House (‘blanchehouse’), presumably, but who the ‘largeladies’ are, I cannot tell. A feminist league? The ‘Patchin youth returns aged thorax’, at whose mention EP’s tears are ‘welling’ is probably Joe Gould (the mad homeless man-scholar) again. seegar injuns = cigar indians. The photo the Herald Tribune have of ‘Cal. with parrot’ refers to a humorous scoop of a picture of President Calvin Coolidge with a parrot. Grace Coolidge, his wife, owned a wide range of birds, including canaries, thrushes, mockingbirds, and a parrot.²³ Warren Dahler was a painter Pound met in New York in 1910-11. Pound refers to him in Canto LXXX.

What can we say about these two letters, then? We can reconstruct their literary and contemporary world. We can peel away many layers of meaning. We can speculate and guess—and why not?

O.K. wot are yu talkin about?

Sometimes one or the other couldn’t decode some words or sentences (so it is no wonder I could not at times!). Examples include (343. Cummings to Pound. 30 May 1953) ‘I forgot to enquire your present opinion of exgeneralissimo I(for Icing)Hoar(for sp)?’—(344. Pound to Cummings. June 1953) ‘wot th b-b blue D -d-d-Danube iz I hoar?’ In between letters, Pound revealed that his wife Dorothy had figured out that it was Eisenhower: (346. Pound to Cummings. 9 June 1953) ‘yaaas D. had managed to figger that out & fill me IN’.

Or: (373. Pound to Cummings. 30 Giugn [June 1955]) ‘I dont spose the kumrad has any IDea of Pine, probably identifies it wiff a troublesome forest growth in N.UmpSheer’. eec: (374. Cummings to Pound. 15 July 1955) ‘—& who is “Pine”?’. EP: (375. Pound to Cummings. 20 July 1955) ‘YU LOUSSY litteraRRRatti, yu write a poem about Olaf large large and big (proof reader… heah heah) and then yu go off Throvianly and let a sowbellied ape bitch the consterooshun (NOT asking why conscription is NOW) and when some ole buzzard kicks the swine in the belly and stops the avalanche yu say: OO iz Pine?’. In this case, Pine is David A. Pine (1891-1970), a federal judge who “ruled President Truman’s seizure of the nation’s steel mills illegal. In April 1952 Truman seized the mills to avert an impending strike.”²⁴ Pound here is attacking Truman the ‘sowbellied ape’ (consterooshun = constitution; not sure about Throvianly). As usual, EP is far more interested in politics than eec, who takes a back seat, even after having written his ‘political’ verse.

My last piece of major analysis (some miscellaneous, more self-explanatory letters will follow) consists of three letters, where it seems each poet failed to understand the other’s letters in full. This is where the code went too far, where it became too difficult to decipher: the other extreme of semiotics. The topic is philosophy, Christianity, and that religion’s relationship to Plato and Aristotle, picking up on a number of topics from previous letters, namely T. S. Eliot’s Anglicanism.

252. Cummings to Pound

253. Pound to Cummings

254. Cummings to Pound

(252.) ‘Wwall’ = well;note that Joyce writes Stephen mocking an American accent in ch.9 of Ulysses (Hamlet ch.): “Wall, tarnation strike me!”²⁵ ‘prophet Ez’ = play on biblical Ezra. ‘Mr Best’ = Aristotle, see letter 254; in ch.9 Ulysses, Richard Best, the assistant director of the National Library—nice one, eec! Jimmie J = James Joyce; U = Ulysses (1922); note, EP helped get U published. ‘unXian’ = UnChristian. ‘Doting Tommie’ = T. S. Eliot. ‘ny MU of Na Hi = New York Museum of Natural History. ‘Di Color Che lui-même’= Aristotle himself, whose On Colours argues that all colours are made from various mixtures of black and white, thus only two colours. ‘the Broad’ = Plato, see 254.

(253.) ‘yrs 4th inst.’ = previous (installment) letter published July 4th (indy day). ‘JJ’ = James Joyce. ‘Webster or Jnsn or one ov them dics.’ = dictionaries, like Webster’s or Dr Johnson’s. EP has other ‘animals’ in his ‘pound’ to focus his attention on, other than Ulysses.

(254.) ‘Tiens’ = French, interjection of surprise. ἄροστος arostos = should be ἄριστος aristos = best, noble, excellent, etc. ‘Century Dict’ = Century Dictionary, the encyclopedia. ‘vide’ = see (Latin imperative). ‘ultramarsupial friend’ = T. S. Eliot; EP’s petname/nickname for the poet was ‘Possum’, hence Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), the inspiration for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats (1981). *Furball*

So what was eec on about? In the previous letter, Pound has critiqued the Harvard education of T. S. Eliot and eec: “being as it iz, as sez Ari StoTL. etc. it comes over me that the almost uniform effeks of a Haaaavud eduk / on the kumrad ‘n’ th’ pos O.M. IZ diffikulty of eggstraktink a clear response to certain attempts at stimulae.” (27 June 1950) (kumrad = eec; pos O.M. = Eliot) This merely seems to refer to eec’s slow or brief responses (eec’s prior letter, 9 June 1950, satirised in one sentence the discovery of Pound’s latest ‘prodigy’), or perhaps a certain personal conservatism. As such, eec says, EP can have Aristotle; he will have ‘the Broad’ (Plato=>note his aforementioned poem plato told).

Another who preferred ‘Mr Best’ was James Joyce. In chapter 9 of Ulysses, “Scylla and Charybdis”, Stephen Dedalus discharges an effluence of theories—*takes*—at a meeting in the National Library of Ireland with the librarians Thomas Lyster, Richard Best, William Kirkpatrick McGee (pseudonym John Eglinton), and, importantly, the great mystic-poet George William Russell (pseudonym A.E.; 1867-1935). The main event is Stephen’s theory of Hamlet re Shakespeare’s personal biography (as referenced by eec): his son Hamnet, his wife, her potential adultery with his brother Richard, etc. What’s more relevant to us is the philosophical framing of the chapter.

This chapter, as Joyce himself identified in his schemata, “should be understood in terms of the contrast between the opposing philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.”²⁶ Stephen’s focus on the Aristotelian theory of ‘entelechy’, that “holds that the soul’s potential is realized within the sensuous world and the ‘particulars of experience’”,²⁷ opposes A.E.’s Platonic “ideas, formless spiritual essences.” (the whirlpools of Charybdis).²⁸ Stephen’s satirical musings firmly place the chapter on the Aristotelian side. He himself is identified as the ‘Aristotelian Scylla’ (who has “the voice of a new-born whelp”, as in the Odyssey).²⁹ Indeed, the initial ‘Platonic’ dialogue between Stephen and the ‘established’ litterateurs breaks down into not only Stephen’s thoughts but music (the sheet music of Gloria in excelsis Deo), a version of Shakespeare’s will, a script as from a play, and even a dramatis personae. “Which of the two, Stephen asked, would have banished me from his commonwealth?”. Presumably not Aristotle.

eec expands further: though EP and JJ can keep Aristotle for themselves, he at least credits ‘Mr Best’ for founding the ‘most unXian church before Paul the Pharisee or Doubting TAcquinas’—the so-called ‘SaulPaul-Acquinas hypersystem’. This ‘hypersystem’ is how eec characterises the Christianity ‘so headily espoused by your ultramarsupial friend’ (Eliot), that is, a sort of corruption, unfaithful to the early Christianity of the New Testament (hence, ‘vide New Testament’). Being ‘au fond Aristotelian’ (at its root Aristotelian), this reformulated Christianity was, in a sense, already founded hundreds of years before Christ’s miraculous birth.

eec’s reference to Ulysses’ Hamlet chapter further illuminates this claim. Stephen certainly favours the ‘SaulPaul-Acquinas hypersystem’. There are a number of indicators of this fact, beyond the basic consistent Christian imagery in the chapter (which is mostly used in reference to the Hamlet theory: father/son; God/Jesus; Shakespeare/Hamnet; Ghost King Hamlet/Prince Hamlet, etc.). Stephen is a zealous reader of Saint Thomas Aquinas: “Saint Thomas, Stephen smiling said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy reading in the original”; Buck Mulligan=>“I called upon the bard Kinch at his summer residence in upper Mecklenburgh street and found him deep in the study of the Summa contra Gentiles.”³⁰ It was Aquinas who synthesised Aristotle with Christianity, which had previously been, in the main, a development of Middle Platonic thinking.

This Aristotelian association, which we have seen opposed to A.E.’s Platonism already, is further confirmed by Stephen’s musings:

“Formless spiritual. Father, Word and Holy Breath. Allfather, the heavenly man. Hiesos Kristos, magician of the beautiful, the Logos who suffers in us at every moment.”³¹

Later down the page:

“Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see. Through spaces smaller than red globules of man’s blood they creepycrawl after Blake’s buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”³²

The first section establishes a sort of Platonic Christian imagery, augmented by the theosophical principles to which A.E., and others, hold. The second is firmly Aristotelian, and rejects Neoplatonic Theosophy.

“Horseness is the whatness of allhorse” is code for Aristotle’s understanding of “essence as embodied, in contrast to Plato’s spiritual essences.”³³ The ‘streams of tendency and eons’ are those worshipped by the theosophists (‘A.E.’, the pseudonym, being derived from Aeon=life force/age/era/gnostic emanation). God is a ‘noise in the street’, referencing Proverbs 1:20-1:

20 Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets:

21 She crieth in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of the gates: in the city she uttereth her words, saying…

For Stephen, God is not merely the Platonic One, who is separate/above creation, never interceding in the ‘fallen’, imperfect, material world. He is in the streets, he is among us in all his creation, and, as Stephen thinks in ch.3 Proteus, “God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain.”³⁴ This is “very peripatetic” (peripatetic = Aristotelian, for his school had colonnaded walkways = peripatoi). These Platonists and Theosophists so eagerly chase after William Blake’s buttocks, in all his prophetic might, but wrongly assume that this “vegetable world is but a shadow” of eternity. Indeed, perhaps here, Joyce declares himself the true heir of Blake (JJ was an admirer; indeed the whole sentence is an allusion to Blake’s Milton), rather than A.E., with his visions and obviously Blake-influenced paintings. God is in “the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”

As for the final sentences of eec’s letter, we find again a certain comparison in Ulysses. The one section I missed out in Stephen’s manic Aristotelian musings, “Space: what you damn well have to see”, is a reference to Aristotle’s theory of vision, that is, that vision could only occur when information from the observed object was received—through space—and, hence, “translated into an understanding of the qualities of the object, which would be sensed by the soul.”³⁵ With Aristotle’s theory of vision in mind, eec calls him ‘old Di Color’, referencing this two-colour theory found in On Colours, ascribed to Aristotle, though potentially by either of his two successors at the Lyceum, Theophrastus or Strato. Essentially, he conceives of all colours being made up of a mixture of black and white. eec’s final reference is to an exhibition of the Natural History Museum in New York that includes Aristotle’s description of dolphins and whales. This is the final thing he can give ‘a bouquet’ to Aristotle for:

“The dolphin and the whale, and all such as are furnished with a blow-hole, sleep with the blow-hole over the surface of the water, and breathe through the blow-hole while they keep up a quiet flapping of their fins; indeed, some mariners assure us that they have actually heard the dolphin snoring.”³⁶

A curious series of letters: so much packed into so little. Explanations lead to learning, lead to knowledge. And even when the other had no clue! Now for some miscellaneous examples.

Miscellaneous

20. Cummings to Pound

I shall not include this letter in full, because it is very long. eec to EP:

A very amusing one. Some over-the-top praise for EP from eec. Followed by a hilarious (and insightful?) section on eec’s seeming obsession, the ‘natural’ history museum—a little context for our dolphins and whales.

Later in the epistle, eec includes a poem:

gertrude steinie

let down her heinie

all on a summer’s day

as it fell out

they all fell in

the rest they ran away

No comment.

58. Cummings to Pound

On whether EP would return to America to lecture, on the suggestion of Max Eastman (at the time) prominent radical socialist author. Chortle.

61. Pound to Cummings

Only a partial inclusion. On the prospect of seeing Marion Morehouse Cummings, eec’s wife (in response to Eastman’s request that EP visit to lecture). [15 April 1937]

Always a charmer our EP.

427. Pound to Marion Morehouse Cummings

The last letter—

So, wot’s the poynt? why theze lettahs? wot drives from ‘em? I jst cldnt recyst—fun! Mayhaps all it iz iz episstolry diaryhea? NO: itz ‘who let the dogs out’ of the Pound—and the cummings.

the augries and the intrials AND the ensieds AND the dasein /of the MaRkESmiTh-en kreetures. peaking at peek modernism. noah’s arcitectonics of the mind. mined tonnels of /meaning. jennyass. Possum et Gertie et Jimmie J et JoeyGouldque… Epistles,forms of duh entelekik woirld.

Didaktik vishuns—Blakelike—fur ME and fur YOO—uh semi-otich phantasie in b minor: less FORM, more FILL-ing; Jerusalem wuz builded here.

&—now jst drk SATANic mills…

cld we ever excite ‘bout the LITTERature t/hodie?

texts maid up texts,Xcerts as ENTIREpretations;stumbling thru Benjaminz Arcadez, thru Make-rob-yus’ dreams uhv chickpea’s SKIPIO, the Broad’s ER—

                                                 METEMPSYCHOSIS!

; ore, rich vains of or, allthings—father, word and holy breath—to HAMlet, HAMnet’s fartherz in-her-itance.

                                      evr,

                                                —AEngus of the birds.

1. Torrey (1992), 248–249. https://archive.org/details/rootsoftreasonez0000torr.

2. God Emperor of Dune.

3. Ahearn 1996, 2.

4. 11 November 1934. ‘pollparrots’ presumably references the mid-term elections that took place on the 6th November 1934, where Roosevelt, in his first mid-term (of many), and the Democrats won a supermajority in the Senate. Kumrad Kcz is a nickname from Cummings based on his being referred to by Soviet soldiers as ‘Kumrad Kumminkz’ in EIMI.

5. Ahearn, 2.

6. Ahearn, 8.

7. Ahearn, 10.

8. Ahearn, 6.

9. EP, ABC of Reading, 61.

10. Less sure on this.

11. https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/spring_cummings/CIOPW.html - this is all I could find of CIOPW. It only had 391 copies in its edition.

12. The Dial also published William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, eec, Kahlil Gibran, Amy Lowell, Mariane Moore, EP, Odilon Redon, Bertrand Russell, Carl Sandburg, W. B. Yeats, Ernest Hemingway, and others! Wowzers.

13. https://www.theattic.space/home-page-blogs/2019/4/19/the-puddle-wonderful-poet-of-spring - blog has other examples.

14. https://sites.broadviewpress.com/lessons/DramaAnthology/FreudOnHamlet/FreudOnHamlet_print.html

15. “A friend of both James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, Paul defied Ernest Hemingway's maxim that “if you mentioned Joyce twice to Stein, you were dead.” Paul was a great enthusiast of Stein's work, equating its “feeling for a continuous present” with jazz.” - From his wikipedia page.

16. https://www.nytimes.com/1977/11/27/archives/how-writers-write-letters-at-the-berg.html

17. https://www.nytimes.com/1977/07/10/archives/alice-entertained-the-wives.html

18. Ibid.

19. https://scholars.wlu.ca/etd/5/, p. 35.

20. Ibid.

21. From Stimpson, Catharine R. “The Mind, the Body, and Gertrude Stein.” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 (1977): 489–506. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342936.

22. Amended here: “may be some postal service that lost the enclosed picture? Perhaps something to do with hell, or maybe Greece (Hellas)?” (quotes are original text)

23. https://www.mmbirdtoys.com/a/blog/presidents-and-their-parrots

24. Ahearn, 366.

25. Ulysses (original edition; centenary edition), 177.

26. Creasy, 280, from centenary edition.

27. Creasy, 281.

28. Ulysses, 177.

29. Odyssey 12.86-7. A. T. Murray, tr.

30. U, 206.

31. U, 178.

32. U, 178

33. Centenary Edition note, U, 178.

34. U, 49.

35. https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/mathematics/the-mathematics-of-light-aristotle/#:~:text=According%20to%20Aristotle's%20theory%20of,observed%20object%20(its%20color).

36. From Ahearn: A. Smith and W. D. Ross, eds., The Works of Aristotle, 15 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910-52), vol. 4, Historia Animalium, trans. D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, book IV, 10, 537b.