Still Life with a Machine

E.E. Cummings's Typewriter Poems

Abstract

Focused on the paradigmatic shift brought about by the typewriter on the compositional habits of Cummings, the paper explores the interrelations between the history of technology and his poetry. A poet and a painter in the belated tradition of the Preraphaelites, Cummings was nevertheless fascinated by the poetics of the machine advocated by Modernism. As a result, he developed the unique features of his style through the relentless exploitation of what Heidegger called an "intermediate thing between a tool and a machine." As a matter of fact, the prosody for the eye of his visual pieces is a direct consequence of the restrictions imposed by the typewriter. The page itself, used as a unit of composition, becomes the site where semantic units take form in patterns whose spacing, punctuation and lettering are dictated by the mechanical pace of the carriage. The passage from typescript to typesetting conceals but does not erase the nature of Cummings's operation; however, the same act of concealment reveals the unresolved tension that characterizes his poetics. Always suspended between an inner "arch-Romanticism" (Gioia) and an outer iconoclasm, his poetry of the machine and yet not machine-like stands at the crossroad between the objectivist stance of the Pound-Williams line and the exasperated lyricism of the anarchist-individualist.