|
6 May 2005: To the Coolidge poem, yet again, followed by what I just wrote about it for my Cummings presentation:
Coolidge's "a// the" is a 100% Cummingsification. I think Cummings used it more than once. He used it for sure in his grasshopper poem. There, beginning with his sixth line, he speaks proto-languagepoetically of the grasshopper's gath "eringinto(p-/ aThe:l/ eA/ !p:" (italics mine). Broken syntax, but--more important--a focus on inflection, on what it is rather than on its results. Of course, Cummings brings inflection to the fore for the sake of his immediate image whereas Coolidge more emphatically arrests us in considerations of the same inflection for a more subtle aim--which I think he may not have been aware of. In fact, it may exist only for me. For me, it indicates (in Coolidge's poem) the evolution of Man's search for knowledge as it comes to understand, first, general classes of things, then distinguishes final uniquenesses.
|
