Volume 13, Number 6 · October 9, 1969
Cummings and Goings
By Denis Donoghue
Selected Letters of E. E. Cummings
edited by F.W. Dupee, edited by George Stade
Harcourt, Brace & World, 296 pp., $8.95
'Singing birds shouldn't talk,' E. E. Cummings told Hildegarde Watson, evading the requirement of making a speech at Rochester. But there was no law against writing letters. The editors of the Selected Letters have chosen 265 specimens from an available correspondence which runs to a thousand letters. There are bound to be more, hoarded for years, then lost, or gathering dust somewhere in vacant lots. Cummings did not hold to the principle that a letter a day keeps the doctor away, but he must have enjoyed typing these prose poems, using the whole Corona, commas, parentheses, capitals, numerals, spaces, 2 for two, 4 for for. The first letter is a pen-and-ink promise to his grandmother: 'I am sorry dear Nana but I will be a good boy'; the aspirant to virtue was five years old, November 27, 1899. The last letter was written a few months before his death in 1962.
Review, 2590 words
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