ing human being is comparable to his indifference to actual scenery in general, and I have been splitting hairs over this word accuracy because it suggests accuracy in representation, accuracy to "life." One finds few descriptions in this poetry which give one that intense joy of recognition (recognition as though of the very essence of the thing described) which is one of the chief pleasures of reading much mature poetry.
The modern common-sense doctrine of literary description figures very clearly in a passage in Chekhov's The Sea Gull where a young author complains about his difficulties in describing a moonlit night, not omitting the shimmering radiance, scented air, and the faint sounds of a piano. Trigorin, the famous author, he says, would have written merely that the neck of a broken bottle glittered in the light and that there was a black shadow under the mill dam, and there you would have had the night before you. This is the doctrine of the fresh and essential detail which dispassionately evokes an entire passionate memory. Cummings, however, does not bother with this remarkably powerful common sense method; he always edges away, interposing an emotional word, firing it like a rocket, where one would expect an appeal to the senses. He obtains the metaphor which equals the phenomenon (or our memories of it) in emotional intensity, rather than the image which evokes the memory and leaves the responsibility so to speak with the phenomenon.
This paraphrasing of life is not anything new in English poetry. One finds it everywhere in the most respectable quarters, in Keats, in Milton, decidedly in Shakespeare. Cummings is not a poet who dislikes conceits and mouth-filling lines. Lord Byron himself could not have got more noise out of tiresome words than Cummings with his
"moments when my once more illustrious arms
are filled with fascination when my breast
wears the intolerant brightness of your charms"
nor has anybody made more luminous metaphors.
"On dappled dawn forth rides the pungent sun
with hooded day preening upon his hand" . . .
