E. E. Cummings' modernism and the classics : each imperishable stanza / J. Alison Rosenblitt.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rosenblitt, J. Alison (Jennifer Alison), author.

Series:

Classical presences

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cummings, E. E. (Edward Estlin), 1894-1962--Criticism and interpretation.

Cummings, E. E.

Cummings, E. E. (Edward Estlin), 1894-1962--Themes, motives.

Cummings, E. E. (Edward Estlin), 1894-1962.

Themes, motives.

Criticism and interpretation.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xxii, 370 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2016.

Summary:

This volume is a major, ground-breaking study of the modernist E. E. Cummings' engagement with the classics. With his experimental form and syntax, his irreverence, and his rejection of the highbrow, there are probably few current readers who would name Cummings if asked to identify 20th-century Anglophone poets in the Classical tradition. But for most of his life, and even for ten or twenty years after his death, this is how many readers and critics did see Cummings. He specialised in the study of classical literature as an undergraduate at Harvard, and his contemporaries saw him as a 'pagan' poet or a 'Juvenalian' satirist, with an Aristophanic sense of humour. In E.E. Cummings' Modernism and the Classics, Alison Rosenblitt aims to recover for the contemporary reader this lost understanding of Cummings as a classicizing poet.

Contents:

E.E. Cummings as a Classical Poet

1 Preface 3

2 Cummings and the Classics 18

1 Cummings at Harvard 20

2 Reading Cummings as a Classical Poet 23

3 1910s Modernism and Classical Continuities 27

4 Language and Syntax 32

3 'Smoking centuries of hecatombs': Cummings and Translation 40

1 Latin Seasonality and Greek Eternity 41

2 Metre and Form 54

Childhood, Harvard, and Paganism

4 The Pagan World of Goat-footed Pan 63

1 Fauns 69

2 'The goat-footed balloonMan' 77

5 Classics and Childhood: Protectors and Transgressors 90

1 Classics and Classicists in Adventures in Value 93

2 'Saints and satyrs' 101

The Great War and Beyond

6 'A twilight smelling of Vergil': Cummings, Classics, and the Great War 113

1 War as an Idea 114

2 'Dusty heroisms' 118

3 'Ça Pue' 124

4 Looking Back 129

7 'Let not thy lust one threaded moment lose': Death in the Meadow 133

1 Exquisite Annihilation 134

2 Pastoral Death 139

3 Nine Songs of Death 146

4 Cummings' 'Songs' and H.D.'s Sea Garden 160

8 'Cast like Euridyce one brief look behind': The Post-War World 166

1 Moving on 168

2 Carpe Diem in a Post-War World 176

3 'Fields slowly Elysian' 183

4 Suicide 187

Cummings, Classics, and Modernism

9 Modernity and Antiquity: 'smite the sounding bollox' 197

1 From Plato to Cezanne: Movement and Bulge 198

2 White Marble and Busted Statues 206

3 Tears Eliot 215

10 A Homeric Affair: Reflections on the Ambitions of Modernism 223

1 The Romantic Poet-lover 224

2 Epic Ambitions 227

3 Homer, Milton, Blake 231

4 Callimachean Defiance 235

5 Major Poetry 242.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 339-357) and indexes.

ISBN:

9780198767152

0198767153

OCLC:

935690582