Abstract

More Roses and Locomotives

The article discusses the book "Viva. Seventy New Poems," by E. E. Cummings. In "Viva" his latest collection of poems, Cummings gives more of the roses and locomotives-not poems about these objects, of course, and not poems about how a poet feels on, seeing this or that, but poems which are experiences in themselves, even as are roses and locomotives. The basis of impressionism in poetry, as everyone knows, is that a poem should recreate an experience by recreating in the reader the identical, often very indefinite sensations the poet himself has felt. The poet attempts to set down in words, the exact intuitive groping toward feeling which was his own reaction to an object. Cummings's poems on romantic love are his serious artistic efforts.