18 pages • 36-minute read
Spring is like a perhaps hand
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Background
Historical Context
E.E. Cummings’s poetry is largely preoccupied with love and nature, though he lived and wrote through turbulent periods of history. Despite his professed lack of interest in politics, Cummings’s literary career was heavily influenced by the poet’s political choices. For instance, Cummings volunteered for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in 1917 after graduating with his master’s degree from Harvard. He did this to help with the war efforts while preserving his pacifist leanings. His laissez-faire attitude, anti-war leanings, and boredom-induced littering of letters home with suspicious phrases meant to provoke the French censors led to his imprisonment on suspicion of espionage. His imprisonment of nearly half a year was the subject of his first book, The Enormous Room, which kickstarted his publishing career. After returning to the United States, he was drafted in the army in 1918.
In 1931, E.E. Cummings visited the Soviet Union. At the time, the Soviet Union was considered an anti-capitalist beacon of hope by American Leftists. Expecting to find a communist utopia, Cummings instead discovered a brutal dictatorship. After returning home, Cummings published an account of his trip that attacked the Soviet regime: Eimi (1933). Because this offended the sensibilities of liberal publishers, Cummings’s heretofore successful poetry manuscripts were blacklisted. He had to resort to self-publishing for a period.
Literary Context
E.E. Cummings began writing and publishing poetry as an adult in the early 1920s, a couple of decades into the roughly defined modernist period in poetry. Cummings’s work has been compared to Gertrude Stein’s insofar as it is preoccupied with and modifies syntax. It is also inspired by Ezra Pound’s innovations in imagism and free verse. Unlike these two giants of modernity, E.E. Cummings considered many of his poems to be visual compositions—the existence of the poem on the page, exactly as he composed it on his typewriter, was the artwork. Typography and visual composition were integral. Reformatting or shifting typography would not affect the work of some poets, but for E.E. Cummings it would be a fundamental alteration. In this way, Cummings has a literary ancestor and peer in the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, whose 1918 Calligrammes was defined by its visual arrangement of letters and text.
it is instructive to read “Spring is a perhaps hand” against the backdrop of other influential literary works of its time. Only a few years earlier, T.S. Eliot published his modernist masterpiece “The Waste Land” (1922), which also discusses spring. In Eliot’s poem, “April[,] is the cruellest [sic] month.” (Eliot, T.S.. “The Waste Land.” Poetry Foundation) For Eliot, the transformative power of spring is painful and destructive. Cummings’s poem can be read, in part, as a rebuttal of this attitude. Rather than cruelty, Cummings’s spring is characterized by care. It may effect change, but it does so “without breaking anything” (Line 19).
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