COLLECTED POEMS OF E.P.CUMMINGS

by E.P

These poems taken en bloc are already an integral part of American literature. No amount of "I like..." and "Why don't he ".... ?" will knock 'em out of that domain.

It is part of the piffling and indent state of English irresponsibility ( neither better nor worse nor cleaner nor more unsewn than American or french irresponsibiliet in the arse end of the age usury and $\frac{\text{MWH}}{\text{pimp rule}}$ that Lone London hasn't yet printed any respectable criticisl of cummings.

My contempt for the various grovveling little cliques of Bloomsbury back-scratchers needs no other justification than that none of these little swarms have had the natural curiosity or the critical urge to SAY anything about CUMMINGS. Cummings's earlier volumes. Exception taken for the a more or less funny introduction to the Enormous Room (naturally after a respectable book-store success elsewhere.

It oughtn't to be necessary for me, at my time ( and by no means a bad time ) of life to TELL the bleating and half witted Brit. pubk. h that here is a book.

It may have been necessary for me to say that Williams (Carlos, author of American Grain etc.) is a solid and indestructable writer. Williams is a decade or more older than cu Cummings. Idem, someone on the spot ought to have done a proper criticism of Rene Crevel.

A milieu fit for human inhabitation would

The Dial printed the translation. The state of public inertia
is judged by Eng/ and Am/ pubrs to be too low to make
edtn/ in bk/ form a tempting business operation.

The slop of the damned XIX century derived
from the psychosis which neglected melody. The study of
a conservatoire curriculum ought to man any sane man vomit.
The way to LEARN composition is :

A. Melody. Study of melody. Comparison of melodies from the earliest known up to now. Comparison of melodic development in the orient with that of the occident.

B. **A**S**H**H**S**UB**H**H**E**H**D**H** Almost as sub-head the study of simultabe say in simultaneous rhythms in oriental dance music.

C. What was done during the clean and decent periods of
European music, namely the filling in of parts from
melody and base.

This had, has or can have an enormously enlightening
effect on any student who will ever be worth preserving.

At one **H**H**H**H**H** period, and a long one, the
keyboard player was supposed to, and did, know enough
to play the intermediate parts at sight.

No process with pen in hand teaches a man so
much both of the thought and of the actual idiom, of the
actual way to *write down* the sound desired and the
durations desired as the copying out of work of genius.

In no other way does the learned pay the same
degree of attention. AND as not one musician in a million

( That dont mean to say I even think I cd/ have written them
down...) The layman probably does not sufficiently demark
the difference between composing and writing music. Writing it
implies the capacity to make the true, not the merely approximate
graph of the sounds imagined. )
In dead music the intervening parts do NOT aid the lateral
movement. Take these bastards who are such nuts on harmony. Take
W. supposed to be so correct and so skilled, magari
learned in harmony. His damned music does not move.

On the other hand the man who said : harmony is perpendicular
melody said a mouthful, though it be a bit sibylene. The
intervening parts CAN draw on the HHHHH future notes of the
melody , and DO so in great music. They are parts of a
living organism that gets up and travels.

Naturally if the student never learns to know a good melody
from a bad one, he or she will remain the kind of pest
that infects the concert platform or conduces ultimately to
crooning, the last disease of poxblistered decadence.