SOURCE: Pagnini, Marcello. “The Case of Cummings.” Poetics Today 6, no. 3 (1985): 357-73.

In the following essay, Pagnini argues that Cummings’s poetry was strongly influenced by Russian futurism.

References to E. E. Cummings's relationship with the early twentieth-century avant-garde are usually rather hurried, and limited to suggesting that the poet felt the influence of Symbolist techniques (absolute metaphor), of Ezra Pound's Rispostes (1912), and perhaps of the linguistic experimentalism of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons (1914); or alternatively, that he owed much to the Dada and Surrealist movements; or again that he was influenced by the lesson of the Cubists, with regard both to the fragmentation of form and to the use of ugly realistic elements that were traditionally considered unpoetic. Futurism is never mentioned: there is at most some passing reference to Apollinaire's Calligrammes. And yet the most superficial glance at Cummings's singular poetic production, from his earliest publications onwards, will...