The Enormous Room certainly poked anti-Modernist bears in its own day. “The conventional wisdom of Cummings off splashing through puddles in pursuit of balloon-men leads quite predictably to his continued absence from critical work on modernism and the avant-garde.” McGuigan wonders if Cummings so successfully domesticated avant-garde poetry, making it accessible and attractive to general readers, that his experimental, cutting-edge bona fides have been forgotten. The book was blasted for being “anti-culture.” The critic for the conservative New York Times called it “Bolshevist.” Such iconoclasm may surprise those familiar with Cummings’s beloved poems today. He urged her, and everybody else, to vigorously clear away the detritus of the traditions and institutions of the past, all that “HAS BEEN TAUGHT HIM OR HER”. The “unsentimental” act McGuigan quotes comes from a letter Cummings wrote to his sister. “In addition to the syntactical and visual experimentation that will mark his entire carer, the book’s jarring combination of autobiography, fiction, history, epic, and war-novel, makes clear Cummings’ ‘unsentimental defecation’ of traditional notions of ‘Beauty’ and ‘The Right.’” “As a critique of governmental ineptitude and the cruelties of wartime it is hardly unique, if nonetheless compelling,” writes McGuigan. First edition dustjacket of The Enormous Room, 1922 via Wikimedia Commons Cummings (aka, Edward Estlin Cummings, 1894–1962) among the Class of ’22’s avant-garde. McGuigan makes a case for including The Enormous Room, the autobiographical novel by E. ![]() ![]() Eliot’s “ The Waste Land,” and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. Works published that year included James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. The year 1922 was, writes literature scholar John McGuigan, a “banner year” for Modernist literature.
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