Collin County Community College Dimensions of Human Reality Discussion
[To post your response to the questions I've posed in the material below, return to the Discussion 2 Follow-up thread
in the Discussions board. Enter that forum and use the Reply button.]
As I mentioned previously, this discussion is a bit more challenging than the first. The greatest challenge (for most
of you) probably derived from the two Modernist works. That isn’t surprising, since the abstraction frequently
found in Modernist works can be challenging or even confusing at times, and at the very least requires some effort
to come to grips with. I’ll start by taking a moment to say something about each of the four works.
To begin with the paintings, many of you seem to have noticed and pointed out the similarity of subject matter
between Delacroix's Massacre at Chios and Picasso's Guernica, the similarity being a setting of warfare or violent
conflict, with the violence in question perpetrated by the powerful against the powerless. In the case of Massacre
at Chios (painted in 1824), Delacroix wished to address the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire's actions two years
earlier to suppress the independence efforts of ethnic Greeks on Chios and other Greekinhabited islands in the
eastern Mediterranean Sea. In the case of Guernica (painted in 1937), Picasso’s subject was the bombing of
Guernica, a small city in northern Spain, earlier that same year. The bombing was carried out by aircraft from Nazi
Germany and fascist Italy during the Spanish Civil War and took place at the request of General Francisco Franco,
a Spanish general trying to overthrow the elected government of Spain, who had allied himself with Adolf Hitler
and Benito Mussolini (who were the leaders of Germany and Italy, respectively; Franco was eventually successful
at seizing control of the Spanish government).
Delacroix’s Massacre at Chiosis considered one of the first significant paintings in the Romantic style, and it
played a major role in initiating the Romantic style in Western painting. It had an extremely controversial
reception when first exhibited, both because of its subject matter and because of its rejection of Neoclassical
aesthetic principles. Picasso’s Guernica, while it did not initiate any new developments in Western painting (all of
the stylistic elements that Picasso draws upon for the painting had been developed years earlier, either by him or
by other artists), the painting itself is considered one of the most significant Western paintings of the 20th century
because of its powerful antiwar sentiment. (A reproduction of Guernica can be found in the entry lobby of the
United Nations building, an organization founded after World War II in an effort to prevent future global conflict.)
In the case of the poems, while the poems themselves and their creators are both prominent in the literary world,
they don’t hold quite the same status as their painting counterparts. Poe was a skilled poet but, while a few of his
poems (such as ‘Annabel Lee’ and ‘The Raven’) are widely known and well-liked by many readers, most literary
scholars would say that his most important contribution to 19th century American literature lies not in his poetry
but in the role he played in the development of the modern short story. Cummings, in turn, while considered to be
a significant 20th century American poet, would not usually appear in most literary scholars’ “Top 10” lists.
Nevertheless, as with Poe, there are a handful of Cummings’s poems (such as ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’
and ‘she being brand’) that are highly prized by many readers. (Of the four works, the Cummings poem probably
posed the most difficulty for many of you. If you’re interested, at the bottom of this document I’ve added a brief
discussion of some of the thornier technical aspects of his poem.)
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In what comes below, my followup questions are bolded to make them easier to see.
As I mentioned at the beginning, it’s clear that the use of abstraction poses challenges to the viewer of an artwork
or the reader of a poem. The two Modernist examples, which utilize abstraction much more extensively than the
Romantic examples, tended to be more difficult to grapple with. That raises the question, “Why use abstraction?”
and especially why use it to the extent that many of the Modernists writers, painters, poets, music composers,
dancers and other artists did. If, as a creative artist, I risk confusing or pushing away some of my potential
audience, where is the gain in using abstraction? Some of you implied a connection between the abstract
approach and the viewer's or reader's imagination. This is an important element of abstraction's appeal, but
there's also more to it.
Artists of all types, whether visual or literary or performing artists, are usually attempting to convey something
about the reality of human experience to their audiences. However, ‘reality’ as humans experience it has a wide
range of dimensions, all of which are of interest to the artist or creative writer. Certainly, physical reality is one of
those dimensions, and visual reality is one aspect of physical reality. But there's also emotional reality, perceptual
reality, social reality and so on, not to mention the imagination and the dream world, which combine the various
dimensions of reality in ways that are different from everyday waking reality. How can we go about representing
these various dimensions of human reality and the different ways of combining these dimensions of
experience? One answer is that each requires different methods (‘languages’) of representation, and artists seek
out and explore useful methods of representing each of these dimensions of human reality. “Abstraction” is one
such method.
To get a deeper sense of the role of abstraction in the creative arts, let’s explore more thoroughly the role of
abstraction in the two Modernist works under our examination (the painting by Picasso and the poem by
Cummings). First, consider the context in which Picasso and Cummings were working. What sort of changes
took place in the social and cultural aspects of Western society between the time period in which
Romanticism was the dominant style to the time period in which Modernism was the dominant style? (Your
course reading materials might help with this.)
Next, how might the social and cultural changes taking place in the Western world have affected the change
in artistic emphasis between the time of the Romantic examples (completed between 1824 and 1849) and the
time of the Modernist examples (completed in the late 1930's)? What might have compelled Cummings, for
instance, to feel that he needed a more complex, more abstract, and more allusive style of language to
capture meaning in the time and place he was writing? What, in turn, might Picasso have felt was gained in
terms of representation, in the context of the 1930's, by presenting his subject in such a radically more
abstract style than that of Delacroix? To put it another way, how might the reality of daily human experience
in Western societies have changed over that hundredyear period in a way that could have contributed to the
development of a more abstract ‘language’ for Western art and literature?
Now, let's consider why Picasso and Cummings, respectively, might have chosen to make heavy use of
abstraction in these specific works. Among other things, their choice implies that they wished to say something a
bit different about their respective subject matters than was the case for their predecessors (that is, Delacroix and
Poe). For instance, despite the similarity of subject matter between Massacre at Chios and Guernica, the two
paintings obviously look and feel quite different. The two artists (Delacroix in the first case and Picasso in the
second case) appear to be calling the viewers’ attention (our attention) to different aspects of these events. What
is it, exactly, that’s more noticeable to you in each painting? What is it that each one causes you to be more
aware of, or that stays with you after you’ve turned away? In other words, what does Picasso seem to want
to show us (and have us remember) about Guernica that’s different from what Delacroix seems to want to
show us about Chios? And how does the use of abstraction help Picasso to do this, to achieve this difference
in impact?
We can ask similar questions about ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’ in contrast to ‘Annabel Lee’. To do that, it
might be helpful to think of Cummings as telling multiple stories, with each of those stories running
simultaneously through the poem, while Poe appears to be telling essentially one story.
Two of the possible stories being told by Cummings depend upon the single word “noone.” Technically speaking,
this word doesn't exist… it’s ‘invented’ by Cummings. In practical terms, it’s simply a ‘misspelling’ of “no one” (two
words) that compresses it into one word. Since this ‘misspelling’ occurs multiple times, we can assume that it’s
intentional on Cummings’s part. Knowing this, we can now read the word in two different ways as “no one” or
as “noone.” Which way we choose to read it (interpret it) determines which of two possible stories we find in the
poem. But, we aren’t restricted to reading it only one way: We can read it first one way, then the other, in which
case we get a different story from the poem in two different readings. One of these stories we can think of as
being about a town, the other we can think of as being about two people.
In addition to the stories that depend upon “noone,” there is at least one other story we might find in the poem.
This story (which one or two of you might have alluded to in your remarks) comes out of the repeated but rotating
use of the seasons, as well as the rotating repetition of the celestial phenomena (“sun, moon, stars, rain”). This
additional story derives from the juxtaposition of those recurring natural cycles with the human story or stories
that run through the poem.
How do the meanings of certain key words in “anyone lived in a pretty how town” change based upon which
of the multiple stories you’re focusing upon? (As just one “for instance,” how does the meaning of the word
“anyone” itself change?) How does Cummings’s use of abstraction enable him to cause those words to carry
multiple meanings and thus to tell multiple stories simultaneously? And why do you suppose he would want
to tell so many stories at the same time, in one poem, in the first place? (For this question, keep in mind my
earlier questions about the cultural context of Cummings’s time period.)
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In light of the challenges many of you faced with the Cummings poem, I’ve added here some technical points
regarding “anyone lived in a pretty how town”:
Although I’ve called out the importance of the word “no one” above, that’s just one instance of the abstract way in
which Cummings uses language in his poem. In general (as some of you noted), the strongest abstract effects
comes from Cummings’s intensive, and sometimes peculiar, manipulation of syntax (the way in which parts of
speech are arranged) as well as his heavy use of pronouns – anyone, someones, everyones, they, their, he, his,
she, her – of which “noone” is a special case. (How many of you had ever considered how very abstract pronouns
are?) When he does use a noun to refer to people, it’s a collective noun (women, men, children, folk, etc.) not an
individual noun.
Regarding the manipulation of syntax, what’s usually happening is that Cummings is using words that we
normally encounter as one part of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.) as a different part of speech.
For instance, when Cummings writes, “he sang his didn’t he danced his did,” the words “didn’t” and “did” (which
we almost always encounter as verbs or auxiliary verbs) are being used as nouns. This is unusual, and a little
disorienting, but not strictly wrong. In fact, we do this ourselves sometimes, especially when talking about a word
as a word. But even in more common situations, we sometimes do it. For example, suppose you hear an athletic
coach telling his or her team, “I don't want to hear any coulda, shoulda, woulda ... I just want to see focus and
execution.” The coach here is using “coulda, shoulda, woulda” (a more emphatic way of saying “excuses”) as
nouns, even though we more commonly encounter those words as auxiliary verbs (which in their expanded, fully
correct form would be “could have, should have, would have”). In other words, coach is speaking metaphorically
in that moment, as is Cummings in his poem. The difference is that Cummings is doing this more intensively,
more densely, in a relatively short span, than we would typically do in normal writing or conversation, and it’s this
intensity or density that we find a bit disorienting.
When Cummings does this is, it allows him to get double duty out of his words (similar to what he does with
“noone”). He gets to use the word as the part of speech needed in that particular moment, but he also gets to
borrow the connotations that the word carries over from its more usual part of speech. For instance, we can read
“he sang his didn’t he danced his did”in two different ways. In one reading, “didn’t” and “did” are nouns that carry
the suggestion of action or inaction, completion or incompletion. In another reading, we can treat “didn’t” as a
verb and stop after the second ‘he’, which makes the partial line into a question: “he sang his didn't he?” So which
reading is the correct one? As it turns out, that’s probably the wrong question. If Cummings only wanted one
possible reading, I doubt he would have written it this way.
There are some situations where Cummings is simply juxtaposing two thoughts or concepts that we don’t
typically associate with each other – for example, “laughed their cryings.” At the most basic level, this is
“metaphor” (see Poetry Vocabulary Lesson); it’s what poets do. Of course, even this bit of oddness in the poem is
not completely foreign to us: We’ve all heard someone exclaim, “I laughed till I cried,” right? Cummings doesn't
mean the same thing here, exactly, but it demonstrates that the juxtaposition – the metaphor – is not unknown to
us.
In other cases, Cummings uses words that are present primarily for their sound, or for the visual images they
evoke, or even for the aural (sound) images they evoke, such as “up so floating many bells down,” which I’m sure
has many possible meanings or interpretations, but one of which, for me, is the hypnotic and lyrical effect of the
sound of church bells carrying across the summer air in a small town. (Note also the multiple possible
connotations of “bells” in the context of the various stories in the poem.)
Finally, there’s the issue of structure, which some of you might have addressed in terms of rhythm or rhyme
rather than organizational structure. Although it’s true that Cummings is “breaking rules” to some degree in much
of what he does in this poem, his rulebreaking doesn’t really extend to structure or rhythm or rhyme.
Structurally (and I think one or two of you might have mentioned this), Cummings’s poem is quatrains (fourline
stanzas) from beginning to end. His adherence to a single structure is even more consistent than Poe’s, whose
stanza lengths vary in Annabel Lee. (To be fair, Poe probably has specific reasons for that variance.) In terms of
rhyme, Cummings’s poem has about the same amount of rhyming as Poe’s. In both cases, about twothirds of the
lineendings use either perfect rhyme or near rhyme. Poe probably feels to us as if he rhymes more because he
makes greater use of perfect rhyme (mostly through the repetition of “sea” and “Lee”), whereas Cummings uses a
larger portion of near rhyme (such as “same”/”rain” and “summer”/”more”). Modern Western poetry makes no
qualitative distinction between perfect rhyme and near rhyme.
As for rhythm, the rhythm and pace (or meter) of the Cummings poem is as regular and persistent as a drumbeat.
Cummings uses a fourbeat line (meaning, there are four stressed syllables in each line) throughout the poem, just
as he uses fourline stanzas all the way through… and, for that matter, just as he consistently uses those fourpart
images – one for the seasons and one for the heavens – to signify the passing of time. (It turns out that “four” is an
important ordering principle in the poem.)
Skeptical? Try this: read the poem through aloud, just once, without worrying about what the words mean, and
simply allow yourself to pronounce the words as they would normally be pronounced. Treat them purely as sound
(remember the Yeats quote from the Poetry Vocabulary Lesson that poems are made out of “a mouthful of air,”
meaning that they are first and foremost constructions of sound). Read along at a comfortable pace and pay
attention to the rhythm that your voice falls into as you do so (as long as you don’t throw yourself off by stopping
to figure out the meaning). Chances are, you’ll start to hear the music that lives in Cummings’s poem.