SOURCE: Cohen, Milton A. “Cummings and Freud.” American Literature 55, no. 4 (December 1983): 591-610.

In the following essay, Cohen addresses the influence of Freud on Cummings’s early aesthetic and technique.

when I see you I shall expect you to be conversant with two books: The Interpretation of Dreams, and WIT and the Unconscious. Both are by FREUD. GET WISE TO YOURSELF!!¹

So wrote E. E. Cummings to his younger sister Elizabeth in May 1922. In some ways, Cummings' enthusiasm for Freud was very much a part of its time: a post-war Modernist in the arts could scarcely resist Freudian theory as the concomitant “modernism” of psychology. As Frederick Hoffman has shown in Freudianism and the Literary Mind, Freud's theories were readily available in America by 1915 and were eagerly snapped up by Greenwich Village intellectuals, among whose ranks was E. E. Cummings.

But Freud's meaning to these bohemians was distorted by...