SOURCE: Friedman, Norman. “Epiphanies Are Hard to Come By: Cummings’ Uneasy Mask and the Divided Audience.” In (Re)Valuing Cummings: Further Essays on the Poet, 1962-1993, pp. 83-98. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.

In the following essay, originally published in 1983, Friedman reviews E. E. Cummings: The Critical Reception, finding the collection of early reviews of Cummings’s work helpful in gaining insight into the opinions of Cummings’s lesser-known contemporaries.

I

This book [E. E. Cummings: The Critical Reception] continues the production of scholarly aids to the study of Cummings—which includes Firmage's bibliography and his edition of Cummings' essays, Dupee and Stade's edition of Cummings' letters, Rotella's bibliography of secondary criticism, and Kennedy's biography—and as such is a welcome addition, enabling us, as these other contributions do, to place the published oeuvre in a broader and deeper perspective. The present volume gives a full sampling of...