Oscillating Center and Frame in E. E. Cummings’s IN JUST- / SPRING

Abstract

The 1923 poem “in Just- / spring” by American modernist E. E. Cummings (1894–1962) has frequently been anthologized and discussed. The current status of its interpretation is compelling. On the one hand, relatively traditional readings by Cummings critics, such as RushworthKidder (24–25) and RichardKennedy (25), viewit as optimistic: a poem depicting aworld of childlike innocence and play, though the first hints of sexual maturity hover, veiled, in the air. It is possible—as Iain Landles asserts (34)—that these critics, as a result of their emphasis on the children’s innocence, marginalize the strangeness of the balloonman-Pan figure. However, in his poststructuralist critique of these optimistic readings, Landles’s analysis goes too far.1 He says that the “main omission in critical discussion seems to be about the capital in ‘Just-”’ (34). The crux of his argument follows: Cummings capitalizes “Just” to signal that “ambiguity is the point,” while this “allows us to penetrate the surface of the poem and treat all definitions, allusions, and symbols with suspicion,” to the extent that the poem centers on deviant sexuality, pedophilia, and queerness (36). As an alternative to both readings—the supposedly “traditional” as well as Landles’s—one may consider that Cummings’s poem is holistic: inclusive of the light of childhood and spring as well as the sexually more complex, “darker” seasons of maturity to come. The goat-footed, earth-connected Pan figure includes all the seasons, without privileging one above the other. The poem may well not be at intense pains to bring opposites into the “purely” deconstructive levels of sheer ambiguity. Instead, it seems to oscillate between its extremes of innocent center (children) and foreboding