Squaring the self: versions of transcendentalism in "The enormous room"

E. E. Cummings’ links with the tradition of American transcendentalism have been much commented upon since comparisons between him and Ralph Waldo Emerson were first drawn by writers like James Dougherty in Landmarks of American Writing and Harold McCarthy in The Expatriate Perspective. These critics observed how Cummings, in his avant-garde poetry and painting and in The Enormous Room, his autobiographical account of his incarceration during World War I, advocates an Emersonian reverence for the inviolability of the individual soul, its ideal potential, and its resistance to society’s corrosive influence.