o 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 I9I5 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 their desire to repudiate bourgeois morality and to adopt sexual mores free of "Puritanical" repression. As Hoffman observes, "Freud did not bring about this revolution in sex morality. The revolution simply drew upon him . . . as a means of justifying its opinions and acts."2 Cummings fits this pattern rather closely. He too felt Freudian theory would remove the sexual inhibitions of his upbringing and sanction his rebellion. He was equally prone, therefore, to misconstrue Freud for his own ends. But Cummings' interest in Freud differed from that of his contemporaries in ways that justify a careful study of Freudian influence on his life and writing. First, unlike many Village and Left Bank intellectuals who merely bandied Freudian ideas, Cummings read Freud extensively and carefully. The Interpretation of Dreams, Wit