e.e. cummings: dadaist, saboteur, or radical modernism?

Antonio Ruiz writes, "We cannot say that Cummings is a Dadaist, but there are important parallels between some of his aesthetic conceptions and experiments, and Dada" (107).   Ruiz asserts that 

Cummings’s relation to Dadaism may well be summarized in the observation by Richard Kennedy that he adopted “the Dada principle to destroy the accepted and the traditional in order to discover something new and surprising in artistic effect, or in order to seek some hidden truth that lies beyond the rational” (Dreams in the Mirror 71). Indeed the destruction of all convention seems to be the main, almost only objective of [No Title]. Friedman refers to this work as a “total rejection of categories,” and Cummings himself describes the prologue as “crazy text.” The work can be considered a “capriccio,” or divertimento, though perhaps it is more appropriate to see it as a Dadaist attack on the story genre and its conventions.(108-9)

Although Ruiz believes that "Certainly, Cummings’s aesthetics do not share the nihilism and radicalism of Dadaism" (111), nonetheless, he is at pains to explain a kind of "radical modernism" being practiced by cummings and William Carlos Williams, one that perhaps collapses or erases the distinction between the modern and the postmodern.
Ihab Hassan has given us a polemical chart detailing the characteristics of the two literary moments.  Yet, reviewing them, I am struck by how much of Modernism we must exclude in order to make the binaries work, and how much of a saboteur cummings seems in retrospect:

Modernism                                     Postmodernism

Romanticism/Symbolism                Pataphysics/Dadaism

Form (conjunctive, closed)             Antiform (disjunctive, open)

Purpose                                            Play

Design                                             Chance

Hierarchy                                        Anarchy

Mastery/Logos                                Exhaustion/Silence

Art Object/Finished Work              Process/Performance/Happening

Distance                                          Participation

Creation/Totalization                      Decreation/Deconstruction

Synthesis                                        Antithesis

Presence                                         Absence

Centering                                        Dispersal (Dismemberment 267–68)

It is quite true that cummings focused relentlessly on undoing literary expectations and beliefs through the radical deviancy of his word-formations, not only in separating parts of existing words but in coining hundreds and hundreds of new ones based upon a strategy of negation, as Richard Cureton has argued, developing extensive lists of words formed from "Un-":

NOUN BASE:  unanimal, unbeing, unday, unday, undeath, undeath, undoom, undream, unearth, uneyes, unfools, ungod, unhands, unhe, unhearts, unlife, unlife, unlives, unlove, unlove, unmeaning, unman, unminds, unmind, unmind, unmiracle, unnoise, unpoets, unrepute, unself, unself, unsleep, unsmile, unstreet, unstrength, unthing, unthing, unthings, unvoice, unwhores, unwish, unwish, unworld, unworld, unworlds, unworlds, unworlds, unworld, unworld.

VERB BASE:  unbecame, undie, undream, uneats, unexist, ungrows, unmate, unsays, unsinging, unsits, unstrolls, unteach, unteaches, untouch.

ADJECTIVE BASE: unalive, unbig, undead, undead, undying, unshapeful, unshy, unslender, unslowly, unsmaller, unstrange, untheknowdulous, unwondering. (Cureton 218)

When Seven-Up instituted its "Un-Cola" campaign, cummings must have been laughing from the grave. . . .


Works Cited
Cureton, Richard. "E.E. Cummings: A Study of the Poetic Use of Deviant Morphology."Poetics Today 1.1/2: Special Issue: Literature, Interpretation,Communication (Autumn, 1979): 213-244
Hassan, Ihab.  The Dismemberment of Orpheus. Toward a Postmodern Literature. Madison:
U of Wisconsin P, 1982.
Kennedy, Richard. Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings. New York: Liveright,
1994. 
Ruiz, Antonio. “The Dadaist Prose of Williams and Cummings: A Novelette and

[No Title].”  William Carlos Williams Review 28.1-2 (Spring/Fall 2008):101-115