E.E Cummings

Category: Online Poetry

(1894-1962)

Unconventional in every way, the poet Edward Estlin Cummings made striking use of grammar and punctuation–so much so that he often referred to himself as “i” and signed his name in lowercase letters as well: e.e. cummings. His arts were poetry, painting, and drama, and in all of them he was an experimenter and innovator. The poetry–for which he is best remembered–was marked by bizarre combinations of words and expressions and produced in very strange printing. But the ideas on which his poems were based were the traditional New England values of self-reliance, justice, and dissent. The unusual techniques that Cummings used served to present his ideas more forcefully and effectively than would have been the case with more ordinary styles.

Cummings was born in Cambridge, Mass., on Oct. 14, 1894. He was graduated from Harvard College in 1915 and received a master’s degree in 1916. During World War I he served as an ambulance driver in France. He spent six months in a detention camp because of his friendship with another American who had supposedly criticized the Allied war effort. This experience increased his distrust for all officialdom, a distrust that showed itself in many of his later poems as well as in his first book, ‘The Enormous Room’, published in 1922.

Between the two world wars Cummings divided his time between Paris and New York City. His first book of verse was ‘Tulips and Chimneys’ (1923). In all he wrote 12 volumes of verse, which were collected in ‘Complete Poems’ (1968). The strangeness of his style was criticized by some as phony and pretentious, but others found it meaningful despite the difficulties it often posed.

Among Cummings’ plays were ‘him’, first performed in 1927, and ‘Tom’ (1935), a work based on ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’. An experimental prose book, ‘Eimi’ (1933), recorded a 36-day visit to the Soviet Union. His Harvard lectures on poetry were published as ‘i: six nonlectures’ in 1953. Some of Cummings’ most frequently read poems are: ‘the Cambridge ladies’, ‘plato told’, ‘pity this busy monster, manunkind’, ‘what if a much of a which of a wind’, and ‘all ignorance toboggans into know’. In a very powerful short poem, ‘i sing of Olav’, he made a case for conscientious objectors–those who refuse to serve in the armed forces on the grounds of moral principles–based perhaps on his World War I experience.

Cummings received the Bollingen Prize for poetry in 1957. He died at his home in North Conway, N.H., on Sept. 3, 1962.

Selected Poems

i thank You God

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;
and for everything
which is natural which is infinite
which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;
this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:
and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
what ever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them
men are old
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right
they are not young
and may my self do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there’s never been
quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail
it is most mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea
love is less always than to win
less never than alive
less bigger than the least begin
less littler than forgive
it is most sane and sunly
and more it connot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky

e.e. cummings