e.e. cummings : american poet

e.e.cummings

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The unique and unbridled American poet, e.e. cummings,
once described spring as a time when the world is
puddlewonderful. He also wrote, listen, there's a
helluva universe next door; let's go!

Imagine walking through a gate, starting over.

He rarely used capitalization, played with punctuation
as though he were stitching an uneven wound, and
occasionally, just when you thought he was growing
too full of his artifice, he kissed the world on the mouth
with a verse like the one below:

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

He dispensed with the laws of punctuation, distorted
typography, used lower-case type, and ignored rules
of grammar and syntax, all important aspects of his
fight against established ideas and systems which
threatened the spontaneity and joy that were
essential to his anima. cummings was in the U.S.
Ambulance Corps in France during WW I, and spent
three months in a detention camp due to the error
of a military censor, an experience he recorded in
a novel, The Enormous Room.

He lived some years in Greenwich Village with his
wife, Marion Morehouse, a photographer and fashion
model, and in Silver Lake, New Hampshire, where
besides writing poetry, cummings also painted. He
was a liberator, whose work challenged publishers
and editors, and offered new possibilities to young
writers. In a letter replying to a high school editor,
he wrote

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses
his feeling through words. This may sound easy. It
isn't. Almost anybody can learn to think or believe
or know, but not a single human being can be taught
to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you
believe or you know, you're a lot of other people;
but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.

This entire letter is marvellous. Toward the end of his
life e.e. cummings wrote...

Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance
of miracles: they are by somebody who can love and
who shall be continually reborn,a human being;somebody
who said to those near him,when his fingers would not
hold a brush, "tie it into my hand"

I took such delight in his work when I was in my teens.
I even sang one of his poems when I first began to
perform. Long years later, it is good to revisit his genius.

it may not always be so; and i say
that if your lips, which i have loved, should touch
another's, and your dear strong fingers clutch
his heart, as mine in time not far away;
if on another's face your sweet hair lay
in such a silence as i know, or such
great writhing words as, uttering overmuch,
stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

if this should be, i say if this should be --
you of my heart, send me a little word;
that i may go unto him, and take his hands,
saying, Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face, and hear one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands.

edward estlin cummings (1894-1962)