Happy Birthday, E.E. Cummings!

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E.E. Cummings was one of the few poets I responded to viscerally when I first had to read his stuff in high school. I didn’t know what it was all about, but I loved his weird syntax, I loved how the poems looked on the page – they became like little jigsaw puzzle pieces – where you get fragments of meaning. The words seem to make sense, but lots of times they are not in the right order. And I wondered about that. Why did he do it like that? I liked the mystery of it.

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

Former poet laureate Billy Collins wrote:

In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings. By erasing the sacred left margin, breaking down words into syllables and letters, employing eccentric punctuation, and indulging in all kinds of print-based shenanigans, Cummings brought into question some of our basic assumptions about poetry, grammar, sign, and language itself, and he also succeeded in giving many a typesetter a headache. Like Pound, who never wrote an obedient line, Cummings reveled in breaking the rules of grammar, punctuation, orthography, and lineation. Measured by sheer boldness of experiment, no American poet compares to him, for he slipped Houdini-like out of the locked box of the stanza, then leaped from the platform of the poetic line into an unheard-of way of writing poetry.

One of the poems I remember reading in high school was “next to of course god america i”. The last line: “He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water” freaked me out a little bit. It seemed so bureaucratic, so perfectly evocative of a PTA meeting. I thought about that poem a lot.

next to of course god america i

“next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?”

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

Perhaps the most famous of his poems is “somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond”, the one woven into the plot and emotional themes of Woody Allen’s Hannah and her Sisters. I know a lot of people who count it as one of their favorite poems of all time, and I would certainly rank it with some of Shakespeare’s sonnets as one of the best love poems ever written.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(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

A guy I was madly in love with sent it to me in an email once, with no explanation, no note from him. Just the poem. I already knew it well, and it is such a naked open expression of love and desire that naturally I thought: Well, you have to be sending this to me for a REASON – you’re not sending it to me because you like the rhyme scheme. It’s the SENTIMENT you want to express – and cummings expressed it better than anyone. “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands”. Perfection. Heart cracks open every time I read it. It’s a dangerous poem. It should be used only wisely and well, something that that guy I was in love with did not understand.

Cummings was doing stuff with language that, yes, had been done before: Gertrude Stein and others had been obsessed with how things LOOKED on the page, but he went at it in his own specific way. Even in his own generation, he stands apart. Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine back then, and midwife to lots of the modernists, loved Cummings’s stuff, but she did say, “Beware his imitators!”

Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets writes:

He split himself between Paris and Greenwich Village, and later in life between the Village and his New Hampshire farm. He died in 1962. Never happy in a single form, cummings dabbled in painting and drawing, based a satirical ballet on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, wrote plays, and a travel diary about his trip to the Soviet Union, Eimi (1933), because he was fascinated with the human experiment of communism. Poems were his primary activity, but set against those of Moore and Loy, Williams and Stevens, his verse is soft-centered. It is often said that dialect poetry, translated into standard English, can prove standard-sentimental, the charm imparted only by the distortions of language: cummings is a dialect poet in this sense. His belief in the Individual, the sacred unit, the anarchic “I” in tension or conflict with the world and its institutions, issues in inventive distortions of language, but not the radical vision of a Loy or the bleakness of Jeffers. The experimentalist and iconoclast takes his place in the Elysian Fields among the conservatives.

That, to me, seems quite insightful. (But then, Schmidt always is.)

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go, my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)

If you read some of cummings’s lesser known poems, not just the anthologized ones, and if you read a bunch of them in succession, you start to get the impression … the feeling … of the philosophy behind all of this. I suppose he had a philosophy about language, he liked mucking it up, but it seems to me that what I sense as one of the driving engines of his poetry is a hatred of phoniness, officiousness and pettiness (which is ironic considering his fascination with Communism – I have not read his travelogue of the Soviet Union, although I own it. I’ll get to it some day). He is brutal when it comes to bureaucrats, anyone who seems outside of the real thrust of life. He is on the side of humanity, originality, life. He can be very very judgmental. There are those who “get it”, and that is a small number, according to Cummings, and outside of that charmed circle, is a vast ignorant populace. He wants no part of convention. He is of that generation (born in 1894, died in 1962) who saw two World Wars overtake the entire world like a plague, and those events changed how writers dealt with language. He was grappling with the same issues as the giants: TS Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound – but unlike them: you can recognize an e.e. cummings poem just by looking at it. It is not MANNERED, though. It’s not a trick. His poems end up feeling incredibly organic and true, full of very real feeling. The forms he chooses, the way he reverses word order, end up being a vehicle for his strong emotions. The form is necessary to Cummings in a way quite unique: it was the only way he could get it out.

But I think Harriet Monroe is right. Beware his imitators! They have the mannerisms, but not the heart.

We all can probably name a few writers who think if they

just break up

the lines
on (the
page)
in a seeeeeeemingly r-a-n-d-o-m
way
then that means
it must be
a

P
O
E
M

Get some technique, please. Write a classical sonnet, write a haiku, write a villanelle, follow the rules. KNOW the forms before you throw them away. Martha Graham, the godmother of modern dance, was a ballet dancer with years of classical ballet training. Breaking free of that tradition was a highly intelligent rebellion: “The forms that exist now, which I know very well, do not suit me, and I cannot create what I want to create inside the old tradition. So using the old tradition as a firm foundation, let’s experiment with new forms.”

E.E. Cummings knew the traditional forms of poetry well, and so when he threw them away, he was able to replace it with an underlying structure of his own.

I love the poem below. He’s one of the few poets of this period who are truly funny.

may i feel said he

may i feel said he
(i’ll squeal said she
just once said he)
it’s fun said she

(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she

(let’s go said he
not too far said she
what’s too far said he
where you are said she)

may i stay said he
(which way said she
like this said he
if you kiss said she

may i move said he
is it love said she)
if you’re willing said he
(but you’re killing said she

but it’s life said he
but your wife said she
now said he)
ow said she

(tiptop said he
don’t stop said she
oh no said he)
go slow said she

(cccome? said he
ummm said she)
you’re divine! said he
(you are Mine said she)

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14 Responses to Happy Birthday, E.E. Cummings!

  1. george says:

    I have a new favorite poem, said he.

  2. chris in ri says:

    A boy wrote me a note as I was going away on a short trip and included the last 4 lines of somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond. I married him, that son of an English teacher. Strong stuff, to be used wisely. Thank you for helping me remember those brave and passionate days. They can get so lost in the day-to-day of an old married couple.

  3. You are right about knowing the rules before you break them. And yet, when you’re in high school . . . . High school was also the time when I took cummings poems to heart. My father had that big collection. My father also knew the playwright, Bill Alfred, who knew cummings’ widow, and my own imitation cummings ended up finding their way to her. Apparently, she approved.

  4. David says:

    “It’s a dangerous poem. It should be used only wisely…”

    I was introduced to this poem by Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters — yes – it is a mighty weapon for wooing women! Sounds like it worked on you — of course you don’t have to provide details…

  5. Tracy says:

    I was introduced to ee cummings by my 4’th grade teacher – my first male teacher – back in the mid-sixties. A very forward thinking man, Mr. Rouse. I wasn’t so in love with The Hobbit or the “chicken fat” exercises we did on rainy days, but the cummings poems opened up a new world to me – rules could be bent or broken if there was a legitimate need.

  6. Pingback: Tweets that mention Happy Birthday, E.E. Cummings! | The Sheila Variations -- Topsy.com

  7. sheila says:

    Tracy – how lovely, I love Mr. Rouse!

  8. sheila says:

    george – isn’t it wonderful said she?

  9. sheila says:

    Chris – how nice! Yes, they are among the most romantic words ever written. Use them wisely and well!!

  10. sheila says:

    David – Unfortunately, he did send it to me just because he liked the poem which makes him an ignorant d-bag. I’m not a flirt. Or, I should say, I only like flirting when it means business. I’m a terrible coquette. I’m pretty frank. He sent me that poem and then was surprised that I thought it meant something?? Good riddance!!

    Wonderful poem for wooing women. Just make sure you mean it!!

  11. sheila says:

    David – and now when I read that poem, I always hear it in Michael Caine’s voice. Beautiful incorporation of a poem!!

  12. sheila says:

    Peter – how cool!!!

  13. I discovered ee cummings on my own, in my sixth-form library – was supposed to be writing a French essay and instead devoured an anthology. I couldn’t stop.

    Sheila, I’m a long-time reader coming out of lurkerdom – just wanted to say that on the strength of your quoting from Lives of the Poets, I bought it and am loving it. Also loving that it will take me ages to finish it – I get to soak in Schmidt’s wisdom for weeks!

  14. sheila says:

    Storygirl – Oh, I am so thrilled to hear that!! It’s such a good book and (obviously) i reference it all the time. I love his writing style – it is so not academic. It’s so readable.

    Thanks for coming out to comment!

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