“Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination…think twice before you think.” — E.E. Cummings

It’s his birthday today. I responded to E.E. Cummings in a visceral way when I first had to read his stuff in high school. I didn’t know what it was all about, but I loved the syntax, the unmistakable look of his poem on the page. (You could tell a poem was his without reading a word of it.) I liked puzzling the poems out. Thinking about them. I still do.

Speaking of the “syntax of things”:

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

More on Cummings after the jump:

 
 

One of the poems we read in high school was “next to of course god america i”. I didn’t quite understand it yet, but somehow I knew it. I got the critique. It was a glimpse into a world of perspective beyond my years. Again, I liked thinking about it, wondering about it.

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 themes of Woody Allen’s Hannah and her Sisters.

I know a lot of people who count it as one of their favorite poems, and I would rank it with some of Shakespeare’s sonnets as great love poetry. Some guy I fell in love with (love at – almost – first sight, an experience I cannot recommend) sent me an email after we left each other’s lives. He didn’t write a personal message in the email, or even a personal greeting. He just sent me the poem. Maybe he should have thought twice before pressing Send.

In the midst of a love affair, or during the falling-in-love process, the poem would be a beautiful valediction and tribute. Post-love-affair, it takes on the mantle of unbearable loss. The poem has a fluid identity, shifting depending on the context.

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

Cummings was doing stuff with language that had been done before, was still being done, the fracturing of the modernist “movement”, the shattering of certainty brought about by the first world war, the realization that the existing language was not up to the task of describing the current world. Disorientation. Alienation. Gertrude Stein and others had been obsessed with how things LOOKED on the page. Even in Cummings’ own generation, though, he stood apart.

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)

One of the driving engines of his poetry was a hatred of phoniness, officiousness and pettiness (ironic considering his attraction to Communism, where bureaucracy was the only God.) His EIMI: A Journey Through Soviet Russia is an impressionistic travelogue of his time in the Soviet Union. Eventually, the veil dropped from his eyes, and he compared his trip to Dante’s Inferno. Bureaucrats represented to him inhumanity, a mechanistic approach to human life. (Many people who started out as Socialists were shocked/heartbroken/disappointed/betrayed by what the end result looked like in Russia. See: Orwell, Rebecca West, Arthur Koestler, or – front-row seat, and the first one to perceive what was happening, Victor Serge, etc.)

Cummings could be very judgmental and elitist: There were those (a very small number) who “got it”, and outside of the charmed circle, were ignoramuses. He wanted no part of convention. He was of that generation (born in 1894, died in 1962) who saw two World Wars, carnage on an industrialized level never before seen on the planet. Those wars changed how writers dealt with language, how they even felt about language. He grappled with the same issues T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound did. Cummings’ use of language feels organic, not a trick or a gimmick (as was the case with some of his contemporaries). The strange startling forms of his poems, the way he arranged words, were a vehicle for emotions. The necessity of form and the strong passions contained in that form: You can feel both in his poems.

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

Cummings knew the traditional forms of poetry well. You can still feel it alive in his poetry, although he created his own forms, veering off from the old. There is in Cummings a baseline, a tradition.

He’s also one of the few poets of that period who was truly funny. I love this one.

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)

It’s sexy. You could even say the poem is about the sexiness of consent. (It’s also a reminder that consent is not some brand new concept invented yesterday.)

QUOTES:

S. I. Hayakawa:

No modern poet to my knowledge has such a clear, childlike perception as E. E. Cummings—a way of coming smack against things with unaffected delight and wonder. This candor … results in breath-takingly clean vision.

Randall Jarrell:

No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and the special reader.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Cumming’s poems are either lyrical or satirical, and they changed little as he took up endless variations out of a limited group of ideas. His love poems express a childlike wonder and humor that Cummings has almost to himself in modern poetry and that he retained into old age. His satirical poems are witty as well as savage.

John Logan:

One of the greatest lyric poets in our language.

George Orwell, “Review of Spearhead: Ten Years’ Experimental Writing in America, edited by James Laughlin, Times Literary Supplement, April 17, 1948

Perhaps the best poem in the book is by E.E. Cummings. He is an irritating writer, partly because of his largely meaningless typographical tricks, partly because his restless bad temper soon provokes a counter-reaction in the reader, but he has a gift for telling phrases (for insttance, his often-quoted description of Soviet Russia — “Vicariously childlike kingdom of slogan”), and, at his best, for neat, rapidly moving verse.

John Cheever:

I was in doubt that I could make something of myself as a writer until I met two people who were very important to me: one was Gaston Lachaise and the other was E.E. Cummings. Cummings I loved, and I love his memory. He did a wonderful imitation of a wood-burning locomotive going from Tiflis to Minsk. He could hear a pin falling in soft dirt at the distance of three miles. Do you remember the story of Cummings’s death? It was September, hot, and Cummings was cutting kindling in the back of his house in New Hampshire. He was sixty-six or sixty-seven or something like that. Marion, his wife, leaned out the window and asked, Cummings, isn’t it frightfully hot to be chopping wood? He said, I’m going to stop now, but I’m going to sharpen the ax before I put it up, dear. Those were the last words he spoke. At his funeral Marianne Moore gave the eulogy. Marion Cummings had enormous eyes. You could make a place in a book with them. She smoked cigarettes as though they were heavy, and she wore a dark dress with a cigarette hole in it.

E.E. Cummings:

Only so long as we can laugh at ourselves are we nobody else.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

He was influenced by Pablo Picasso’s fracturing of space, Gertrude Stein’s linguistic experimentation, and Ezra Pound’s and Amy Lowell’s Imagist concision and freedom. The title of his first book of poems, Tulips and Chimneys (1923), suggests the opposition that was to become lifelong to his work, between organic life and what he calls “manunkind” (“pity this busy monster, manunkind / not”).

Malcolm Cowley:

[He] suffers from comparison with those [poets] who built on a larger scale—Eliot, Aiken, Crane, Auden among others—but still he is unsurpassed in his special field, one of the masters.

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets:

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.

John Dos Passos, review of The Enormous Room:

In a style infinitely swift and crisply flexible, an individual not ashamed of his loves and hates, great or trivial, has expressed a bit of the underside of History with indelible vividness.

Bethany K. Dumas, E. E. Cummings: A Remembrance of Miracles:

More important than the specific devices used by Cummings is the use to which he puts the devices. That is a complex matter; irregular spacing allows both amplification and retardation. Further, spacing of key words allows puns which would otherwise be impossible. Some devices, such as the use of lowercase letters at the beginnings of lines allow a kind of distortion that often re-enforces that of the syntax…. All these devices have the effect of jarring the reader, of forcing him to examine experience with fresh eyes.

Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, July 3, 1957:

I meant to write you about Cummings’ reading on the public garden, but its colors have somewhat faded on me after a week in Maine … Well, Cummings was introduced by MacLeish as some one who had been against Communism when it was still dangerous to take such a position. “Unlike Archie,” Allen [Tate] said loudly. And there we sat, a rather conspicuous and hateful row, the two Merwins, us, Allen, Moira Sweeney, Bill Alfred–all ages, all degrees of innocence and cynicism–while Cummings read outrageous and sentimental poems, good and bad of both kinds. About eight thousand people listened and those who couldn’t hear crowded in huge masses under awnings across the Public Garden pond to look at non-objectivist paintings. The Revolution has come, I guess, yet we’re still creatures of flesh and blood.

Stanley Edgar Hyman:

Cummings has written at least a dozen poems that seem to me matchless. Three are among the great love poems of our time or any time.

E.E. Cummings, intro to Collected Poems (1938):

It’s no use trying to pretend that most people and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone.

John Peale Bishop, 1938:

The Enormous Room has the effect of making all but a very few comparable books that came out of the War look shoddy and worn.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

E.E. Cummings is one of the most innovative modern poets, but his innovation is on a different level from T.S. Eliot’s ambitious, polyglot collages or Wallace Stevens’s philosophically complex long poems. In some ways, Cummings is oddly traditional. Though he drops most punctuation and capitalization, breaks words into syllables and letters, and deliberately distorts syntax, he is fond of the sonnet and other regular forms, and he likes rhymes and off-rhymes. And though he alters part of speech, making verbs into nouns and nouns into verbs, he does so chiefly to express feelings whose simplicity belies all this complication. He does not seek, or find, the authoritative utterance of some of the modernists, but he achieves a magnificent, subversive smallness.

Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, April 26th, 1962:

But Cummings, strange to say, seems best known [in Brazil, as compared to other poets]. Not so strange, maybe–that sentimental side of Cummings, in love and “social comment,” is sort of the stage they are at here–

M. L. Rosenthal:

The chief effect of Cummings’ jugglery with syntax, grammar, and diction was to blow open otherwise trite and bathetic motifs through a dynamic rediscovery of the energies sealed up in conventional usage…. He succeeded masterfully in splitting the atom of the cute commonplace.

John Cheever:

Cummings was never paternal. But the cant of his head, his wind-in-the-chimney voice, his courtesy to boobs, and the vastness of his love for Marion were all advisory.

Richard P. Blackmur:

Cummings has a fine talent for using familiar, even almost dead words, in such a context as to make them suddenly impervious to every ordinary sense; they become unable to speak, but with a great air of being bursting with something very important and precise to say.

Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine:

Beware his imitators!

 
 
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