The Poetry of E. E. Cummings

...He is for living, eccentricity (but not for its own sake), love, pity, anger (against "manunkind"), beauty, God (not the god mostpeople listen about on Sundays), hope...

...From his Poems 1923-1954 I would select 99 poems (about 69 more than Cummings approves in i. Six Nonlectures) as excellent, a couple of hundred more as very good, 38 as as great as any poems written in our century...

...They cannot forget (of course I speak of most, not all of them) that someone very, very intelligent will appraise, not praise their work...

...Paris: this April sunset completely utters utters serenely silently a cathedral before whose upward lean magnificent face the streets turn young with rain...

...They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science, in its finite but unbounded wisdom, has succeeded in selling their wives luckily for us, a mountain is a mammal...

...I'm afraid I don t feel or think so...

...Like a small boy (and this ability to maintain childlikeness at 60 is also a source of his strength), he often sticks out his tongue both in what he says and how he says it...

...This view of life that I hope rather than believe (as often seems true of Cummings, too) disregards or discounts a good many "facts": Cold War, Imitation as god of screen, book, and mainstreet...

...Modern poetry has been lacking, notably, in ecstasy and anger...

...Cummings, who lowercases himself because he doesn't think "I" can "comprehend not numerable whoms," is against science, logic, conformity, gadgets, cruelty, war, hopelessness, and finality...

...It is good to hope what one hopes Cummings believes as well as hopes, to wish and try to believe what one fears Cummings hopes more than believes...

...Money...

...pity this busy monster, manunkind, not...

...Miracles are to come...

...Modern poets, the very good and intelligent who are many among them, are so constrained that they cannot let go as Yeats, a restrained artist, could...

...Cum-mings can write for others while remaining (at least in his poems) his perpetually intense self...

...The 38 "great" poems (eighteen of them from the volumes published since 1940) are angry and ecstatic, singularly and yet almost traditionally formed, a pleasure as great as any I can remember to read...

...Although he has written the most devastating book against Soviet itness (Eimi), he is as indifferent to politics as politicians are to poetry...

...The best way to present them, and by presenting I hope to persuade you to read, is to quote parts that should send you to the wholes: In ecstasy: "when god lets my body be From each brave eye shall sprout a tree fruit that dangles therefrom the purpled world will dance upon...

...Now ("out of tinying time/into supreme/Now...

...Depressions, salesmen who are its that stink, unhes and unshes, nature, consisting of flowers, birds, men, etc., that has become Nature Abstract, lives unlived out of fear of death that's already happening almost...

...Life, for mostpeople, simply isn't...

...Can one seriously accept (except as more poetry than truth) the lines " the blond absence of any program except last and always and first to live makes unimportant what i and you believe...

...Progress is a comfortable disease...

...They cannot be angry at the sun, love God or woman without a sophistication Hopkins or Catullus would have abhorred...

...nor can I go along with a good deal more of the content and making of Cummings's poems, for I expect (and believe Cummings does, ton) that there is more truth in poetry than in truth as it is progressively conceived...

...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 " In anger: "the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead " * "why are these pipples taking their hets off...

...He can be adolescently clever about sex as in the very bad "she being Brand ??”new" and in "may i feel said he...

...he does not have to feel because he thinks (the thoughts of others, be it understood...

...Blow king to beggar and queen to seem (blow friend to fiend: blow space to time) ??”when skies are hanged and oceans drowned, the single secret will still be man...

...Poetry is not philosophy, sociology, theology, aesthetics or political science...

...What do mostpeople mean by 'living...

...it is experience created and reformed...

...He believes that you and I are not "timorous itsters," that we do not believe in "the foetal grave/called progress," that we can escape the "shrill collective myth" of both our houses, that even an it can become alive...

...Another time he ineptly says "con ter fusion ror," a rather simple ineffective puzzle that means "confusion terror.'' Nevertheless he delights me, should you, and is possibly our greatest living poet...

...the king & queen alighting from their limousine inhabit the Hotel Meurice ( whereas i live in a garret and eat aspirine...

...Never the murdered finalities never to rest and never to have: only to grow...

...Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question" This quotation from E. E. Cum-mings's introduction to his Collected Poems (1938), which significantly ends without a period, states as well as prose can what his poems are about...

...if i have made, my lady, intricate imperfect various things chiefly which wrong your eyes (frailer than most deep dreams are frail) songs less firm than your body's whitest song '' "love is more thicker than forget more thinner than recall more seldom than a wave is wet more frequent than to fail " "what if a much of a which of a wind gives the truth to summer's lie: bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun and yanks immortal stars awry...

...What was felt about what was and is communicated with intensity...

...But one has reservations...

...Most metaphysical questions he answers simply by not admitting their existence...

...Professor of English at Louisville University "The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople...

...One of his poems starts with an "o" that then must be applied at the end of each succeeding line to understand what it's all about...

...ecstasy if it can be, anger (or even despair) if it must...