e.e. cummings

This week I read Christopher Sawyer Lauçanno’s massive biography (606 pages!) about the experimental, lyrical love-poet e.e. cummings whose goal in life was to be a “human being,” in the fullest sense, and to be free to paint and write poetry.

I felt I had to read about his life because I needed to come to some working understanding of how the man produced his extraordinary poetry. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that e.e. cummings was the son of a Harvard professor, went to Harvard himself at the age of 16, and majored in classics and comparative literature (he loved Greek). So he knew, very well, all the rules of grammar and punctuation in several languages (English, Greek, and French being his favorites though he also studied Latin and German besides) before he decided to break so many of them however he saw fit in his later poetry. (His earlier poetry can be quite traditional; one of his most-used forms is the eternal sonnet.)

He fell under the influence of the modernist poet Ezra Pound, to whom the biographer attributes e.e. cummings’ initial experimentation with non-traditional line breaks, spacing, and punctuation, but really, I think his studies of Middle English literature (with its phonetic spellings) and classical manuscripts (which could often be written in scriptacontinua) were what gave him permission to start breaking with convention in order to draw his readers’ attention to words and the power of language.  Given how different his work is from that of T.S. Eliot (famous for writing the heavily self-annotated poems The Waste Land, Four Quartets and the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock), it’s rather extraordinary to realize they were contemporaries at Harvard (even playing in the same theatre production!). They clearly took their classical educations and went in two different directions with them.

But e.e. cummings was not lazy about grammar or punctuation, no matter how much he was lampooned or criticized by poetry reviewers. He was deliberate in what he was trying to provoke his readers to understand about words or ideas or both. That much is clear.

After a more or less idyllic childhood, his personal life was one long string of emotional disasters, it seems, and he coped with this by painting, drinking and writing poetry. He was imprisoned during World War I in France, which later resulted in the memoir The Enormous Room. He had a six year affair with the wife of a friend, which later turned into a marriage that lasted only two months. His soon-to-be ex-wife Elaine took their daughter Nancy and fled to Ireland with a new man; e.e. cummings didn’t see Nancy again until she was an adult. He married again, this time to Annie Barton, a woman who had been physically and sexually abused by her father. In that relationship, the affairs were once again on both sides, more or less repeatedly. When that ended, he met Marion, twelve years younger than he, and though they never married, they stayed together. While he was with her, his father was killed when a train crashed into his car, though miraculously his mother, who was in the car, survived.

The pain e.e. cummings experienced because of these betrayals and losses was acute and undeniable. It is not always possible to empathize with him, however, as his biographer reveals the poet’s nasty bouts of selfishness, misogyny, and racism against Jews (though not against Blacks). Yet there is a thread of redemption running through the tapestry of the poet’s life.

E.E. Cummings wrote poetry extraordinarily sensitive and aware of the natural world and the Spirit of God made manifest in it. He wrote anti-war poems as well as the lyrical love poems for which he is justly famous and best known. When he died, he was one of the most-read poets in the United States.

I’ve posted about e.e. cummings before (i thank You God for this most amazing and somewhere I have never travelled gladly beyond), but I thought I would re-post these two (two of my favorites) and some others that I love so that you can enjoy them.

1

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 will easily 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

2

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 the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

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

3

Buffalo Bill’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus

he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

4

i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth’s own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

5

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
wich 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 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)

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