e. e. cummings: a brief biography

e.e. Cummings


Born in 1894 e.e., cummings is the sort of modernistic poet you either admire or despise and vilify at every opportunity. One senses from the very outset that cummings reinvented both English language and grammar to suit his own unique, artistic needs, throwing conventional style out the window. What he accomplished in the end was truly amazing, but only if you buy into his literary landscape.


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(i carry it in my heart)
e. e. cummings




Who else felt such a compelling need to restructure the written language? Think back to 1827 and Alessandro Manzoni, author of the Beloved, which many Italians consider the greatest novel in all of Italian literature. Manzoni altered the modern (i.e. modern in terms of when he was writing, not today’s standards) Italian language to create his masterpiece about the medieval plague.


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
From e. e. cumming’s “i thank You God for most this amazing (1950)




A more contemporary example of a poet reconfiguring the language in unimaginable ways might be John Berryman in his Dream Songs. Many of Berryman’s poems are virtually unintelligible to most readers (i.e. myself included), which is not such a good thing, and yet the man was a brilliant scholar truly dedicated to his craft.


Cummings wrote approximately 2,900 poems. He is often regarded as one of the most important American poets of the 20th century, associated with modernist free-form poetry; much of his work uses idiosyncratic syntax and lower-case spellings for poetic expression.


M. L. Rosenthal wrote: “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.”


For Norman Friedman, Cummings's inventions "are best understood as various ways of stripping the film of familiarity from language to strip the film of familiarity from the world. Transform the word, he seems to have felt, and you are on the way to transforming the world."


The poet Randall Jarrell said of Cummings, "No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and the special reader." James Dickey wrote, "I think that Cummings is a daringly original poet, with more vitality and more sheer, uncompromising talent than any other living American writer." Dickey described himself as "ashamed and even a little guilty in picking out flaws" in Cummings's poetry, which he compared to noting "the aesthetic defects in a rose. It is better to say what must finally be said about Cummings: that he has helped to give life to the language."


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)


In closing, every great poet possesses an inner vision of what they need to accomplish when they reach for a pen and piece of paper. They polish their linguistic skills with sedulous care and attention to tiny details that make all the difference between the mundane and exceptionally evocative. Readers also must rise to the occasion by developing their interpretive skills so that, when they come face to face with a poem as demanding as the ones we see here in this essay, they can readily grasp the profound wisdom, beauty and at times gut-wrenching emotion buried deep within the text.