e.e. cummings (1894 -1962)

Literary signature of Edward Estlin Cummings who ,at the time of his death, was one of the best-known and best-liked poets on the American scene.  He was also a novelist, out of whose brief imprisonment for traesonous statements in corresondence while serving in the ambulance corps during World War I, came his novel The Enormous Room in 1922.

He was born in Cambridge, Massuchusetts and graduated from Harvard.  He was influenced by vorticism, futurism, and imagism and experimented radically with syntax, line and typography.  And yet he still used regular rhyme scheme and traditional forms such as the sonnet.  His work joyously celebrates beauty and the physical aspects of love, as well.  His appreciation and faith in humanity and the natural world has been seen as linking him to the American Transcendentalist tradition.  His work has great lyric power.

35

somewhere i have never traveled,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 skillfully,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 compels me with the colour 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

4

in Just
spring     when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles      far       and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far     and      wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's
spring
and
       the

             goat-footed

balloonMan      whistles
far
and
wee

From 100 Selected Poems, by e.e cummings; Grove Press, New York. 1959.