E.E. Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School.
He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.
After the war, he settled into a life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.
In 1920, The Dial published seven poems by Cummings, including "Buffalo Bill ’s.” Serving as Cummings’ debut to a wider American audience, these “experiments” foreshadowed the synthetic cubist strategy Cummings would explore in the next few years.
In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work toward further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.
The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted that Cummings is “one of the most individual poets who ever lived—and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings’s poems are loved because they are full of sentimentally, of sex, of more or less improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence.”
During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant.
At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.
source: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/e-...
“and it's you are whatever a moon has always meantand whatever a sun will always sing is you”
“Love is the whole and more than all.”
“who knows if the moon'sa balloon,coming out of a keen cityin the sky--filled with pretty people?( and if you and I shouldget into it,if theyshould take me and take you into their balloon,why thenwe'd go up higher with all the pretty peoplethan houses and steeples and clouds:go sailingaway and away sailing into a keen city which nobody's ever visited,wherealways it's Spring)and everyone'sin love and flowers pick themselves”
“pity this busy monster, manunkind'pity this busy monster, manunkind,not. Progress is a comfortable disease:your victim (death and life safely beyond)plays with the bigness of his littleness--- electrons deify one razorbladeinto a mountainrange; lenses extendunwish through curving wherewhen till unwishreturns on its unself. A world of madeis not a world of born --- pity poor fleshand trees, poor stars and stones, but never thisfine specimen of hypermagicalultraomnipotence. We doctors knowa hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hellof a good universe next door; let's go”
“what if a much of a which of a wind”
“Anybody can learn to think, or believe, or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel... the moment you feel, you're nobody ― but-yourself ― in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else ― means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.”
“a total stranger one black dayknocked living the hell out of me-who found forgiveness hard becausemy(as it happened)self he was-but now that fiend and i are suchimmortal friends the other's each ”
“nothing” the unjust man complained “is just” (“or un-“ the just rejoined.”
“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyondany 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 nearyour slightest look easily will unclose methough i have closed myself as fingers,you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first roseor if your wish be to close me, i andmy life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,as when the heart of this flower imaginesthe snow carefully everywhere descending;nothing which we are to perceive in this world equalsthe power of your intense fragility: whose texturecompels me with the colour of its countries,rendering death and forever with each breathing(i do not know what it is about you that closesand opens; only something in me understandsthe voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands”
“the mind is its own beautiful prisoner.Mind looked long at the sticky moonopening in dusk her new wingsthen decently hanged himself,one afternoon.The last thing he saw was younaked amid unnaked things...”
“Now the ears of my ears are awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened.”
“i do not know what it is about you that closesand opens;only something in me understandsthe voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses”
“Here's to opening and upward...and to yourself and up with you and up with and up with laughing.”
“What if a dawn of a doom of a dreambites this universe in two,peels forever out of his grave,and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?”
“And now you are and I am and we're a mystery which will never happen again.”
“If 180 million people want to be undead, that’s their funeral, but I happen to like being alive.”
“i imagine that yes is the only living thing.”
“you shall above all things be glad and youngFor if you're young,whatever life you wearit will become you;and if you are gladwhatever's living will yourself become.”
“let it go -- thesmashed word brokenopen vow orthe oath cracked lengthwise -- let it go itwas sworn togolet them go -- thetruthful liars andthe false fair friendsand the boths andneithers -- you must let them go theywere bornto golet all go -- thebig small middlingtall bigger reallythe biggest and allthings -- let all godearso comes love”
“Love is a place & through this place of love move (with brightness of peace) all places yes is a world & in this world of yes live (skillfully curled) all worlds”
“Your homecoming will be my homecoming”
“deeds cannot dream what dreams can do”
“Humanity i love you because youare perpetually putting the secret oflife in your pants and forgettingit's there and sitting downon itand because you areforever making poems in the lapof death Humanityi hate you”
“Time cannot children,poets,lovers tell-measure imagine,mystery,a kiss-not though mankind would rather know than feel”
“great men burn bridges before they come to them”
“most people are perfectly afraid of silence”
“If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.”
“Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.”
“Seeker Of Truthseeker of truthfollow no pathall paths lead wheretruth is here”
“Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star...”
“you said Isthere anything whichis dead or alive more beautifulthan my body,to have in your fingers(trembling ever so little)?Looking intoyour eyes Nothing,i said,except theair of spring smelling of never and forever.....and through the lattice which moved asif a hand is touched by ahand(whichmoved as thoughfingers touch a girl'sbreast,lightly)Do you believe in always,the windsaid to the rainI am too busy withmy flowers to believe,the rain answered”
“may my heart always be open to littlebirds who are the secrets of livingwhatever they sing is better than to knowand if men should not hear them men are old may my mind stroll about hungryand fearless and thirsty and suppleand even if it's sunday may i be wrongfor whenever men are right they are not young and may myself do nothing usefullyand love yourself so more than trulythere's never been quite such a fool who could failpulling all the sky over him with one smile”
“I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more.”
“One's not half of two; two are halves of one.”
“my sweet old etceteraaunt lucy during the recentwar could and whatis more did tell you justwhat everybody was fightingfor,my sisterisabel created hundreds(andhundreds) of socks not tomention shirts fleaproof earwarmersetcetera wristers etcetera, mymother hoped thati would die etceterabravely of course my father usedto become hoarse talking about how it wasa privilege and if only hecould meanwhile myself etcetera lay quietlyin the deep mud etcetera(dreaming,et cetera, ofYour smileeyes knees and of your Etcetera)”
“l(aleaffalls)oneliness”
“love is the every only god”
“I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.”
“a wind has blown the rain away & the sky away & all the leaves away, & the trees stand. i think i, too, have known autumn too long.”
“The three saddest things are the ill wanting to be well, the poor wanting to be rich, and the constant traveler saying 'anywhere but here'.”
“Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are by somebody who can loveand who shall be continually reborn, a human being.”
“The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches.”
“Unless you love someone, nothing else makes sense.”
“That which we die for lives as wholly as that which we live for dies.”
“Damn everything but the circus!. . .The average 'painter' 'sculptor' 'poet' 'composer' 'playwright' is a person who cannot leap through a hoop from the back of a galloping horse, make people laugh with a clown's mouth, orchestrate twenty lions.”
“i remember we all cried like the Missouriwhen my Uncle Sol's coffin lurched becausesomebody pressed a button(and down wentmy uncleSoland started a worm farm)”
“For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),It's always our self we find in the sea.”
“listen: there’s a hellof a good universe next door; let’s go”
“Lovers alone wear sunlight.”
“down with ought with because with every brain that thinks it thinks nor dares to feel.”