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-...
“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 aprilmy 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)childrenwhose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladnessaround me surges a miracle of unceasingbirth and glory and death and resurrection:over my sleeping self float flaming symbolsof hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountainsi am a little church(far from the franticworld 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 singingwinter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire tomerciful Him Whose only now is forever:standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)”
“we are for each other: thenlaugh, leaning back in my armsfor life's not a paragraphand death i think is no parenthesis”
“Kisses are a better fate than wisdom.”
“Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.”
“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 boyMister Death”
“one pierced moment whiter than the rest-turning from the tremendous lie of sleepi watch the roses of the day grow deep.”
“life's not a paragraphAnd death i think is no parenthesis”
“I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)I am never without it (anywhereI 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 youhere 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 growshigher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apartI carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)”
“Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.”
“i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)”
“nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility:whose texture 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-excerpt of #35 from "100 Selected Poems”
“I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance”
“may came home with a smooth round stoneas small as a world and as large as alone.”
“since the thing perhaps isto eat flowers and not to be afraid”
“since feeling is firstwho pays any attentionto the syntax of thingswill never wholly kiss you;wholly to be a foolwhile Spring is in the worldmy blood approves,and kisses are a far better fatethan wisdomlady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry--the best gesture of my brain is less thanyour eyelids' flutter which sayswe are for eachother: thenlaugh, leaning back in my armsfor life's not a paragraphAnd death i think is no parenthesis”
“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”
“nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands”
“when man determined to destroy himself he picked the was of shall and finding only why smashed it into because”
“Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit”
“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”
“may i feel said he(i'll squeal said shejust once said he)it's fun said she(may i touch said hehow much said shea lot said he)why not said she(let's go said henot too far said shewhat's too far said hewhere you are said she)may i stay said he(which way said shelike this said heif you kiss said shemay i move said heis it love said she)if you're willing said he(but you're killing said shebut it's life said hebut your wife said shenow said he)ow said she(tiptop said hedon't stop said sheoh no said he)go slow said she(cccome?said heummm said she)you're divine!said he(you are Mine said she)”
“feeling is first,”
“in time of daffodils(who knowthe goal of living is to grow)forgetting why,remember howin time of lilacs who proclaimthe aim of waking is to dream,remember so(forgetting seem)in time of roses(who amazeour now and here with paradise)forgetting if,remember yesin time of all sweet things beyondwhatever mind may comprehend,remember seek(forgetting find)and in a mystery to be(when time from time shall set us free)forgetting me,remember me”
“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”