E. E. Cummings (1894-1962)

E.E. Cummings decided to become a poet when he was a child. From age eight until twenty-two he wrote one poem a day exploring poetic form. Cummings can easily be counted as one of the most innovative poets of the 20^th century.  His treatment of language alone can be discussed for hours, but I will try to be brief. Cummings molded, altered and disrupted language to his own ends, and in doing so created a vast body of work that was unique both aurally and visually.    His experimental approach to poetic form was matched by a whimsy, sometimes sardonic approach to the actual content.

One of the most pivotal moments in Cummings’s experience of the 1930s, was a visit to the Soviet Union in 1931.  Like most other writers and artists of the time he looked to the communist revolution in hopes of a better more unified society.  However, after a very short time it became clear to Cummings that the Soviet Union was dictatorship and individuality was severely regimented by the state.  He bitterly attacked the Soviet Regime for it’s dehumanizing policies in “Eimi,” in 1933. He called the Soviet Union an “uncircus of noncreatures.”  His obvious disgust with the horrors of the 1930s expressed came through in poetry that elevated the individual human experince through an intensely ironic attitude toward all “movements” artistic or otherwise. 

Later he writes:           

to hell with literature

            we want something redblooded

 

            lousy with pure

            reeking with stark

            and fearlessly obscene

 

This is part of the 24^th poem in “No Thanks” (1935). His language is aggressive and mocking.  He converts the adjectives to nouns as if the fierceness of tone would overwhelm your attempt to vocalize them.  His joy to play with language is more important than any attempt to communicate. He speaks for his own pleasure. “To hell with literature” he says, the visceral act of speaking is a greater thrill than theorizing about deeper social or literary significance. 

His desire to tear apart literary and social pretentions is tempered by a genuine appreciation for a human capacity for love and transcendent significance. He says it best himself, sometimes quoting his own poetry when it seems appropriate.  “ I am someone who proudly and humbly affirms that love is the mystery-of-mysteries, and that nothing measurable matters ‘a very good God damn’; that ‘an artist, a man, a failure’ is no mere whenfully accreting mechanism, but a givingly eternal complexity-neither some soulless heartless ultrapredatory infra-animal nor any understandingly knowing and believing and thinking automaton, but a naturally and miraculously whole human being- a feelingly illimitable individual; whose only happiness is to transcend himself, whose every agony is to grow.”