e.e.

 

(clicking imbiggens)

I apologize for not knowing the source for this.  It's from a xerox I found tucked inside a book of poetry, and the original source has been lost.

But it's very useful, and helped me understand Cummings' poetry.

99

 by e.e. cummings:

#79

 by e.e. cummings:

If I Sing

 "And if i sing you are my voice,"  ~e.e. cummings (source)

Suppose

 

by e.e. cummings

little i

From 73 Poems by e.e. cummings, published posthumously © 1963:

who are you,little i

(five or six years old)
peering from some high

window;at the gold

of november sunset

(and feeling:that if day
has to become night

this is a beautiful way)

In a world seduced by easy understanding…

This short excerpt from the preface to E.E Cummings: A Life by Susan Cheever, ©2014, was a big help to me in understanding his poems.  It's a tremendous relief to know I'm not supposed to "get it" right away:

Modernism as (E.E.) Cummings and his mid-twentieth-century colleagues embraced it had three parts. The first was the exploration of using sounds instead of meanings to connect words to the reader's feelings. The second was the idea of stripping away all unnecessary things to bring attention to form and structure: the formerly hidden skeleton of a work would now be exuberantly visible. The third facet of modernism was an embrace of adversity. In a world seduced by easy understanding, the modernists believed that difficulty enhanced the pleasures of reading. In a Cummings poem the reader must often pick his way toward comprehension, which comes, when it does, in a burst of delight and recognition.

Slow Down the Inexorable Rush

Excerpted from the preface to E.E Cummings: A Life by Susan Cheever, ©2014

Princeton poet Richard P. Blackmur said (E.E.) Cummings's poems were "baby talk," and poetry arbiter Helen Vendler called them repellent and foolish: "What is wrong with a man who writes this?" she asked.

Nothing was wrong with Cummings-- or Duchamp or Stravinsky or Joyce, for that matter. All were trying to slow down the seemingly inexorable rush of the world, to force people to notice their own lives. In the twenty-first century, that rush has now reached Force-Five; we are all inundated with information and given no time to wonder what it means or where it came from. Access without understanding and facts without context have become our daily diet.