Cummings

“"i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)"

e.e. cummings, 1894-1962

NOTHING IS SO DIFFICULT AS TO BE ALIVE!!!!!! which is the ONLY THING WHICH YOU CANNOT LEARN ever, from anyone, anywhere: it must come out of you; and it never can, until you have KNOCKED DOWN AND CARRIED OUT all the teachable swill of Cambridge etc.”

~a letter the poet (ee cummings) wrote to his younger sister in 1922, when she was struggling to leave the family home and move to New York.

… Outwardly, Cummings was a well-behaved young man; according to Malcolm Cowley, "he was intensely shy and private in the Cambridge fashion." Yet… this shyness concealed a strong sexual appetite, which Cummings both longed and feared to indulge. He blamed his repression on what he called "my New England downbringing," which "tried its best to make [me believe] that 'virtue' and volupté are opposites." And his father, the pastor, was the living symbol of that sexual Puritanism. "I led a double life," Cummings recalled, "getting drunk and feeling up girls but lying about this to my Father and taking his money all the time." More generally, he wrote, "FEAR & SEX go together in my life. With sex I associate, also, GUILTINESS."

It was only in his senior year, when he finally moved out of the Irving Street house, that Cummings had the opportunity and the audacity to overcome that guiltiness. As an adult, Cummings would become an emblem of the sexually liberated Twenties. His poetry has a sexual frankness, a delighted naughtiness that still makes it very popular with adolescent readers:

may i feel said he (i'll squeal said she, just once said he)
it's fun said she... (let's go said he, not too far said she
what's too far said he, where you are said she)...

… Cummings and his friends loved to explore the bars and brothels of Boston. He took advantage of his newfound freedom, as he later recalled, to "roam that surrounding world sans peur(without fear), if not sans reproche (above reproach)." It was on one of these expeditions, with his classmate "Tex" Wilson, that Cummings parked his father's car in front of a prostitute's apartment, only to emerge to find it towed away… the woman, "thinking she was doing a good deed...rung the Reverend at three in the morning to tell him his car had been seized by the Boston police."

… In the ensuing fight, Edward Cummings wailed to his errant son, "I thought I had given birth to a god." … Cummings senior and junior often thought about each other in quasi-blasphemous terms… if Estlin was God the Son, it was only natural for Edward to become God the Father. "My father," the poet recalled as an adult, "is the principal figure of my earliest remembered life; when he cradled me in his arms, i reposed in the bosom of God Himself; & when i rode on God's shoulder i was king of the world. His illimitable love was the axis of my being." It must have been difficult for this God to learn that his only son was, in fact, all too human… To the end of his life, Cummings declared his profound respect for his father. Certainly any father would be proud to receive the kind of encomium Cummings delivered in one of his Norton lectures:

“He was a New Hampshire man, 6 foot 2, a crack shot & a famous fly-fisherman & a first rate sailor (his sloop was named The Actress) & a woodsman who could find his way through forests primeval without a compass & a canoeist who'd still paddle you up to a deer without ruffling the surface of a pond & an ornithologist & taxidermist & (when he gave up hunting) an expert photographer (the best I've ever seen) & an actor who portrayed Julius Caesar in Sanders Theatre & a painter (both in oils and watercolors) & a better carpenter than any professional & an architect who designed his own houses before building them & (when he liked) a plumber who just for the fun of it installed all his own waterworks....” ~ Adam Kirsch

"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.”

Images ~ Cummings in a hammock with his father and sister, Elizabeth

~ Painting of e.e. cummings by John Bedford