by e.e. cummings(New York: Grove Press, 1954)
Trade Paperback, 121 Pages, Poetry Anthology
ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE
From the Cover: e.e. cummings is without question one of the major poets of this century, and this volume, first published in 1959, is indispensable for every lover of modern lyrical verse. It contains one hundred of cummings’ wittiest and most profound poems, harvested from thirty-five of the most radically creative years in contemporary American poetry. These poems exhibit all the extraordinary lyricism, playfulness, technical ingenuity, and compassion for which cummings is famous. They demonstrate his extrapolations from traditional poetic structures and his departures from them, as well as the unique synthesis of lavish imagery and acute artistic precision that has won him the adulation and respect of critics and poetry lovers everywhere.
My Review: Honestly, what can one truly say about the poetry of e.e. cummings? Like that of William Carlos Williams, after the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the playful and celebratory poetry of cummings is truly a breath of fresh air. More than that. It is a rejuvenating and hope-bringing force. cummings’ poems are poems that are syntactically gymnastic, that break all the carefully constructed rules that poets like Eliot created, and that flip society’s value sets on their head. cummings valued the “life force” and railed against the “death force” in modern life just as much as Eliot did, but unlike Eliot, cummings places his values differently. For cummings, as is shown in his poems, the “life force” he valued and felt others should value were those that went against the status quo of society. Sin, in short. His “death force,” therefore, was the status quo that stifled and oppressed the basic pleasures of human life. Whether the status quo was enforced through religion, law, economics, government, or any other institution you can imagine, cummings railed against all of them.
cummings felt that such institutions were created to serve the people, not to have the people serve them, as had become the case. He felt that mankind had two choices: they could become unanimal or animal; institutionalized or natural, and his poetry invariably advocated for the animal and natural mankind to rise up against and overcome the increasing trend toward the unanimal.
What is, perhaps, the most incredible aspect of cummings’ poetry is that fact that in spite of his poems being written a half-century to nearly a century ago, they are still there, still relevant to our post-modern, 21st-Century lives and they are still daring us to say that cummings had it wrong, that we overcame the unanimalization of our lives and returned to the animal state of mankind, and honestly … honestly I can’t find a single thing that cummings got wrong. Each of his poems still resonant, are still a clarion call for awakening that to say that he knew not of what he spoke/wrote would be tantamount to saying that water is not wet and fire is not hot. At the risk of sounding corny or clichéd, cummings’ poems call out across the decades, showing us the problems of the first half of the 20th-Century, showing us how to correct those wrongs, and then demand that we hold the mirror up to our 21st-Century lives and ask if things are really so different.
Given that it looks like the increasing branding and institutionalization of our lives is not slowing, not enough people read the poems of e.e. cummings, or don’t recognize the warnings that he is calling to our attention. More people need to read e.e. cummings poems. I cannot stress enough just how detrimental that things that he is warning us against are and how important that which he values really is. Find yourself a book of e.e. cummings’ poetry (I personally recommend this particular volume) and take a look for yourself, I am not being trite when I say it may just change your life.
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