FOREWORD FOREWORD Ezra Pound once encouraged his fellow poets to make it new Edward Estlin Cummings 1894 1962 or e e cummings self-named in his poems took that dictum to another planet farther than any other English or American poet Even as a child Cummings knew what he wanted to be From the ages of 8 to 22 he wrote a poem a day By the time he graduated from Harvard his avant-garde forms and eccentric syntax spilled letters of words down the page and he juggled verbs adverbs and adjectives as if they were nouns gleefully violating grammar’s rules He reveled in new word combinations such as balloonman mud-luscious and eddieandbill Yet for all that and despite being influenced by Pound and Gertrude Stein many of Cummings’s poems are quite traditional and in sonnet form No matter how peculiar jarring or even incomprehensible Cummings’s poems appeared in print with letters jammed together to encourage speed reading or split apart to tell the reader where to pause the abiding theme of this intelligent experimenter as one reviewer called him remained constant That theme was love especially for his father who died in 1926 and of whom the younger Cummings wrote my father moved through dooms of love Cummings opposed progress that comfortable disease the arrogance of science and technology which he saw as the antithesis of nature Listen he wrote in Pity this busy monster manukind there’s a hell of a good universe next door let’s go After 1930 Cummings’s emotional devices and old-fashioned poetry as some called it fell out of favor Others still see his greatest failure as being flagrant sentimental ism For a time his star was eclipsed by the more intellectual modern poets But the candor and freshness of his form his lyricism is unmistakable indisputably rank him as one of America’s most inventive poets endlessly trying new ways as he put it to paint a picture J Patrick Lewis United States Children’s Poet Laureate 2011-13 5
INTRODUCTION If a poet is anybody he is somebody to whom things made matter very little somebody who is obsessed by Making E E Cummings made this observation in the intro duction to is Five He was himself a poet obsessed by Making Combining an artist’s sense of visual compo sition with a writer’s sense of verbal manipulation he created poems that looked and sounded entirely new Cummings was an odd combination of avant garde modernist and old-fashioned lyricist A staunch believer in the rights of the individual he wrote biting satirical poems that were critical of the dehumanizing aspects of industry and government Yet he was also an unabashed romantic writing lovely lyrical poems that celebrated nature and the human spirit And despite their disjointed appear ance many of his poems were written in traditional rhymed and metered verse forms Foregoing commercial success for artistic experi mentation Cummings created poems so unique that they permanently altered poetry’s artistic boundar ies In the process he earned a reputation as one of America’s most daring and innovative poets 6 E E Cummings poet and artist
