★★★★☆ 100 Selected Poems, by EE Cummings
That weird guy with the broken Shift key
100 Selected Poems
EE Cummings
That weird guy with the broken Shift key
Like many of you, I first became aware of E.E. Cummings in High School English class. Our textbook contained a few quirky little poems written entirely in lower case by a guy who called himself E.E. Cummings. (Cummings usually signed his name with capital letters -- writing it “e.e. cummings” was an innovation of his publisher’s.)
There is a lot more to Cummings than made it into my high school textbook. But fair enough, it accurately conveyed one thing. Cummings was concerned with the way his poems appeared on the page. Experts who take it on themselves to tell other people the One Right Way to Appreciate Poetry will tell you that you should always read poetry aloud. If you do that with Cummings you will miss a lot.
One of the first poems in this collection that really caught my attention was Buffalo Bills’s. (Use that link to see how Cummings splayed this poem over the page.) The sentence “how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death” particularly grabbed me.
Another powerful poem is i sing of Olaf
i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or
He goes on to praise Olaf’s courage. (Olaf is capitalized. The only capital letters in this poem are references to God and Olaf.)
I was also surprised at how erotic some of the poems were. Cummings was in fact well known for his erotic poetry. In this collection it’s fairly muted. But when I read the last verse of my sweet old etcetera
(dreaming,
et
cetera, of
Your smile
eyes knees and of your Etcetera)
there was no doubt in my mind what Cummings had in mind with the words “your Etcetera.”
There are in fact many love poems, but they are quite different from most love poems you have ever read. When most poets write love poems, they write hymns of praise to the object of their affections, most typically their physical attributes. Cummings doesn’t do that. He writes about the experience of being in love. Even in the fragment I just quoted you will note that although he dreams of “your smile eyes knees and of your Etcetera,” Cummings does not explicitly praise them.
A surprise, considering Cummings’s obvious inclination towards unconventional forms, was the number of sonnets. They are a little bent, but the core of the sonnet form -- 14 lines of iambic pentameter -- is there.
I didn’t like the later poems as much. They’re too self-consciously quirky. But there is plenty of brilliance in the earlier poems. If you like poetry, you should look at Cummings.