Alina Happy Hansen

I recently finished reading this book of poems, a selection of poems by E.E. Cummings, this collection featured fantastic poems that display Cummings love for the written word, skills in typography and his particular use of punctuation and enjambment.

Originally published in 1923 this selection contains poems that might be considered risky even in the ’20’s about sex and sexual urges. There are also poems that display Cummings ongoing “un-doing” of words, punctuation and the typographical form of a poem on the page. A consistent pattern that I noticed towards the end of this collection is his use of “un”.

In the poem, “pity the busy monster, manunkind” (pg.125), “un” is used to undo and possibly invert not only the meaning of words such as ‘mankind’, ‘wish’, and ‘self’ but to put these words and their meanings on their head (or in on themselves). Cummings weaves in words such as “disease”, “electrons”, “hypermagical”, and “ultraomnipotence”, his puts some words together while emulating (I think) a sing-song voice that reminds me of advertisements for cure-alls.

The poem, I think, talks about the ‘silliness’ of mankind and death which is always present. I wonder if this poem is specifically about death as an unavoidable reality regardless of how far mankind has “progressed” or if it is making fun of people that believe in the progress of mankind to overcome death? Is the “hypermagical ultraomnipotence” a reference to god? I am not sure.

I would love to read some criticism of this poem and others published around the same time to help me better understand where Cummings is going with his poetry. I honestly felt that although Cummings was tearing poetry apart, in terms of form and style and creating something all his own, his poems operate on the same mastery levels like the greatest poets who lived hundreds of years before Cummings time.

Cummings poems may look like simplistic easy-reads but there is really so much more packed into them than meets the eye. I love reading E.E. Cummings and have a couple other books of his poems that I love just as much as this one and highly recommend to readers,

“Etcetera: The Unpublished Poems” by E.E. Cummings

“No Thanks” by E.E. Cummings

photo sources: goodreads.com

A plus note about “E.E. Cummings: A Selection of Poems” is the introduction by Horace Gregory which adds some flavor and plenty of words from Cummings himself on his poetry and poetry in general. This introduction really adds to the experience of reading this book of poetry in its entirety. My edition is a 1965 reprint edition and can be found on Amazon.

Alina’s Rating: 5/5