Backe.e. cummings: perhaps the only poet you need to read
cummings is the one Great Modern Poet that a harried and time-strapped manager could try reading. Try his 100 Selected Poems
Premium
My first encounter with the writings of e.e. cummings, certainly one of the 20th century’s greatest poets, was rather unusual. I chanced upon The Enormous Room, the autobiographical novel he wrote about his prison experiences in France during World War I. His language was simple yet lyrical, his tone soft and civil. From the notes on the book jacket, I came to know that he had been a famous poet.
I was then studying engineering, and in my heavily masculine campus, poetry was seen as namby-pamby stuff; those who read poetry were viewed with suspicion, if not derision. It would be years later, in business school, that I would meet humanities graduates who were as manly as anyone else, yet loved poetry.
Struggling with self-image and self-esteem issues, I read a bit of the stuff my new friends lent me—Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Dylan Thomas. And I realized that reading poetry does not affect testosterone levels.
This, though, failed to make me an avid poetry reader. My knowledge of this form of literature begins, you might say, with that school curriculum favourite The Charge of the Light Brigade (Half a league, half a league, / Half a league onward, / All in the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred, etc.) and ends with Auden’s poem used as a heart-wrenching eulogy in the film Four Weddings And A Funeral (Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead / Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, / Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, / Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves).
You will know what I mean when I confess that I discovered cummings’s poetry through the late great British actor David Niven’s hilarious autobiography The Moon’s A Balloon. Niven had taken the title of the book from a cummings poem and quoted part of it:
Even to a philistine like me, that sounded pretty cool, and I sought out more poetry by cummings. And he has never disappointed me. 100 Selected Poems (the selection done by cummings himself) is a boundless treasure trove and a sure-shot uplifter of spirits.
For three decades now, I have turned to this book uncountable times. Open it at any page, and there it is: a deeply evocative poem disguised as whimsy, with uniquely inventive syntax and punctuation that appear at first glance to be self-indulgence but without which cummings’s poems would not be what they are.
His experimentation with punctuation, spaces and the sheer visuality of a poem when printed on a page produces a rare beauty, making the radical gentle—and the gentle radical.
Or, in an anti-war poem birthed by his memories of World War I:
His love poems are simple, mellow, joyful, touching. Here is one that I have mooned over many times and never got tired—and I don’t think I’m a pansy; I watch Mad Max: Fury Road and Predator every time they show these films on TV, and never get tired.
And there’s sexuality too—unabashed expression of physical desire:
cummings was against communism—he died in 1962 at the age of 67, so he would have known and thought about the Stalinist atrocities and also met many American Marxist fellow-travellers:
But, cummings does not seem to have had much respect for politicians as a breed:
And he hated the Wall Street fat cats too:
He invents the word “recktie" as plural for “rectum"—arse. “lloyds’s", of course, is Lloyd’s, the famous insurance company.
Sometimes, cummings was pessimistic too, but expressing his disappointment, as always, in his unique oblique words that seem to be wafting in from a different plane:
I could go on quoting cummings till the Cows Come Home, but I shall desist. All I want to say is this:
For anyone who has studied technology and/or management, who will miss all the erudite references to Greek or Indic mythology in poetry written by dead-scholarly, dead-serious poets (and don’t have the time or inclination to look the references up), for someone who is still wondering why the women come and go talking of Michelangelo in Eliot (I am certainly still wondering), for someone who reads for pleasure and not to seek out a challenge, for someone who is not interested in daffodils and skylarks, who has heard of poetry but is not going to go out of his way to find out what it’s all about, read e.e. cummings.
He is refined. He does not tax your brain, but leaves you with food for thought (in case you are hungry; it’s totally up to you whether you go beyond tasting to real eating). He always leaves you with a warm glow inside.
And he is fun. You can’t say that about too many poets who—as decided by the lit crit establishment—are “great".
As cummings wrote: “the godless are the dull and the dull are the damned".
He is the one Great Modern Poet that a harried and time-strapped manager could try reading.
Sandipan Deb is the editorial director of swarajyamag.com
The Bookmark is a series on ‘interesting’ books—intelligent and thought-provoking, but also enjoyable.
Comments are welcome at feedback@livemint.com
Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!
