Complete Poems, 1913-1962

A little difficult to read (content and form). There's alot more here than the small letters.

'anybody lived in a pretty how town with up so floating many bells down' The poetry of ee cummings is something that most Americans gain exposure to during secondary school (and very rarely in the education of those outside America) -- he is often seen as an acceptable example of one who broke the rules -- rules, the teacher will often hasten to add, which must be mastered before they can be acceptably broken. Yet this is not what ee cummings would hope had come of his legacy. In reading his poetry in this edition, his prose, his theatrical writings, and his unpublished manuscripts (some of which have been published under the title Etc.), a new vision begins to emerge of a real maverick--not someone who wanted to break the rules, but someone who eschewed the idea of rules so completely that breaking them was beyond the question, for that would have to recognise the value of the rules. And yet, some rules creep in: 'the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds (also, with the church's protestant blessings daughters, unscented shapeless spirited)' This is a classic example of a cummings sonnet--adhering to rhyme and meter, yet very original. Or, perhaps not that original. Unfortunately, ee cummings has become a conventional unconventionality. He was a success at being different--at one point only cummings and Frost, New Englanders both, with very different vines growing on the respective sides of their fence, were able to make a living solely from their writing while concentrating on poetry. This text almost all of the poetry cummings produced in his lifetime. In this we find his faith, his politics, his social criticism and his social prejudices, and his ideas of love and desire. There are other poems that go beyond this text (including ones never published in his lifetime) that are not included here, but this contains everything major, and all for which cummings became known. Some of his poetry is best meant to be read aloud, as all good poetry ultimately finds its best expression not on the lifeless page but in the spirited, feeling telling. There is an incredible sense (try reading it aloud, slowly). Some of the cummings poetry, however, is simplicity and verges on the concrete. These sometimes resort to cleverness that might have been genius of observation at the time but unfortunately due to overexposure now just seem an elementary type of cleverness. Of course, simplicity is so often overlooked, that when it is seen, we often react not as we should. Arrangement on the page is so critical to cummings perception of how things must be that the lastest editions of his poetry are put in typewriter typeset (the way he composed and envisioned his poetry). The medium is part of the message, he would have said. Try to read cummings with a new eye, and look for that which would have been shocking to the more standard and rule-bound Cambridge soul.

Not being able to remember a first line, which could be easily found in the Index of First Lines starting at page 849, I just looked through hundreds of pages trying to find a poem whose last line is spread over seven lines on page 700. These poems are not always easy to read, and now that I have found this one, I would love to share it with anyone who might be interested:as joe gould says inhis terrifyingly human manner the only reason every womanshouldgo to college is sothat she never can(knowledge is power)say oif i'dOHnlygawntuecollege

There may be some problem, like am I being retro? with the way that I think about the poems in this book, because I tried to read the whole book more than twenty years ago, and was so impressed that when an Etcetera collection of additional poems came out in 1983, I bought that too. I'm not sure I know anyone now who would even consider reading a book this big if it was just poems. The big revelation in the 1913-1962 collection, as far as I was concerned, was the poem "the boys i mean are not refined," which was first published in a limited edition of nine copies in 1935, according to the first paragraph of the inside flap of the First American edition 1972 of Complete Poems 1913-1962, which I still have. That poem, in particular, taught me a lot about culture, and how someone (famous) who knew what culture was could know what could be said, while others might just "speak whatever's on their mind." This might be close to what the verses in Proverbs that try to describe the difference between a wise man and a fool are trying to say, and it was great to find that someone who might be considered almost as modern as myself could be sensitive to this kind of thing, almost like hearing John Prine wondering if it would be possible for him to still blush in some song he wrote.Even I don't read much of this book at any one time, anymore, but I appreciate how well it stores its pleasures. One of the curiosities of poetry is that it can be incredibly difficult to find a poem unless the first line is the one that pops into the appropriate recall mechanism, whenever a poem is thought of, and this book has been around a long time because, even when I don't know if I will be able to find what I am looking for, it is interesting to look through it trying to find the last line of a great poem that was greater at the end than at the beginning. My favorite poem in this book starts out with "jake hates/all the girls" but the great thing is an unexpected rhyme scheme, which jumps around from bold, meek, sleek, cold in the first verse to lean, mean, clean, green in the last. Actually, this poem might be considered utterly devastating if there was anything personal about it, but thoughts about all the girls have been on the conscience of philosophy about as long as books have been maintained for the future, and it does my heart good to see a poet try to join in the mess surrounding this topic. What I mean is, I think this poem is good in a way that centuries of being modern might try to deny, but it is here, under a number 21 in a section titled XAIPE, originally published in 1950, when I was alive and maybe even speaking, if something reminded me of my mother. Actually, she might not like this poem, so I think it's funny, if anyone can understand the humor in that. These reviews aren't supposed to be by great critics; they are just supposed to say: buy this book.