E. E. Cummings

cantfindit

Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School. He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University.  In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage for his outspoken anti-war convictions. After the war, he settled into a life divided between his lifetime summer home, Joy Farm in New Hampshire, and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired. In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. He attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war. During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant. At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts. Source

[love is more thicker than forget]

love is more thicker than forget

more thinner than recall

more seldom than a wave is wet

more frequent than to fail

 

it is most mad and moonly

and less it shall unbe

than all the sea which only

is deeper than the sea

 

love is less always than to win

less never than alive

less bigger than the least begin

less littler than forgive

 

it is most sane and sunly

and more it cannot die

than all the sky which only

is higher than the sky

Published:

1926

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Modernism

Anthology Years:

2022

Themes:

Joy & Praise

Love & Relationships

Literary Devices:

Anaphora

a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences

End Rhyme

when a poem has lines ending with words that sound the same

Enjambment

a line break interrupting the middle of a phrase which continues on to the next line

Paradox

a situation that seems to contradict itself

Quatrain

A stanza made of four lines.