Complete Poems, 1904–1962
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Complete Poems, 1904–1962
E. E. Cummings
Poetry
James Mustich
Aug 9, 2018
There is something inexplicably joyful about the poetry of E. E. Cummings—not happy, exactly, but vivid and exuberant. Simultaneously intimate and expansive, his poems achieve what the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry labeled “a magnificent, subversive smallness.” His many sonnets, eccentric though they be, are among the best of the twentieth century, combining rhymes and off-rhymes with a casual confidence; his love poems are equally distinguished, putting linguistic virtuosity at the service of erotic longing (and, as he might say, nearing) with an ingenuity reminiscent of seventeenth-century metaphysical master John Donne. Beneath their beguiling (and at times befuddling) façades, Cummings’s poems do serious work, encouraging the language into new powers of expression. His poetry proves, again and again, that no familiarity—not dawn nor death nor laughter nor love—is quite as straightforward as it seems.
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Matt Mayerchak
Oct 16, 2018
loved it as a child - easy enough to understand as a child, and even more powerful as an adult
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Bradley McDonald
Apr 11, 2019
Such creativity, passion and movement in cummings' poems!
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