[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in] by E. E. Cummings
- Meri Utkovska
- Dec 18, 2023
- 5 min read
Updated: Jan 31
[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]
BY E.E. CUMMINGS
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
“[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]” Copyright 1952, © 1980, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust, from Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J.
About E.E. Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings was an American poet, essayist, painter, author, and playwright, born on October 14, 1894, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He decided to be a poet when he was a child, and between the ages of 8 and 22, he wrote a poem a day, thus, exploring many traditional poetic forms and finding his own style and language. Cummings attended the Cambridge Latin High School, where he studied Latin and Greek, and later earned both his BA and MA from Harvard University. His earliest poems were published in Eight Harvard Poets (1917).
Revising grammatical and linguistic rules, experimenting with language and poetic form, and, diving into the non-traditional paths of poetry, made Cummings one of the most innovative poets of his time.
“Cummings has written at least a dozen poems that seem to me matchless. Three are among the great love poems of our time or any time”,
Stanely Edgar Hyman writes in Standards: A Chronicle of Books for Our Time,
“The chief effect of Cummings’ jugglery with syntax, grammar, and diction was to blow open otherwise trite and bathetic motifs through a dynamic rediscovery of the energies sealed up in conventional usage.... He succeeded masterfully in splitting the atom of the cute commonplace.”
World War One and Cummings' The Enormous Room
In April 1915, the world was already enveloped in the raging of World War One, and, considering himself a pacifist, Cummings volunteered for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service in France. There, he became friends with William Slater Brown. Cummings and Brown tried to outwit the French censors by inserting veiled and provocative comments in their letters back home, but were soon being held on suspicion of treason and sent to an internment camp in Normandy for questioning. Cummings was released three months later, in December 1917, on account of his father holding outraged protests, and Brown was held until April 1918.
Drawing from the time he spent in French captivity, Cummings wrote and published his first book The Enormous Room in 1922.
"[The Enormous Room’s emphasis] is upon what the initiate has learned from his journey. In this instance, the maimed hero can never again regard the outer world (i.e., ‘civilization’) without irony. But the spiritual lesson he learned from his sojourn with a community of brothers will be repeated in his subsequent writings both as an ironical dismissal of the values of his contemporary world, and as a sensitive, almost mystical celebration of the quality of Christian love”,
wrote David E. Smith in Twentieth Century Literature.
More like this:
Tulips and Chimneys and Other E.E. Cummings Poetry Collections
Cummings' first poetry collection Tulips and Chimneys (originally titled by him Tulips & Chimneys), appeared in 1923. Among other, the collection features the poems:
All in green went my love riding,
Tumbling-hair
yours is the music for no instrument, and
a wind has blown the rain away and blown.
His second collection of poetry, XLI Poems, was published two years later, in 1925. Writing for Nation, Mark Van Doren said that Cummings was a poet with
“a richly sensuous mind; his verse is distinguished by fluidity and weight; he is equipped to range lustily and long among the major passions.”
Is 5, his third poetry collection, was published in 1926, and it was with these collections that Cummings asserted himself as an avant-garde poet thriving in language experimentation.
Notes On E.E. Cummings' Poetry
Cummings wrote purely, clearly, yet complexly, both from the heart of a man and the soul of a child. His poetry is, perhaps, best observed as one man's faith in the freedom of the individual, and a revolution against mass thought, small minds, and conformity.
Focused on, and celebrating love, nature, and life in the most sincere way known to humankind, Cummings' poetic expression was, and still is, like no other.
One of the most prolific poets of his time, and ranked among the greatest love poets in the world, he died on September 3rd, 1962.
Essential Books by E.E. Cummings
e. e. cummings
Complete Poems, 1904-1962
(HARDBACK)
Description
courtesy of Bookshop.org
Combining Thoreau's controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited bohemian, E. E. Cummings, together with Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. Today Cummings is recognized as the author of some of the most sensuous lyric poems in the English language, as well as one of the most inventive American poets of his time. Formally fractured and yet gleefully alive and whole, at once cubistic and figurative, Cummings's work expanded the boundaries of what language is and can do.
With a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn, this redesigned, newly corrected, and fully reset edition of Complete Poems collects and presents all the poems published or designated for publication by E. E. Cummings in his lifetime. It includes 36 poems that were first collected in the 1991 edition and 164 unpublished poems issued in 1983 under the title Etcetera. It spans his earliest creations, his vivacious linguistic acrobatics, up through his last valedictory sonnets.
In the words of Randall Jarrell, "No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and special reader." SHOP THE BOOK FROM BOOKSHOP
Selected Poems
(PAPERBACK)
Description
courtesy of Bookshop.org
The one hundred and fifty-six poems here, arranged in twelve sections and introduced by E. E. Cummings's biographer, Richard S. Kennedy, include his most popular poems, spanning his earliest creations, his vivacious linguistic acrobatics, up to his last valedictory sonnets. Also featured are thirteen drawings, oils, and watercolors by Cummings, most of them never before published.
Erotic Poems
(PAPERBACK)
Description
courtesy of Bookshop.org
Many years ago the prodigious and famously prolific E. E. Cummings sat in his study writing and thinking about sex. His private brooding gave way to poems and drawings of sexual and romantic love that delight and provoke. Here, collected for this first time in a single volume, are those erotic poems and sketches, culled from Cummings's original manuscripts by the distinguished editor George James Firmage.
from "16"
may i feel said he
(i'll squeal said she
just once said he)
it's fun said she
(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she SHOP THE BOOK FROM BOOKSHOP
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