If up’s the word: spring and e.e.cummings

When I was in high school, I developed an absorbing interest in the poetry of e.e.cummings. My mom, herself an English major, had a book of his poetry that I happened upon one day. I was captivated. This was nothing like the poetry they forced us to read in school. This was new, different, fascinating.

I wrote my junior term paper on cummings, using as my thesis the scintillating argument “e.e.cummings used unusual language and punctuation in his poetry.” I then proceeded to prove this point with endless examples. It must have been excruciating to read.

For my 17th birthday, when my grandmother took me to buy my traditional gift of a book, I selected the collected works of cummings and then carried it around with me almost anywhere. (Why, yes, I was a raging dork, although I would have called myself an “outsider.” I was emo before emo was invented, goth before anyone called it that. I had a long black trenchcoat that I wore in all weather.) (Except when I was wearing my letter jacket and dance team uniform. I was part-time emo–and kind of psychophrenic about my outsider status.)

Anyhoo, I read cummings with passionate intensity. I memorized what I could–which wasn’t much, I’m a terrible memorizer. I was particularly fond of this short piece, which I inscribed everywhere as a sort of theme statement:

seeker of truth

follow no paths

all paths lead where

truth is here

I went to college fully expecting to study cummings more intently, but it didn’t take me long to realize that e.e. was sadly out of fashion. Interest in his work had peaked in the 1950s, when he toured college campuses speaking to halls filled with hundreds of students. Since his death in 1962, his reputation had declined. No one ever mentioned him when I was in college in the 1990s, and when I went to grad school in the early 2000s, he was completely ignored.

Now I understand why. For all the insistence of my junior thesis that cummings was new, different, progressive, modern, he is in fact a highly traditional poet. Yes, he avoided capitalization and scattered his words all over the page, but these irregularities were glosses over conventional work. The man wrote sonnets. Uncapitalized sonnets, but sonnets. His themes are rooted in the history of poetry–love, nature, beauty. His expression of them, while unconventional, lacks the precision or clarity of the greatest modern poetry. For all the arm-waving and de-capitalizing, he is the least modern of modernists.

It took age and sophistication on my part to realize this. The uncapitalized “i” in cummings’ poetry is an affectation, as contrived as my black trenchcoat. He might as well have been writing in green ink or wearing sunglasses in the dark. It was a put on, and therefore in many ways adolescent. Hence the appeal to me as an adolescent. I frequently wrote in green ink, although I can’t remember resorting to sunglasses.

Yet I can’t regret my passion for cummings, and as the years have gone by I have returned to him. For one thing, while cummings was a lousy modernist, he provided an excellent introduction to good modernists. My love of cummings made me more interested in other works of the period, which led me to Yeats. His inventiveness paved the way for the greater inventiveness of Gerard Manley Hopkins. By reading cummings, I was preparing myself to read Eliot.

And I’ve come to love–again–some of his work. Today I appreciate it for what it is, and I feel the strongest for his most traditional poems. Cummings is at his best when he sticks to the themes of love and nature. He can bring to these works a joy and delight that are infectious.

He is above all a poet of spring. And every spring I remember him. I remember this, one of his earliest works:

in Just-

spring          when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles          far          and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it’s

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer

old balloonman whistles

far          and             wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s

spring

and

         the

                  goat-footed

balloonMan          whistles

far

and

wee

I love “eddieandbill,” friends so inseparable they are one name. I love the words “puddlewonderful” and “mudluscious.” And I love the dated innocence of it–for who today plays marbles, and what mom would let her kids run around after a goat-footed balloon man?

There’s this lovely work:

    Spring is like a perhaps hand

(which comes carefully

out of Nowhere)arranging

a window,into which people look(while

people stare

arranging and changing placing

carefully there a strange

thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps

Hand in a window

(carefully to

and fro moving New and

Old things,while

people stare carefully

moving a perhaps

fraction of flower here placing

an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

I love the tentative quality of it, “like a perhaps”–for don’t you feel that way, on the days you awake and you’re not entirely sure if winter is over?

This poem, however, is my favorite for spring days so glorious that the universe itself seems to be bouncing in joy:

if up’s the word;and a world grows greener

minute by second and most by more-

if death is the loser and life is the winner

(and beggars are rich but misers are poor)

-let’s touch the sky:

with a to and a fro

(and a here there where)and away we go

in even the laziest creature among us

a wisdom no knowledge can kill is astir-

now dull eyes are keen and now keen eyes are keener

(for young is the year,for young is the year)

-let’s touch the sky:

with a great(and a gay

and a steep)deep rush through amazing day

it’s brains without hearts have set saint against sinner;

put gain over gladness and joy under care-

let’s do as an earth which can never do wrong does

(minute by second and most by more)

-let’s touch the sky:

with a strange(and a true)

and a climbing fall into far near blue

if beggars are rich(and a robin will sing his

robin a song)but misers are poor-

let’s love until noone could quite be(and young is

the year,dear)as living as i’m and as you’re

-let’s touch the sky:

with a you and a me

and an every(who’s any who’s some)one who’s we

“And a climbing fall into far near blue.” God, I love that. I love the swoop of this poem. Try reading it out loud and see if you aren’t swaying by the end. It rushes and jogs and leaps. “In even the laziest creature among us / a wisdom no knowledge can kill is astir” –and it’s right, somehow. We find this strange wisdom in spring, especially if digging in the dirt, planting flowers, cleaning beds. We know something we didn’t know we knew, we are connected to a deeper understanding through our very bodies.

I get why we didn’t bother to read cummings in my American modernism graduate class.  No offense to the man, but he’s a lightweight among Eliot, Yeats, Frost et. al. His poetry is all emotion and aesthetics, while they prompt far more complex reactions, intellectual and philosophical as well as emotional and aesthetic. Eliot could be beautiful and impossibly deep at the same time in a way that cummings simply didn’t have in him. On the other hand, Eliot could never be as unselfconsciously joyous as cummings at his best.

Today was a gorgeous spring day in Texas–a lilting day, an e.e. cummings kind of day. I found myself thinking of that line, “a climbing fall into far near blue.” The sky was a far near blue out my back window. Up’s the word, and the world grows greener, minute by second and most by more. Enjoy your spring.