e. e. cummings
e. e. cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings, known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e e cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. His body of work encompasses approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays and several essays, as well as numerous drawings and paintings. He is remembered as an eminent voice of 20th century English literature...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth14 October 1894
CityCambridge, MA
CountryUnited States of America
An artist, a man, a failure, must proceed.
Damn everything but the circus! ...damn everything that is grim, dull, motionless, unrisking, inward turning, damn everything that won't get into the circle, that won't enjoy. That won't throw it's heart into the tension, surprise, fear and delight of the circus, the round world, the full existence...
more each particular person is(my love) alive than every world can understand and now you are and i am now and we're a mystery that will never happen again, a miracle which has never happened before and shining this our now must come to then
Life ,for eternal us,is now
seeming's enough for slaves of space and time ours is the now and here of freedom . Come
it's spring when the world is puddle-wonderful
Next to of course god America i / love you land of the pilgrims and so forth oh
O sweet spontaneous earth how often has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy beauty thou answereth them only with spring.
If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.
Do not hate or fear the artist in yourselves... Honor and love him...do not try to possess him. Trust him as nobly as you trust tomorrow. Only the artist in yourself is more truthful than the night.
If at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world- unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works. Jacques Barzun, 1959 all ignorance toboggans into know and trudges up to ignorance again.
To like an individual because he's black is just as insulting as to dislike him because he isn't white.