A review by readingoverbreathing
e. e. cummings: Complete Poems, 1904-1962 by E.E. Cummings

4.0

"if you like my poems let them
walk in the evening,a litle behind you"

I've always been fond of E.E. Cummings I think if for nothing else his use of lowercase letters in a way that the old Tumblr/Instagram poetry aesthetic has only ever aspired to. I admire his creativity, his willingness to produce poems that at the end of the day have probably only ever made sense to him and him alone. All of that is certainly a style of poetry I could get behind.

Here, as I'm sure other readers and even scholars can understand, most of what I read went over my head. A lot of these seemed only possible to comprehend when read aloud, and most of the time I did not bother to do that. I'm sure within the proper academic context and the time to take apart each poem I could have gotten much more out of my reading experience here. But that's true of any poetry collection, or any work of written word, really, if you think about it.

I'd like to know a lot more about the context Cummings wrote within, apart from the obvious political stuff like the First World War and the rise of European communism. I'd like to know how truly unique his work is, whom his influences were, et cetera. I wish I'd had a better understanding of his career before I'd embarked upon this book; usually I like to first come to an author's work fresh, without having any conception of their life apart from it, but I think with poetry I made have to start making an exception. It's a tricky balance analyzing both a singular person's reality as well as their written recapitulations of it, but one, as academia has surely proved, truly worthwhile and, in my opinion, profoundly interesting.