‘may i feel said he’ is one of E. E. Cummings’ most playful poems, detailing the to-and-fro between a man and a woman engaged in a fling (the man’s wife is mentioned, so the female speaker here must be his mistress). It’s one of Cummings’ more straightforward and easily comprehensible […]
The American poet e. e. cummings (as he styled himself) was one of the most linguistically experimental mainstream modernist poets writing in the United States in the twentieth century, and his poem ‘next to of course god america i’ is a fine example of his innovative style. But is ‘next […]
Poets have often turned to classical mythology to shine a light on erotic feeling, and the great twentieth-century American poet E. E. Cummings (or perhaps that should be, following the poet’s own self-styling, e. e. cummings) wrote some of the best erotically charged poetry of the twentieth century. So it […]
What do we call this short E. E. Cummings masterpiece? ‘l(a’, after its first line? ‘loneliness (a leaf falls)’? But that violates the careful syntax of Cummings’ own poem. ‘a leaf falls on loneliness’? But that separates the two things that need to be kept together. ‘l(a leaf falls)oneliness’ then? […]
The poem with the opening line ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’ is one of E. E. Cummings’ (or perhaps that should be, following the poet’s own self-styling, e. e. cummings’) best-known poems. But like much of his poetry, ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’ presents a number […]