100 Selected Poems

by E. E. Cummings

Overview

E.E. Cummings is without question one of the major poets of this century, and this volume, first published in 1959, is indispensable for every lover of modern lyrical verse. It contains one hundred of Cummings’s wittiest and most profound poems, harvested from thirty-five of the most radically creative years in contemporary American poetry. These poems exhibit all the extraordinary lyricism, playfulness, technical ingenuity, and compassion for which Cummings is famous. They demonstrate beautifully his extrapolations from traditional poetic structures and his departures from them, as well as the unique synthesis of lavish imagery and acute artistic precision that has won him the adulation and respect of critics and poetry lovers everywhere.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802130723
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	01/10/1994
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	259,067
Product dimensions:	5.26(w) x 8.26(h) x 0.37(d)
Age Range:	16 Years

About the Author

E. E. Cummings (1894–1962) was among the most influential, widely read, and revered modernist poets. He was also a playwright, a painter, and a writer of prose. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he studied at Harvard University and, during World War I, served with an ambulance corps in France. He spent three months in a French detention camp and subsequently wrote The Enormous Room, a highly acclaimed criticism of World War I. After the war, Cummings returned to the States and published his first collection of poetry, Tulips & Chimneys, which was characterized by his innovative style: pushing the boundaries of language and form while discussing love, nature, and war with sensuousness and glee. He spent the rest of his life painting, writing poetry, and enjoying widespread popularity and success.

Table of Contents

	Tulips and Chimneys (1923)
1	Thy fingers make early flowers of	1
2	All in green went my love riding	2
3	When god lets my body be	4
4	In Just--	5
5	O sweet spontaneous	6
6	Buffalo Bill's	7
7	The Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls	8
8	It may not always be so; and i say	9
	& {And} (1925)
9	Suppose	10
10	Raise the shade	11
11	Here is little Effie's head	12
12	Spring is like a perhaps hand	14
13	Who knows if the moon's	15
14	I like my body when it is with your	16
	XLI Poems (1925)
15	Little tree	17
16	Humanity i love you	18
	Is 5 (1926)
17	Poem, or Beauty Hurts Mr. Vinal	19
18	Nobody loses all the time	21
19	Mr youse needn't be so spry	23
20	She being Brand	24
21	Memorabilia	26
22	A man who had fallen among thieves	28
23	Voices to voices, lip to lip	29
24	"Next to of course god america i	31
25	My sweet old etcetera	32
26	Here's a little mouse) and	33
27	In spite of everything	34
28	Since feeling is first	35
29	If i have made, my lady, intricate	36
	W {ViVa} (1931)
30	I sing of Olaf glad and big	37
31	If there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have	39
32	A light Out)	40
33	A clown s smirk in the skull of a baboon	41
34	If i love You	43
35	Somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond	44
36	But if a living dance upon dead minds	45
	No thanks (1935)
37	Sonnet entitled how to run the world)	46
38	May i feel said he	47
39	Little joe gould has lost his teeth and doesn't know where	48
40	Kumrads die because they're told)	49
41	Conceive a man, should he have anything	50
42	Here's to opening and upward, to leaf and to sap	51
43	What a proud dreamhorse pulling (smoothloomingly) through	52
44	Jehovah buried. Satan dead	53
45	This mind made war	54
46	Love's function is to fabricate unknownness	57
47	Death (having lost) put on his universe	58
	New Poems {from Collected Poems} (1938)
48	Kind)	59
49	(Of Ever-Ever Land i speak	61
50	This little bride & groom are	62
51	My specialty is living said	63
52	If i	64
53	May my heart always be open to little	65
54	You shall above all things be glad and young	66
	50 Poems (1940)
55	Flotsam and jetsam	67
56	Spoke joe to jack	68
57	Red-rag and pink-flag	69
58	Proud of his scientific attitude	70
59	A pretty a day	71
60	As freedom is a breakfastfood	72
61	Anyone lived in a pretty how town	73
62	My father moved through dooms of love	75
63	I say no world	78
64	These children singing in stone a	80
65	Love is the every only god	81
66	Love is more thicker than forget	82
67	Hate blows a bubble of despair into	83
68	What freedom's not some under's mere above	84
	1 x 1 {One Times One} (1944)
69	Of all the blessings which to man	85
70	A salesman is an it that stinks Excuse	86
71	A politician is an arse upon	87
72	Plato told	88
73	Pity this busy monster, manunkind	89
74	One's not half two. It's two are halves of one	90
75	What if a much of a which of a wind	91
76	No man, if men are gods; but if gods must	92
77	When god decided to invent	93
78	Rain or hail	94
79	Let it go--the	96
80	Nothing false and possible is love	97
81	Except in your	98
82	True lovers in each happening of their hearts	100
83	Yes is a pleasant country	101
84	All ignorance toboggans into know	102
85	Darling! because my blood can sing	103
86	"Sweet spring is your	104
87	O by the by	105
88	If everything happens that can't be done	106
	Xaipe (1950)
89	When serpents bargain for the right to squirm	108
90	If a cheerfulest Elephantangelchild should sit	109
91	O to be in finland	110
92	No time ago	111
93	To start, to hesitate; to stop	112
94	If (touched by love's own secret) we, like homing	113
95	I thank You God for most this amazing	114
96	The great advantage of being alive	115
97	When faces called flowers float out of the ground	116
98	Love our so right	117
99	Now all the fingers of this tree (darling) have	118
100	Luminous tendril of celestial wish	119

What People are Saying About This

John Dos Passos

He puts his inventions down with an unexpected refurbishing of phrase and a filigree delicacy of hairbreadth exact statement that is a continual challenge.

Marianne Moore

E.E.. Cummings is a concentrate of titanic significance. . .He does not make aesthetic mistakes.

Karl Shapiro

He has more control over language since Joyce. . . .Everybody delights in reading him.

Editorial Reviews

“E.E. Cummings is a concentrate of titanic significance.”—Marianne Moore

“To my way of thinking Cummings is, within his field of personal emotion, the lyrical field, one of the inventors of our time. He puts his inventions down with an unexpected refurbishing of phrase and a filigree delicacy of hairbreadth exact statement that is a continual challenge.”—John Dos Passos

“No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive both to the general and the special reader; since the early twenties, Cummings has been more widely imitated and easily appreciated than any other modernist poet.”—Randall Jarrell

“He has more control over language than any poet since Joyce. . . . Everybody delights in reading him.”—Karl Shapiro

“E.E. Cummings is a concentrate of titanic significance, ‘a positive character’; and only ingenuousness could attempt to suggest in a word the ‘heroic’ aspect of his painting, his poems, and his resistances. He does not make aesthetic mistakes.”—Marianne Moore

From the Publisher