poetry lamenting war #4

[truepenny]

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you're flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you

--E. E. Cummings, "Humanity i love you," "La Guerre" I. Tulips and Chimneys. 1923. New York: Liveright, 1996.

LINKS:
Brief biography from the Academy of American Poets.

The Modern American Poetry (MAPS) pages again have secondary material. Also a self-portrait of Cummings from the 1950s.

SPRING is the journal of the E. E. Cummings Society; here they weigh in on the "Cummings" vs. "cummings" issue, quite conclusively.

Comments

[monanotlisa.livejournal.com]

Although I am not usually an E. E. Cummings lover, this poem resonated within me...

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I generally find that Cummings's early work is more engaging, moving, and thought-provoking than his best known stuff. In the stuff from the '20s, you can see him really experimenting, pushing the boundaries, going, basically, Holy fuck, look at what the language can DO! Later on, it devolved into a shtick ... and thus the poems are safer and get anthologized and reprinted and well-known, yada yada.

But, yeah, this one's just a great poem.