e.e. cummings was a teenage hero for me in the 70's, all idiosyncratic, experimental and strange but also whimsical, child-like and even sentimental as well as political. So it comes as some surprise to find how much I still like him now and how much of his poems has stayed with me.
So much of the poetry that claims to be ground-breaking and cutting edge and innovative is dull, almost dull for the sake of it as if weighed down by its own innovative seriousness but cummings retains the nursery rhyme innocence on the surface that so often covers a darker theme.
A favourite then which I must still pick now is the rhyming and scanning maggie and milly and molly and may in which molly is chased by a horrible thing but may finds a 'smooth round stone / as small as a world and as large as alone'.
In the greedy the people cummings offers us a version of his innocent world view in which 'they flock and they flee/ through a thunder of seem/ though the stars in their silence/ say Be.'
Obviously best known for his typographical innovation, l(a is a masterpiece, mingling the phrase 'a leaf falls' into the word 'loneliness' to considerable effect.
in Just- very nearly takes us further than one might want to go into whimsy and one can see why some adult readers who take themselves and their taste rather seriously might object to cummings but I think he's also expressing the wonder of childhood as well as indulging the nursery rhyme tendency and it is evocatively 'puddle-wonderful'.
mr youse needn't be so spry is philistine aesthetics with a fairly simple point to make and my father moved through dooms of love makes me wonder if there isn't some kinship with Dylan Thomas to be found in these poems. There really isn't such a thing as a one-off original even if cummings looks quite close to being one. He did make a unique contribution, though, and one I'm glad to find I haven't grown out of.
