[.ca] Complete Poems 1904 To1962 (ISBN 0871401525)

Canonical Cummings Compendium:
I have a few E.E. Cummings books of poetry, but quickly despaired of every finding them all. This collection is a terrific resource for someone who simply wishes to have all the poems collected in one volume. Typography was preserved very well (with Cummings this is critical), and I find the order of appearance by date helpful in charting his growth as a poet; the first few poems are radically different from the later ones. Of course, acquiring his individual issues has its own appeal, but if you simply want to have his work easily at hand, this is your only choice (the indexing at the back is extrememly good at helping you remember a poem by its first lines).

not just anybody...:
'anybody lived in a pretty how town with up so floating many bells down' The poetry of ee cummings is something that most Americans gain exposure to during secondary school (and very rarely in the education of those outside America) -- he is often seen as an acceptable example of one who broke the rules -- rules, the teacher will often hasten to add, which must be mastered before they can be acceptably broken. Yet this is not what ee cummings would hope had come of his legacy. In reading his poetry in this edition, his prose, his theatrical writings, and his unpublished manuscripts (some of which have been published under the title Etc.), a new vision begins to emerge of a real maverick--not someone who wanted to break the rules, but someone who eschewed the idea of rules so completely that breaking them was beyond the question, for that would have to recognise the value of the rules. And yet, some rules creep in: 'the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds (also, with the church's protestant blessings daughters, unscented shapeless spirited)' This is a classic example of a cummings sonnet--adhering to rhyme and meter, yet very original. Or, perhaps not that original. Unfortunately, ee cummings has become a conventional unconventionality. He was a success at being different--at one point only cummings and Frost, New Englanders both, with very different vines growing on the respective sides of their fence, were able to make a living solely from their writing while concentrating on poetry. This text contains the entirety of the 12 published volumes of poetry cummings produced in his lifetime. In this we find his faith, his politics, his social criticism and his social prejudices, and his ideas of love and desire. Some of his poetry is best meant to be read aloud, as all good poetry ultimately finds its best expression not on the lifeless page but in the spirited, feeling telling. There is an incredible sense (try reading it aloud, slowly). Some of the cummings poetry, however, is simplicity and verges on the concrete. These sometimes resort to cleverness that might have been genius of observation at the time but unfortunately due to overexposure now just seem an elementary type of cleverness. Of course, simplicity is so often overlooked, that when it is seen, we often react not as we should. Arrangement on the page is so critical to cummings perception of how things must be that the lastest editions of his poetry are put in typewriter typeset (the way he composed and envisioned his poetry). The medium is part of the message, he would have said. Try to read cummings with a new eye, and look for that which would have been shocking to the more standard and rule-bound Cambridge soul.

it's always ourselves we find in the enormous room:
Though i would automatically attribute 5 stars to Mr. Cummings collection of the most beautiful words collaborated onto paper in one grouping, i find that the editor in this particular volume lacked the sensibility to categorize Cummings' poetry according to both first *and* last lines, understanding that it is within the last lines that Cummings packs the most emotional weight in his "story telling" verse: "you are my sun, my moon and all my stars," "it's always ourselves we find in the sea," "not even the rain, has such small hands," "brought all of her to a dead stand Still" (among others). It is nice to see his progression of publishing (though the order is not according to when the pieces were written and it seems to me the editor took the easiest way out on this one by ordering it according to each book). While the sections into which Kennedy (see reference in an above review) sorted these fine works was comfortable for those who wanted ease of theme, it would have been a rather magnanamous task for his vast array of published poetry. While often simplistic, the topics of Cummings' concepts can get too complex to fit into neatly fitted packages tied with the bows of universal theme. And while Kennedy was my introduction to more of this man's great work and i grew to love Cummings through him, i found myself liking works that weren't included in Kennedy's collection, and disliking his more experimental works that lacked the emotional punch (and those linguists might feel the contrary). It is cheaper, in the long run, to buy this collection than to collect the many individual publications to get all one's favorites. For those unfamiliar with Cummings' poetry, (and i am sure there are few if any that would bother looking up poetry who are) i recommend any reading simply because this man has got it goin' on. He is a passionate lover of life and language. He is a dreamer, an innovator, and quietly seduces your understanding. The true emotion of his work comes not from the meaning of the words, but in the spaces between the letters, the way they slip from the tongue like kisses; The sounds of intense breaths between lines and breaks. And then the words come, and the poem is done, and you are compelled to read again, to learn again, to find yourself again. Simply put, a book i can read each night like "Illusions" by Richard Bach suggests: i take the book, plop it onto the bed, and read the page onto which it falls (often more than once, simply to feel its full force of intensity).

"what a gently welcoming darkestness":
ee cummings is a magnificent poet - almost as much of a visual artist as writer. His poems fall and flow and jump and dance, their patterns and punctuation adding so much more to the words and essence of meaning. I have tried reading cummings' work aloud: it never quite works. He has an exceptional turn of phrase, and with one line (give or take a pattern or two) can bring about powerful emotive responses. This book is fantastic - I had quite a lot of difficulty finding collections of his poetry, and although I'd found a couple of small volumes, this one was exhaustive. I reread it - or at least parts thereof - more often than any other poetry book I own, and always seem to discover another nuance or aspect or pattern that I hadn't seen before. cummings wraps you in words, and the best way I can think of to describe how I feel after reading his works is to steal a quote from one of his poems - "such strangeness as was mine a little while." Worldwords. And he is the creator of my favourite quotation of all time... "listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go." And there is.

life's not a paragraph:
My story begins with my high school English teacher assigning us to read "since feeling is first". We studied that poem for an entire week. It's not a long poem, so we really dug our hands in, studying every piece of punctuation, every line break, and discovering things we didn't know could be discovered in writing. By the time we were through, I knew I couldn't stop. This is what poetry could be. I couldn't believe it. For a little while, I practiced writing my name in all lower-case. And while I knew I couldn't be cummings, I knew I still wanted to hang out with him and maybe be his friend. To me, the whole point of e.e. cummings' works is to show how throwing logic and syntax out the window can help one rediscover how to truly capture an emotion -- and not just capture it, but to interrogate it and become either its best friend or its arch rival. There is not one word in any of cummings' works that does not have a reason to be there. His lack of cohesion is sometimes confusing. But at the same time, it charms you; and while you do feel the need to read and re-read each poem, you don't do it to analyze it - you do it because it elicits a different response each time you do. cummings hangs on just the right word, even the right letter in a word, and you know how you feel at that exact moment. cummings looks not only at the definition of a word but the shape of the word to impact his meaning. This makes his style so intense and so pure that, in my mind, no other has come close to duplicating it. cummings will never be the world's favorite poet, he will never be studied and understood and appreciated the way Yeats, Poe, Frost, Whitman, or any other of the "greats" will. Fine. I think if you can pick up this book and read one poem and set the book down and never read it again, you'll learn more about yourself, humanity, and about what poetry should be than if you spent days laboring over the "greats". It's been a long while since I left high school, and now I have lots of favorite cummings poems; so many that pages are missing and entire poems are feared lost. So here I am. And then I thought, my God! There are people out there who don't know what this is, that don't know what these words can do to you. So I just wanted to pass along my little story. I need to thank that teacher. I don't think there is a better lesson than "life's not a paragraph / and death, i think, is no parenthesis."