E.E. Cummings -- The Poet of Spring

Poets can’t decide about spring. Some even cast aspersions on April. It may not be “the cruelest month,” yet who still believes spring is when “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world”?

But one poet had no ambivalence about spring. E.E. Cummings seemed to own the season, to feel it, live it, rejoice in it year round. Playing with words as he might with petals, Cummings did for spring what Van Gogh did for sunflowers. Once you have felt an E.E. Cummings spring, not even the dreariest day can drown the rising April in your soul.

Cummings’ own rites of spring began with his first poem in his first collection:

the mad magnificent herald Spring

assembles beauty from forgetfulness

with the wild trump of April

Some critics scoffed. Edmund Wilson found Cummings “simple in the extreme,” yet Harriet Monroe, founder of Poetry, hailed this “agile faun. . . full of delight over the beauties and monstrosities of this brilliant and grimy old planet.” So who was this grown man playing at poetry with the joy of a child?

Because his father, a Unitarian minister, already claimed the boy’s first name — Edward — his parents called him by his middle name — Estlin. By any name, few children have enjoyed a more nurturing youth. Both parents encouraged Estlin to paint and write poetry from the age of eight. Winters in Cambridge, MA and summers at a New Hampshire home called Joy Farm burst with creativity. Cummings later thanked both parents.

if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have one

And of his father:

joy was his song and joy so pure

a heart of star by him could steer. . .

(and every child was sure that spring

danced when she heard my father sing)

After flourishing at Harvard, then surviving three months in a French prison during World War I, Cummings burst into American letters in the 1920s. It was a time of experimentation, a time of modernism, a time of ambition tempered by Pan-like romps, and Cummings was one of its literary lights. In 1925, when his second book of poetry drew better reviews, he moved to an alley apartment in Greenwich Village. Winters were hard and money scarce, but spring, oh spring...

sweet spring is your

time is my time is our

time for springtime is lovetime

and viva sweet love

Here was spring in your veins:

wholly to be a fool

while Spring is in the world

Here was spring as not just a season but a sentiment, a symbol for the best in us:

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

Okay, now comes the darkness, you’re thinking. The horror he must have hid while playing the harlequin. Sorry to disappoint you but Cummings was as charming in person as he was in print. Though sometimes shy around strangers, with friends he would talk for hours, quoting Horace in Latin, Sappho in Greek, then turning to painting. Cummings painted as often as he wrote. Even his most experimental poems seem painted.

Especially later in life, when his poems stretch letter-by-letter down the page, a Cummings poem must be seen, not read. Still, he performed them frequently, in soaring cadences that charmed audiences. “He thought a poet should be fed by the ravens,” John Dos Passos said, “and of course he was.”

There is no ending to this. What, you thought the joyous poet of spring would just up and die? He did, of course, in 1962 when he was still living in Greenwich Village with his common-law wife of 30 years. But like spring itself, E.E. Cummings waits to reawaken and revive us. Cruelest month? Sorry, Mr. Wasteland, but it’s spring!

spring when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it's

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

THE PUDDLE-WONDERFUL POET OF SPRING