E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962

This got to be the poet who has meant most to me, and he has followed me through life. Cummings has this marvelous perceptiveness that make things stand out from the background as small gems and handfuls of reality. His sentences have the syntax of thoughts half thought and voices that murmur in the back of our minds. His imagery is as fresh and clear and wonderful as a day in spring, and his issues are always the only ones that really count; closeness, love, friendship, time, nature and death. This is the book that always makes me feel alive and happy to be so. It came to me the first time I fell seriously in love, and it never fails to revive the magic of those days. When I sit around reading it my wife laughs at me and says: "So it's show more that time of the year again!" Which it is. An incredible book. show less

Another monumental tome of poetry completed!

Cummings is confirmed as one of my favourite lyric poets, though, given his mature style, one can't really imagine singing a lot of them successfully. Technical aspects of his work have been much discussed; typographical and punctuational elements became as important as the words. Thematically, love and sex, nature and contemporary society all feature prominently.

I note down page references for particular favourites in poetry books as I read them. The number of such I noted for this book was very large even when compared to books of similar size. Cummings had immense expressive power and is not merely a showy poet reliant on "superficial" effects. Strongly recommended.

Man, what's to say about e.e. cummings poetry? It's simply one-of-a-kind. I feel like the closest you get to it is James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and yet those are two wildly different beasts. The poet followed a path so many poets took, starting out at his strongest and then at different rates growing less and less sharp. Though this is almost never an absolute curvature, it does show in the trend. The difference in quality is most notable when the main part of the book ends (the poems published in collections presented in their entirety) and the uncollected poems start. The uncollected poems, like the collected poems, follow a chronological order until you reach the appendices which contain juvenilia that I can almost guarantee e.e. show more cummings didn't want to see the light of day. In fact, the uncollected poems contain perhaps some of the greatest verse in the book.

In terms of technique, cummings plays with type, line breaks, and even forces you to sound out the words piece by piece- often leading you to sound things out incorrectly before the word is completed. The creativity at first seems to suggest expansive possibilities but as I said before, somewhere along the line he got less inspired and for whatever reason it wasn't words that failed him but the tricks. Just kidding. It was the words, too.

Someone told me e.e. cummings was a genius. It might be a little bit hard to see that in the main experimental material in this book, but if you flip over to the appendices and read what he was writing at Harvard, the poems do show a great deal of technical acumen. I think to him, though, it was clear that he had to pursue a more original direction. None of that material is classic, per say, but it does show a considerable mind at work. show less

There is no poet that seems to speak to me more than e.e. cummings. I don't know how he does it (or did it) and examining it too closely is probably not the best idea. His poetry just frankly makes my stomach flop over. For good or ill.

EE Cummings is my personal favorite poet. I could write essays about why I love his poetry- I will spare you that here. Suffice it to say that lovers of Cummings will find this edition clear, complete, and beautifully presented.

For every 25 poems I read, only one would really stir me. My 2 stars aren't a reflection of his poetry but my ability to enjoy. For the most part his kind of poetry is not the kind I wish to read.

who knew? cummings writes some of the sexiest love poems around. move over Barry White. No. seriously. Move OVER.