Poet · Modernist
E. E. Cummings
American poet · 1894–1962
E. E. Cummings drove an ambulance in the First World War and spent four months in a French detention camp on a baseless suspicion of espionage — an experience he turned into his prose masterpiece The Enormous Room. Then he went home and spent four decades joyfully dismantling English punctuation, capitalization, and syntax.
The typographic mischief disguises a deeply traditional heart: under the scattered parentheses, Cummings is a love poet and a spring poet in the lineage of the Elizabethans, and his sonnets are real sonnets. (The lowercase "e. e. cummings" styling was largely his publishers' invention; he usually signed his name with capitals.)
His poems remain under copyright and are managed by his estate, so we present them in brief excerpts with links out — including "[i carry your heart with me]," one of the most requested wedding readings in English.
E. E. Cummings's most famous poems
These poems are still in copyright, so we can't reprint them — but here's what makes each one matter, and where to read it.
[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]1952
i carry your heart with me(i carry it inmy heart)i am never without it
The most beloved modern wedding poem in English, its parentheses working like cupped hands — one heart literally enclosed inside another on the page. The poem builds to calling love 'the wonder that's keeping the stars apart,' a line couples have been borrowing for seventy years. Its 1952 publication keeps it under copyright, so two lines is all we may carry here.
Read the full poem →somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond1931
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyondany experience,your eyes have their silence:
A love poem about being opened 'as Spring opens / (touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose' — power expressed entirely through gentleness. It closes with one of the most quoted endings in modern poetry, about rain and small hands. Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters introduced it to a generation of moviegoers.
Read the full poem →anyone lived in a pretty how town1940
anyone lived in a pretty how town(with up so floating many bells down)
Cummings turns pronouns into characters — 'anyone' is a man, 'noone' the woman who loves him — and lets the seasons and bell-sounds cycle indifferently through their whole lives, love, death, and burial. The scrambled grammar enacts the town's inattention: nobody notices anyone, except noone. It may be the most moving poem ever built from a syntax joke.
Read the full poem →[in Just-]1920
in Just-spring when the world is mud-
Spring arrives as a 'mud-luscious,' 'puddle-wonderful' playground, with a lame balloon man whistling 'far and wee' as children come running. The spacing on the page scores the whistle's distance like sheet music. The balloon man's goat feet hint at the god Pan — pagan spring smuggled into a child's poem.
Read the full poem →since feeling is first1926
since feeling is firstwho pays any attention
The poem argues that anyone who minds 'the syntax of things' will never wholly kiss you — logic and grammar as the enemies of love, from a poet who broke both for a living. Its closing line, 'And death i think is no parenthesis,' lands the metaphor of a lifetime. It is the Cummings manifesto: feeling first, punctuation later, if ever.
Read the full poem →[Buffalo Bill 's]1920
Buffalo Bill 'sdefunct
An elegy for the Wild West showman compressed into eleven jagged lines, with words jammed together ('onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat') to mimic the sharpshooter's speed. The startling word 'defunct' — not 'dead' — keeps the carnival barker's tone even at the grave. It ends by addressing 'Mister Death' directly, asking how he likes his blueeyed boy now.
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