Rating: 
Summary: not just anybody...
Review: '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 In reading his poetry in this edition, his prose, his theatrical writings, and his unpublished manuscripts (some of which have been published under the title Etc.), a new vision begins to emerge of a real maverick--not someone who wanted to break the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.
Rating:
Summary: An off-the-beaten-path poet
Review: Along with being a poet, cummings was a visual artist-chiefly a painter and sometimes an engraver. With his poetry, he made the attempt to arrange the words of his poems in something of an image. He also achieved this end with the words themselves: if he was to say a leaf falls, he might say: a l e (fa l l s) a f His poetry is not straight forward-if you want something easy to read, look elsewhere. But if you want to be exposed to a new and innovative style, and some exquisite writing and subject matter cummings is for you.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful words
Review: e.e. cummings is a master of the English language. The way he uses words to paint a picture will leave you breathless and touch your heart. These are not poems to be read lightly...you will need to think about what has been written and how, but I think that each poem in its own way will reflect a part of your own life once you figure out exactly what is being said. His combinations of words are unique and beautiful and create a melody of poetry that you will fall in love with. "rain fell(as it will in spring) ropes of silver gliding from sunny thunder into freshness as if god's flowers were pulling upon bells of gold" How could you not want to read this?
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful words
Review: e.e. cummings is a master of the English language. The way he uses words to paint a picture will leave you breathless and touch your heart. These are not poems to be read lightly...you will need to think about what has been written and how, but I think that each poem in its own way will reflect a part of your own life once you figure out exactly what is being said. His combinations of words are unique and beautiful and create a melody of poetry that you will fall in love with. "rain fell(as it will in spring) ropes of silver gliding from sunny thunder into freshness as if god's flowers were pulling upon bells of gold" How could you not want to read this?
Rating:
Summary: Marvellous.
Review: e.e. cummings' poems: "somewhere i have never travelled" and " l ( a " stand as the best pieces of poetry ever written. His style, imagery, and pure beauty are untouchable by anyone. The greatest (and most innovative) poet of all time.
Rating:
Summary: "what a gently welcoming darkestness"
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: amazing
Review: i first heard of e.e. cummings last year at a poetry conference. someone had written this profound poem and told me that his main influence was e.e. cummings, someone i had never read. i checked out one of his books from my school library and was addicted from then on. his style is incredible, his imagery is so marvelous, and his writing is all-together great. the way he used words to paint a gorgeous image has never been matched, and most likely never will. he is one of the most expressive poets ive ever read. some of his work is touching, some hilarious, some full of passion. amazing is the only word i can think of to describe him.
Rating:
Summary: Canonical Cummings Compendium
Review: 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).
Rating:
Summary: Canonical Cummings Compendium
Review: 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).
Rating:
Summary: life's not a paragraph
Review: 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."
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