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Word Gems
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E.E. Cummings
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[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in] by E. E. Cummings
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/e-e-cummings
Edward Estlin (E.E.) Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He attended the Cambridge Latin High School, where he studied Latin and Greek. Cummings earned both his BA and MA from Harvard, and his earliest poems were published in Eight Harvard Poets (1917). As one of the most innovative poets of his time, Cummings experimented with poetic form and language to create a distinct personal style. A typical Cummings poem is spare and precise, employing a few key words eccentrically placed on the page. Some of these words were invented by Cummings, often by combining two common words into a new synthesis. He also revised grammatical and linguistic rules to suit his own purposes, using such words as “if,” “am,” and “because” as nouns, for example, or assigning his own private meanings to words. Despite their nontraditional form, Cummings’ poems came to be popular with many readers. “No one else,” Randall Jarrell claimed, “has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and the special reader.” By the time of his death in 1962 Cummings held a prominent position in 20th-century poetry. John Logan in Modern American Poetry: Essays in Criticism called him “one of the greatest lyric poets in our language.” Stanley Edgar Hyman wrote in Standards: A Chronicle of Books for Our Time: “Cummings has written at least a dozen poems that seem to me matchless. Three are among the great love poems of our time or any time.” Malcolm Cowley admitted in the Yale Review that Cummings “suffers from comparison with those [poets] who built on a larger scale—Eliot, Aiken, Crane, Auden among others—but still he is unsurpassed in his special field, one of the masters.”
Cummings decided to become a poet when he was still a child. Between the ages of eight and twenty-two, he wrote a poem a day, exploring many traditional poetic forms. By the time he was in Harvard in 1916, modern poetry had caught his interest. He began to write avant-garde poems in which conventional punctuation and syntax were ignored in favor of a dynamic use of language. Cummings also experimented with poems as visual objects on the page. In April of 1917, with the First World War raging in Europe and the United States just becoming involved, he volunteered for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service in France. Ambulance work was a popular choice with those who, like Cummings, considered themselves to be pacifists. He was soon stationed on the French-German border with fellow American William Slater Brown, and the two young men became fast friends. To relieve the boredom of their assignment, they inserted veiled and provocative comments into their letters back home, trying to outwit and baffle the French censors. They also befriended soldiers in nearby units. Such activities led in September of 1917 to their being held on suspicion of treason and sent to an internment camp in Normandy for questioning. Cummings and Brown were housed in a large, one-room holding area along with other suspicious foreigners. Only outraged protests from his father finally secured Cummings’ release in December of 1917; Brown was not released until April of the following year. In July 1918, Cummings was drafted into the U.S. Army and spent some six months at a training camp in Massachusetts.
Upon leaving the army in January of 1919, Cummings resumed his affair with Elaine Thayer, the wife of his friend Schofield Thayer. Thayer knew and approved of the relationship. In December of 1919 Elaine gave birth to Cummings’ daughter, Nancy, and Thayer gave the child his name. Cummings was not to marry Elaine until 1924, after she and Thayer divorced. He adopted Nancy at this time; she was not to know that Cummings was her real father until 1948. This first marriage did not last long. Two months after their wedding, Elaine left for Europe to settle her late sister’s estate. She met another man during the Atlantic crossing and fell in love with him. She divorced Cummings in 1925.
The early 1920s were an extremely productive time for Cummings. In 1922 he published his first book, The Enormous Room, a fictionalized account of his French captivity. Critical reaction was overwhelmingly positive, although Cummings’ account of his imprisonment was oddly cheerful in tone and freewheeling in style. He depicted his internment camp stay as a period of inner growth. As David E. Smith wrote in Twentieth Century Literature, The Enormous Room’s emphasis “is upon what the initiate has learned from his journey. In this instance, the maimed hero can never again regard the outer world (i.e., ‘civilization’) without irony. But the spiritual lesson he learned from his sojourn with a community of brothers will be repeated in his subsequent writings both as an ironical dismissal of the values of his contemporary world, and as a sensitive, almost mystical celebration of the quality of Christian love.” John Dos Passos, in a review of the book for Dial, claimed that “in a style infinitely swift and crisply flexible, an individual not ashamed of his loves and hates, great or trivial, has expressed a bit of the underside of History with indelible vividness.” Writing of the book in 1938, John Peale Bishop claimed in the Southern Review: “The Enormous Room has the effect of making all but a very few comparable books that came out of the War look shoddy and worn.”
Cummings’ first collection of poems, Tulips and Chimneys, appeared in 1923. His eccentric use of grammar and punctuation are evident in the volume, though many of the poems are written in conventional language. The original manuscript for Tulips and Chimneys was cut down by the publisher. These deleted poems were published in 1925 as &, so titled because Cummings wanted the original book to be titled Tulips & Chimneys but was overruled. Another collection quickly followed: XLI Poems, also in 1925. In a review of XLI Poems for Nation, Mark Van Doren defined Cummings as a poet with “a richly sensuous mind; his verse is distinguished by fluidity and weight; he is equipped to range lustily and long among the major passions.” At the end of 1925 Dial magazine chose Cummings for their annual award of $2,000, a sum equaling a full year’s income for the writer. The following year a new collection, Is 5, was published, for which Cummings wrote an introduction meant to explain his approach to poetry. In the introduction he argued forcefully for poetry as a “process” rather than a “product.”
It was with these collections of the 1920s that Cummings established his reputation as an avant-garde poet conducting daring experiments with language. Speaking of these language experiments, M. L. Rosenthal wrote in The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction: “The chief effect of Cummings’ jugglery with syntax, grammar, and diction was to blow open otherwise trite and bathetic motifs through a dynamic rediscovery of the energies sealed up in conventional usage.... He succeeded masterfully in splitting the atom of the cute commonplace.” “Cummings,” Richard P. Blackmur wrote in The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidation, “has a fine talent for using familiar, even almost dead words, in such a context as to make them suddenly impervious to every ordinary sense; they become unable to speak, but with a great air of being bursting with something very important and precise to say.” Bethany K. Dumas wrote in her E. E. Cummings: A Remembrance of Miracles that “more important than the specific devices used by Cummings is the use to which he puts the devices. That is a complex matter; irregular spacing ... allows both amplification and retardation. Further, spacing of key words allows puns which would otherwise be impossible. Some devices, such as the use of lowercase letters at the beginnings of lines ... allow a kind of distortion that often re-enforces that of the syntax.... All these devices have the effect of jarring the reader, of forcing him to examine experience with fresh eyes.” S. I. Hayakawa also remarked on this quality in Cummings’ poetry. “No modern poet to my knowledge,” Hayakawa wrote in Poetry, “has such a clear, childlike perception as E. E. Cummings—a way of coming smack against things with unaffected delight and wonder. This candor ... results in breath-takingly clean vision.” Norman Friedman explained in his E. E. Cummings: The Growth of a Writer that Cummings’ innovations “are best understood as various ways of stripping the film of familiarity from language in order to strip the film of familiarity from the world. Transform the word, he seems to have felt, and you are on the way to transforming the world.”
Other critics focused on the subjects of Cummings’ poetry. Though his poetic language was uniquely his own, Cummings’ poems were unusual because they unabashedly focused on such traditional and somewhat passé poetic themes as love, childhood, and flowers. What Cummings did with such subjects, according to Stephen E. Whicher in Twelve American Poets, was, “by verbal ingenuity, without the irony with which another modern poet would treat such a topic, create a sophisticated modern facsimile of the ‘naive’ lyricism of Campion or Blake.” This resulted in what Whicher termed “the renewal of the cliché.” Jenny Penberthy detected in Cummings a “nineteenth-century romantic reverence for natural order over man-made order, for intuition and imagination over routine-grounded perception. His exalted vision of life and love is served well by his linguistic agility. He was an unabashed lyricist, a modern cavalier love poet. But alongside his lyrical celebrations of nature, love, and the imagination are his satirical denouncements of tawdry, defiling, flat-footed, urban and political life—open terrain for invective and verbal inventiveness.”
This satirical aspect to Cummings’ work drew both praise and criticism. His attacks on the mass mind, conventional patterns of thought, and society’s restrictions on free expression, were born of his strong commitment to the individual. In the “nonlectures” he delivered at Harvard University Cummings explained his position: “So far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was, is, and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality.” As Penberthy noted, Cummings’ consistent attitude in all of his work was “condemning mankind while idealizing the individual.” “Cummings’ lifelong belief,” Bernard Dekle stated in Profiles of Modern American Authors, “was a simple faith in the miracle of man’s individuality. Much of his literary effort was directed against what he considered the principal enemies of this individuality—mass thought, group conformity, and commercialism.” For this reason, Cummings satirized what he called “mostpeople,” that is, the herd mentality found in modern society. “At heart,” Logan explained, “the quarrels of Cummings are a resistance to the small minds of every kind, political, scientific, philosophical, and literary, who insist on limiting the real and the true to what they think they know or can respond to. As a preventive to this kind of limitation, Cummings is directly opposed to letting us rest in what we believe we know; and this is the key to the rhetorical function of his famous language.”
Cummings was also ranked among the best love poets of his time. “Love always was ... Cummings’ chief subject of interest,” Friedman wrote in his E. E. Cummings: The Art of His Poetry. “The traditional lyric situation, representing the lover speaking of love to his lady, has been given in our time a special flavor and emphasis by Cummings. Not only the lover and his lady, but love itself—its quality, its value, its feel, its meaning—is a subject of continuing concern to our speaker.” Love was, in Cummings’ poems, equated to such other concepts as joy and growth, a relationship which “had its source,” wrote Robert E. Wegner in The Poetry and Prose of E. E. Cummings, “in Cummings’ experience as a child; he grew up in an aura of love.... Love is the propelling force behind a great body of his poetry.” Friedman noted that Cummings was “in the habit of associating love, as a subject, with the landscape, the seasons, the times of day, and with time and death—as poets have always done in the past.”
Cummings’ early love poems were frankly erotic and were meant to shock the Puritanical sensibilities of the 1920s. Penberthy noted that the poet’s first wife, Elaine, inspired “scores of Cummings’s best erotic poems.” But, as Wegner wrote, “In time he came to see love and the dignity of the human being as inseparable.” Maurer also commented on this change in Cummings’ outlook; there was, Maurer wrote, a “fundamental change of attitude which manifested itself in his growing reverence and dedication to lasting love.” Hyatt H. Waggoner, writing in American Poets from the Puritans to the Present, noted that “the love poems are generally, after the 1920s, religious in tone and implication, and the religious poems very often take off from the clue provided by a pair of lovers, so that often the two subjects are hardly, if at all, separable.” Rushworth M. Kidder also noted this development in the love poems, and he traced the evolution of Cummings’ thoughts on the subject. Writing in his E. E. Cummings: An Introduction to the Poetry, Kidder reported that in the early poems, love is depicted as “an echo of popularly romantic notions, and it grows in early volumes to a sometimes amorphous phenomenon seasoned by a not entirely unselfish lust. By [his] last poems, however, it has come to be a purified and radiant idea, unentangled with flesh and worlds, the agent of the highest transcendence. It is not far, as poem after poem has hinted, from the Christian conception of love as God.” Waggoner concluded that Cummings “wrote some of the finest celebrations of sexual love and of the religious experience of awe and natural piety produced in our century, precisely at a time when it was most unfashionable to write such poems.”
from https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/e-e-cummings/i-carry-your-heart-with-me-i-carry-it-in
The speaker and an unidentified lover are—according to the speaker—so connected that the lover's heart now seems to exist inside the speaker's own. This means that their love is always with the speaker, no matter where the speaker goes. Even when the speaker seems to be acting as an individual, then, the truth is that everything the speaker does is inspired by or somehow associated with the lover's perpetual presence within the speaker's heart.
The speaker is not afraid of the future, certain that whatever happens will happen with the lover. For this reason, the speaker doesn't yearn for any other kind of life, feeling that this relationship with the lover already makes for a perfect existence. Accordingly, everything in life seems imbued with the lover's presence, and this enables the speaker to understand previously meaningless elements like the moon. Similarly, the feeling of joy that the sun conveys now seems connected to the lover's relationship with the speaker.
The grand feeling of connection that arises as a result of the speaker's relationship with the lover is unknown to anyone else. Their love is so fundamental and pure that it resembles the basic truths of existence in the natural world, growing and expanding like a tree—a tree so tall and magnificent that it exceeds human understanding. And the sheer intangibility of this love is so powerful and awe-inspiring that it's like the elemental forces that keep the stars from crashing together.
Once more, the speaker insists that the lover's heart is always with the speaker, since it exists inside the speaker's own heart.
With its affectionate tone and focus on the heart, “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in” explores what it feels like to be deeply in love with another person. To do this, the speaker communicates wonder and amazement about the beauty of love. More than that, though, the speaker describes a romantic relationship so strong and intimate that it transcends individuality, effectively uniting the speaker and the subject of the poem as one. In the world of the poem, then, love leads to a sense of unity.
The speaker makes it clear early on that this poem is about the kind of romantic devotion that inspires people to stop seeing themselves as totally separate from their partners. To that end, the first line suggests that the speaker carries the lover’s heart inside of the speaker’s own heart. This image underscores the extent to which the speaker has embraced the lover, incorporating the lover into the very organ that keeps the speaker alive. In this sense, the lover is portrayed as integral to the speaker’s entire being.
To further cement the idea that the lover is tangled up in the speaker’s very existence, the speaker upholds that the lover informs everything the speaker does, since the two of them have become one—after all, “whatever is done” by the speaker is, according to the speaker, the lover’s “doing.” In turn, it becomes clear that the speaker’s love for the subject not only refigures the speaker’s sense of self, but also influences the way the speaker moves through the world.
With this in mind, love also affects the way the speaker conceives of the surrounding environment and the natural world. Even the moon, for instance, becomes an embodiment of the lover’s effect on the speaker. This is because the lover is the speaker’s entire “world,” and this ultimately helps the speaker make sense of things that have previously seemed inscrutable. Indeed, the speaker doesn’t know what a “moon has always meant” but now feels as if it conveys the feeling of being in love.
In other words, the speaker’s relationship with the lover has given meaning to otherwise meaningless parts of everyday life, including natural elements like the moon and, for that matter, the sun. If this seems convoluted, it doesn’t have to be. Simply put, being in love makes the speaker feel in touch with everything. Accordingly, the poem presents loves itself as a powerful thing capable of lending a person’s entire life a sense of beautiful harmony...
The speaker opens with apostrophe, addressing an unidentified subject directly. Right away, the speaker's love for this person becomes clear, since the speaker immediately focuses on the lover's heart. Of course, heart-related imagery often appears in love poems, but the speaker's thoughts about the lover's heart are somewhat unique. Using an anaphora to repeat the words "i carry," the speaker continues in the parentheses by suggesting that the lover's heart exists inside the speaker's own. Whereas the original idea of carrying the lover's heart isn't particularly notable, the image of a heart within another heart is somewhat strange and thus all the more meaningful. Indeed, that the lover's heart is inside the speaker's creates a sense of unity, as if these two people are so close that their most vital body parts are practically one.
Needless to say, the heart frequently functions in literature as a symbol for love, but it's worth considering the actual anatomical function of this bodily organ. Because the heart is responsible for pumping blood through the body, it is perhaps the most important organ. As such, the fact that the lover's heart is inside the speaker's suggests that the lover is integral to the speaker's very existence, effectively becoming the speaker's life force.
No matter how close these two people are, though, it's obvious that this image of a heart existing inside another heart is a metaphor. After all, the lover's heart isn't literally inside the speaker's—rather, this is simply a way for the speaker to express just how close and dear these two people are.
Similarly, the strange use of punctuation in the first line reinforces the idea that the speaker and the lover are inseparable, as if putting a space between the end of the first phrase and the opening parenthesis ("me(carry") would be too painful for the speaker. In other words, the lack of white space between "me" and "(carry" softens the effect of the caesura that would otherwise occur between the two phrases, and this only underlines the feeling of closeness between the speaker and the lover. In this regard, E. E. Cummings's characteristically odd syntactical style helps the speaker more thoroughly communicate the feeling of unity between the speaker and the lover...
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