E. E. Cummings (#1940Club)

 

love is more thicker than forget

more thinner than recall

more seldom than a wave is wet

more frequent than to fail

it is most mad and moonly

and less it shall unbe

than all the sea which only

is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win

less never than alive

less bigger than the least begin

less littler than forgive

it is most sane and sunly

and more it cannot die

than all the sky which only

is higher than the sky

-e. e. cummings

This is from e. e. cummings' book 50 Poems, which came out in 1940. None of what I think of as his best-known and most-anthologized poems appear in it: 'i sing of Olaf glad and big' is earlier and 'pity this busy monster, manunkind,' and 'what if a much of a which of a wind' appear in the next book 1x1, which came out in 1944. The balloonMan whistles in spring, far and wee, in the first book, Tulips and Chimneys, of 1923. (Which would have been a good mud-licious sort of poem for the season.) But the 1940 club is on, and so, 50 Poems,  a sort of lost middle-child among his books, is it. 😉

But it does have some lovely poems: 'it is most sane and sunly/and more it cannot die'. There are those poems in cummings that just make me happy.

I hadn't really twigged to it, but it turned out 1940 was a good year for poetry, at least as represented on my blog... What I tend to think of as Auden's best book, Another Time, came out in 1940. There's two poems already on the blog from it: 'The Unknown Citizen' and 'Roman Wall Blues'. But I can't be doing Auden all the time. And Ogden Nash had a book in 1940, The Face is Familiar, which included the incomparable 'Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man'.