mr youse needn't be so spry
concernin questions artyeach has his tastes but as for i
i likes a certain party
gimme the he-man's solid bliss
for youse ideas i'll match youse
a pretty girl who naked is
is worth a million statues
Well, it's been about 11 years since I added to this blog. Had I lost my passion for Cummings? Have his poems stopped being active in my life? No, of course not. Just a case of interest in blogging about them amongst all the other demands on my time as father, husband and so on. They live in me. They reverberate in me. They roam around and bounce around in me. They are so much to me that I can say they are me. I am them.
Mr, you certainly don't need to be such a prick about what you think you know and how superior you believe you are. Take a good bite of humble pie and swallow hard. For a person as educated and erudite to speak in this street fashion only strengthens to me his point that even a man like him, A Hahvahd grad and intellectual leader of his era, understands that direct experience far outshines abstractions. All his learning, all his privilege, is still less than a pretty girl to a boy.
I've carried this one with me through the greatest museums of Europe. It doesn't make me appreciate the Louvre or Pompidou any less, but only to keep it where it belongs in the pantheon of what matters in the world. And it's not that great art is not a sublime achievement. It is. Even the most sublime human achievement...perhaps. And yet when seen from the point of view of an individual human, a great love surpasses any art. If you have ever deeply loved, you know that nothing compares to that in strength or power.
This poem also reminds me of Frost in his sly rebuke of a poem about kneeling at well curbs always wrong to the light. There is a strong vein of poetic pomposity that pervades the genre. Snobbery, plain and simple. Poets and critics of their day dismissed Frost as a lightweight because his poems rhymed. Fools would dismiss the protagonist of this poem by Cummings as simple.
Let's be careful to not conflate intelligence with value, or education with human worth.
