great men burn bridges before they come to them
19
when Americans stop being themselves they start behaving each other
20
you can’t ef the statue of liberty
21
false is alike. False teeth
22
enter labor, with an itching heart and a palm of gold: leading (by the nose) humanity, in a unionsuit
23
the pigpen is mightier than the sword
24
item: our unworld has just heaved a sigh of belief
25
people who live in steel houses should pull down the lightning
26
hatred bounces
27
il faut de l’espace pour être un homme
28
most people are perfectly afraid of silence
29
think twice before you think
30
an intelligent person fights for lost causes, realizing that others are merely effects
31
equality is what does not exist among equals
32
it may be dreadful to be old but it’s worse not to be young
33
sleep is the mother of courage
From Wake No. 10, 1951.
VIDELICET
by E. E. Cummings
For more than half a hundred years, the oversigned’s twin obsessions have been painting and writing.
Several decades ago (when Academic Unart was exactly as representational as it now isn’t) an eminent art critic described my most recent picture as “hardly the sort of thing you would care to live with.”
Earlier still, if memory serves, the notable promoter of a book called The Enormous Room had remaindered its first edition at thirty cents a copy; and I’d scarcely prevented the author’s enthusiatic father from purchasing more than sixty copies.
Long before an epoch of disillusionment became an era of dehumanization—and about the time a play called Him, by my “lower-case” self, was dramacritically deplored as “exactly like stepping on something extremely nasty in the dark”—our prenonobjectivist realized that denying Nature’s imagination meant renouncing my own; and joyfully hurdled Jehovah’s anaesthetic commandment “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in the heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” (Exodus XX 4).
Some years later Eimi—the diary of a pilgrimage to Marxist Russia—was dutifully damned by America’s fellow-travelling literary gangsters. Still later, learning that fourteen publishers had refused a collection of poems aptly entitled No Thanks, my serenely confident mother requested the privilege of ensuring its unwelcome appearance.
Came the forties; and culture (lucely translated You Never Had It So Good) leaped like a weed. Education of the not educable speedily outranked all other national rackets: college degrees, crowning any activity from stagelighting to piecrust-rolling, were sold as freely as pardons during the middle ages. Television antennae blossomed from the poorest housetops; and moviestars, no longer content with a Cézanne in the toilet, hastily acquired livingroomsize Picassos. Nobody and nothing escaped The New Look: children of parents who’d honestly hated my writing were taught how to pity my painting instead. For a voice like unto the cooing of A-bombs had spoken, saying “EVERYBODY SHALL BE EVERYBODYELSE!” and (after a period of anxiety, during which The Nonforgotten Man pretty nearly suspected that he’d been properly frigged) it was revealed—amid everybody’s surprise and delight—that everybodyelse was an artist.
Let me only add that one human being considers himself immeasurably lucky to enjoy, both as a painter and as a writer, the affectionate respect of a few human beings.
From Arts Digest, December 1, 1954.
A POET’S ADVICE TO STUDENTS
A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.
This may sound easy. It isn’t.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel—but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling—not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time—and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world—unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does this sound dismal? It isn’t.
It’s the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.
From the Ottawa Hills Spectator, October 26, 1955.
ALSO BY E. E. Cummings
IN LIVERIGHT EDITIONS
Complete Poems, 1904–1962
The Theatre of E. E. Cummings
Erotic Poems
EIMI
Selected Poems
Fairy Tales
73 Poems
One Times One
95 Poems
Etcetera
22 and 50 Poems
AnOther E. E. Cummings
ViVa
XAIPE
Is 5
Tulips and Chimneys
The Enormous Room
No Thanks
Copyright © 1924, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1930, 1932, 1933, 1935, 1936, 1938, 1942, 1945, 1946, 1949, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1957, 1958 by E. E. Cummings
Copyright © 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966 by Marion Morehouse Cummings
Copyright © 1974, 1977, 1979, 1982, 1986 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust
Copyright © 1958, 1965 by George J. Firmage
All rights reserved
First Liveright Edition 2018
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