[love is more thicker than forget]

Cummings was by vocation a writer but by temperament a painter. If World War One and then the Great Depression gives Cummings’s playful poetry its far more serious agenda, that same poetry reflects two critical aesthetic movements that found expression in both literature and painting, movements that Cummings explored during his frequent trips to Europe after the war: Modernism with its stress on radical formal invention and Cubism, a genre of painting that sought to shatter the familiar surfaces of everyday experience and then reassemble them into startling new designs.

In Modernism, particularly the intricate wordplay of poet, essayist, and novelist Gertrude Stein, Cummings tapped into a liberating sense that inherited language could not represent the endgame of language itself. The Modernists, with their uncompromising sense of rejecting any inherited artistic forms and reimagining the very structures of aesthetic expression, sanctioned for Cummings a liberating daring. Words are not words, sentence are not sentences—they are moments of expression, ever changing, ever re-signifying. Given Cummings’s own Harvard education in the languages of Antiquity, he took from Modernism several things: its happy sense of incautious experimentation with language structures themselves, experiments in how a poem looks, how words create an aural delight, how unconventional poetry is intended to shock and provoke the status quo, and perhaps most importantly, to engage and delight those willing to see art itself as endlessly, perpetually evolutionary.

From Cubism, an early century school of radical expressionism that sought to upend conventional notions of perspective by revisiting objects and subjecting them to experiments in how the thing itself is seen by shifting perspectives on a single canvas, Cummings re-imagined poetry itself. His poems are splintered, fragments of traditional poetic lines, minimalist in intent that compel readers to re-see what a poem should look like. The Cubist touches here are quiet: The poem looks like a poem, four tidy quatrains with clean and careful rhyming and rhythm, all executed in lines that happily upend all assumptions about grammar, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. It looks like a poem but certainly does not sound like a poem. It does not even have a title—that was provided by well-intentioned but benighted editors. Like a Cubist canvas claiming to be a still life but depicting shards of color and fragments of shapes, the poem claims to be one thing, a poem, and yet joyfully rejects every expectation of that same thing.