Perhaps e. e. cummings’ most famous poem, somewhat due to its featuring in the film (name) where I was first entranced by it, ‘i carry your heart’ is one of the beautiful and intimate expressions of love.
Here is a fragment of it:
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)
…
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
Here we see that the closeness of romantic love has the effect of being utterly hidden and private—carrying another’s heart in the heart—and yet holding within it, mystically, the entirety of all of the sky and the cosmos. There is no need for another world; the beloved is one’s world. One’s entire world is in the fullness of the interior life, taken up in love. Love is enough to fill the whole of one’s existence.
This is what cummings captures.
Despite this intimacy he is able to encapsulate in his lowercase, halting structure, however, cummings is not a favorite among those who value formalism. And these formalists are not always or not even commonly pearl-clutchers, but often simply wise sages who understand second-order effects.
And there are many things that could be said about these effects of such an author.
Recent centuries have been marked in the arts increasingly by abstractions and a rejection of traditional form, and even art’s proper end in lifting of the human soul. Cummings is one of the main poets who departed along these lines.
In i carry your heart, we see a sincere attempt, and I believe success, at communicating the almost whispering reality of ecstatic love. It seems it could not have been communicated similarly via convention.
The reader feels that it is truly heart speaking to heart, with no bravado or intermediary. It carries not so much timidity as a kind of reverence.
One person, especially a gifted one like cummings, intentionally breaking convention allows for greater attention and the filling in of these insights. It can be powerful, and I would argue that in this case, it is.
But the breaking of convention, by definition, relies on convention for its foiling effect. It expresses itself via contrast. When everyone breaks convention, which has become the norm in modern poetry, then non-convention becomes the convention.
But now our “convention” doesn’t even have the redeeming quality of structure, rhythm, and rhyme.
What we have instead is mostly childish diary entries and poor mimicry of the greats like cummings, awkwardly and unnecessarily spaced, reeking of pseudo-depth.
We see this most starkly in the viral poetry on social media. There is little sincerity cultivated in quiet. There is little substantial interior life to form a true substrate for language that cuts into the heart and real human experience.
It’s not even sentimentalism, which is its own poverty; it in fact lacks all sincere sentiment.
It’s possible e.e. cummings is in large part responsible for this scaled departure into bad poetry that is now our pitiful norm.
But his work, especially in the affective clarity of i carry your heart, made possible in and through his departure from traditional form, is not pitiful. It is beautiful, and full of sincere human affective experience.
If he could be effectively mimicked rather than the distant source of impoverished derivatives, we would be much better off.
While i carry your heart and cummings’ other works remain a key conversational point in any serious discussion on the state of poetry today, it yet remains one of the most beautiful expressions of the reverential experience of intimate human love ever written.
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