e.e. cummings Explains What It Means To Be a Complete Human Being

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of poet E.E. Cummings (Edward Estlin Cummings)(books by this author ), born in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1894). He spent most of his life unhappy and irritable in New York, struggling to pay the bills, ostracized by other writers for his unpopular political views, yet he wrote many poems in a naïve style about the beauty of nature and love.

He had published several books of poetry, including Tulips and Chimneys (1923), but was still relatively unknown. He came to wider public attention by giving a series of lectures at Harvard University. Most lecturers spoke from behind a lectern, but he sat on the stage, read his poetry aloud, and talked about what it meant to him. The faculty members were embarrassed by his earnestness, but the undergraduates adored him and came to his lectures in droves. By the end of the 1950s, he had become the most popular poet in America. 

If asked to explain Cummings’ popularity, I suppose I would offer the poem below, “a man who had fallen among thieves,” and ask readers to think if they’ve ever experienced a simpler or more compelling statement of what it means to be fully human:

a man who had fallen among thieves

lay by the roadside on his back

dressed in fifteenthrate ideas

wearing a round jeer for a hat

fate per a somewhat more than less

emancipated evening

had in return for consciousness

endowed him with a changeless grin

whereon a dozen staunch and leal

citizens did graze at pause

then fired by hypercivic zeal

sought newer pastures or because

swaddled with a frozen brook

of pinkest vomit out of eyes

which noticed nobody he looked

as if he did not care to rise

one hand did nothing on the vest

its wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt

while the mute trouserfly

confessed a button solemnly inert.

Brushing from whom the stiffened puke

i put him all into my arms

and staggered banged with terror through

a million billion trillion stars.

We live in a cold, dark universe that is completely indifferent to our happiness, yet we have the power to find meaning and to confer it onto our lives. There are countless ways to do this, but one of them is performing acts of kindness to people, whether they deserve it or not, at some expense to ourselves, without any hope of being recognized for what we do.  We do it precisely because that’s what it means to be a human being.

Perhaps this is of particular relevance in our world today, where the lesson here seems to be getting further diluted with each passing day.  Yet it’s not too late to remember who we are.