Cummings vs. Frost

It’s National Poetry Month and today in New York it’s Poem in Your Pocket Day. Hey, I got yer poetry right here, buddy.

Did you know that when e.e. cummings died in 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the U.S. after Robert Frost? I think both poets were probably oversimplified in the minds of their readers then, and probably still are now.

For instance, people recall cheery New England landscapes and “The Road Not Taken”, but forget that behind Frost’s carefully crafted self-image of a genteel countryman were mostly themes of darkness, death and despair. Last night, I watched The West Wing episode (“The Red Mass”) in which Josh and Donna talk about how a self-help guru has misinterpreted Frost’s “Mending Wall”:

Josh:

Here he quotes Robert Frost: “Good fences make good neighbors.” Did he talk about that?

Donna:

Yeah.

Josh:

What’d he say?

Donna:

Basically that if you stay within your personal space, you’ll end up getting along fine with everyone.

Josh:

You had to study modern poetry?

Donna:

Yes.

Josh:

Is that what Frost meant?

Donna:

No, he meant that boundaries are what alienate us from each other.

Josh:

Why did he say “Good fences make good neighbors”?

Donna:

[testily] He was being ironic.

Cummings, on the other hand, is often seen as a jumbled, simplistic word-doodler, whose lasting claim to fame, as former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins pointed out in a Slate article yesterday, is “most easily found in the pages of middle- and high-school literary magazines where rain, leaves, and snow are perpetually

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from the sky.” Yet Cummings cut his teeth as a “formal” poet before breaking into the printed acrobatics he’s known for, and in fact was a master of the sonnet, a most rigid and ordered form of poetry; Collins points out that Cummings always included several in every collection he published.

So poets are misunderstood: boo-hoo. Since I’ve thrown up Frost and Cummings for comparison, I can tell you that I wholeheartedly select the latter as a favorite. He’s no less intelligent but much more fun than the cantankerous, annoyingly rhyming and formalistic Frost; Cummings contributed a forward to a collection of Krazy Kat cartoons, for Christ’s sake. I think that while Cummings was enjoying reading the comics on Sunday mornings, Frost was content to eat a bowl of high-fiber cereal, then go out to his front yard to kill some gophers with a spade.

Anyway, it’s Spring, it’s poetry month/day. Here ya go, some Spring-as-symbol-of-renewal poems that you’re probably unfamiliar with from the suspects in question. Make up your own mind. And read more poetry.

Spring Pools (1928), by Robert Frost
These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.

The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods—
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

Spring is like a perhaps hand (1925), by e.e. cummings
Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.