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E.E. Cummings Quotes
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Edward Estlin "E. E." Cummings , often styled as e e cummings, as he sometimes signed his name, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. He wrote approximately 2,900 poems; two autobiographical novels; four plays and several essays. He is remembered as an eminent voice of 20th century English-language literature.

✵ 14. October 1894 – 3. September 1962
E.E. Cummings photo
E.E. Cummings: 208 quotes35 likes

E.E. Cummings Quotes

“i feel that(false and true are merely to know)
Love only has ever been, is, and will ever be, So”

E.E. Cummings

33
XAIPE (1950)

“So, ungentle reader, (as you and I value what we should ashamed—after witnessing a few minor circus-marvels—to call our "lives,") let us never be fooled into taking seriously that perfectly superficial distinction which is vulgarly drawn between the circus-show and "art" or "the arts." Let us not forget that every authentic "work of art" is in and of itself alive and that, however "the arts" may differ among themselves, their common function is the expression of that supreme alive-ness which is known as "beauty." This being so, our three ring circus is art—for to contend that the spectacle in question is not an authentic manifestation of "beauty" is as childish, as to dismiss the circus on the ground that it is "childish," is idiotic.”

E.E. Cummings

"The Adult, the Artist and the Circus." Vanity Fair (October 1925)

“the courage to receive time's mightiest dream”

E.E. Cummings

3
95 poems (1958)

“pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness”

E.E. Cummings book 1 × 1

XIV : pity this busy monster, manunkind
1 x 1 (1944)

“the cunning the craven
… they live for until
though the sun in his heaven
says Now”

E.E. Cummings

29
73 poems (1963)

“unlove's the heavenless hell and the homeless home”

E.E. Cummings

91
95 poems (1958)

“nothing false and possible is love
(who's imagined, therefore limitless)
love's to giving as to keeping's give; as yes is to if, love is to yes”

E.E. Cummings book 1 × 1

Source: 1 x 1 (1944), XXXIV

“more each particular person is(my love)
alive than every world can understand
and now you are and i am now and we're
a mystery that will never happen again, a miracle which has never happened before—
and shining this our now must come to then”

E.E. Cummings

69
XAIPE (1950)

“the only man woman or child who wrote
a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical
errors “is dead”
beautiful Warren Gamaliel Harding
“is” dead
he's
“dead””

E.E. Cummings

W [ViVa] (1931) XVII

“Life, for eternal us, is now”

E.E. Cummings

Introduction to Poems 1924-1954

“they work and they pray
and they bow to a must
though the earth in her splendor
says May”

E.E. Cummings

29
73 poems (1963)

“nothing except the impossible shall occur”

E.E. Cummings book 1 × 1

XLII
1 x 1 (1944)

“ye! the godless are the dull and the dull are the damned”

E.E. Cummings

13
50 Poems (1940)

“without any doubt he was
whatever(first and last) most people fear most:
a mystery for which iv'e
no word except alive”

E.E. Cummings

30
73 poems (1963)

“no evil is
so worse than worst you fall in hate with love —human one mortally immortal i
can turn immense all time's because to why”

E.E. Cummings

7
95 poems (1958)

“completely dare
be beautiful”

E.E. Cummings

68
XAIPE (1950)

“all which isn't singing is mere talking
…
and all talking's to oneself alone
but the very song of(as mountains
feel and lovers)singing is silence”

E.E. Cummings

32
73 poems (1963)

“how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any — lifted from the no
of all nothing — human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?”

E.E. Cummings

65
XAIPE (1950)

“and nothing quite so least as truth
—i say though hate were why men breathe—
because my father lived his soul
love is the whole and more than all”

E.E. Cummings

34
50 Poems (1940)

“It may take two people to make a really beautiful mistake”

E.E. Cummings Him

Him (1927)

“when you confuse art with propaganda, you confuse an act of God with something which can be turned on and off like the hot water faucet. If "God" means nothing to you(or less than nothing)I'll cheerfully substitute one of your own favorite words,"freedom". You confuse freedom—the only freedom—with absolute tyranny…
all over this socalled world, hundreds of millions of servile and insolent inhuman unbeings are busily unrolling in the enlightenment of propaganda.”

E.E. Cummings

Essay in the anthology The War Poets (1945) edited by Oscar Williams

“though mankind persuades
itself that every weed's
a rose, roses(you feel
certain) will only smile”

E.E. Cummings

72
95 poems (1958)

“The one…thing which mattered about any poem (so ran my second poetic period's credo) was what the poem said; it's socalled meaning … Thus it will be seen that, by the year 1900, one growing American boy had reached exactly that stage of "intellectual development" beyond which every ungrowing Marxist adult of today is strictly forbidden … ever to pass.”

E.E. Cummings

"i & you & is: Nonlecture Four"
i : six nonlectures (1953)

“A distinct throat. Which breathes. A head: small, smaller than a flower. With eyes and with lips. Lips more slender than light; a smile how carefully and slowly made, a smile made entirely of dream. Eyes deeper than Spring. Eyes darker than Spring, more new... These, these are the further miracles... the breasts. Thighs. The All which is beyond comprehension — the All which is perpetually discovered, yet undiscovered: sexual, sweet, Alive!”

E.E. Cummings Him

Him (1927)

“when you confuse art with propaganda, you confuse an act of God with something which can be turned on and off like the hot water faucet. If "God" means nothing to you(or less than nothing)I'll cheerfully substitute one of your own favorite words,"freedom."”

E.E. Cummings

You confuse freedom—the only freedom—with absolute tyranny…
all over this socalled world,hundreds of millions of servile and insolent inhuman unbeings are busily unrolling in the enlightenment of propaganda.
Essay in the anthology The War Poets (1945) edited by Oscar Williams

“Simple people, people who don't exist, prefer things which don't exist, simple things.
"Good" and "bad" are simple things. You bomb me = "bad." I bomb you = "good."”

E.E. Cummings

Simple people(who,incidentally,run this socalled world)know this(they know everything)whereas complex people—people who feel something—are very,very ignorant and really don't know anything.
"Foreword to an Exhibit: I" (1944)

“My theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz. "Would you hit a woman with a child?”

E.E. Cummings book EIMI

No, I'd hit her with a brick." Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.
EIMI (1933)

“my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world”

E.E. Cummings

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.
E. E. Cummings
A Poet's Advice (1958)

“An artist doesn't live in some geographical abstraction, superimposed on a part of this beautiful earth by the nonimagination of unanimals and dedicated to the proposition that massacre is a social virtue because murder is an individual vice. Nor does an artist live in some soi-disant world, nor does he live in some so-called universe, nor does he live in any number of "worlds" or in any number of "universes."”

E.E. Cummings

As for a few trifling delusions like the "past" and "present" and "future" of quote mankind unquote,they may be big enough for a couple of billion supermechanized submorons but they're much too small for one human being.
Re Ezra Pound (p. 69)
i : six nonlectures (1953)

“So, ungentle reader, (as you and I value what we should ashamed—after witnessing a few minor circus-marvels—to call our "lives,") let us never be fooled into taking seriously that perfectly superficial distinction which is vulgarly drawn between the circus-show and "art" or "the arts." Let us not forget that every authentic "work of art" is in and of itself alive and that, however "the arts" may differ among themselves, their common function is the expression of that supreme alive-ness which is known as "beauty."”

E.E. Cummings

This being so, our three ring circus is art—for to contend that the spectacle in question is not an authentic manifestation of "beauty" is as childish, as to dismiss the circus on the ground that it is "childish," is idiotic.
"The Adult, the Artist and the Circus." Vanity Fair (October 1925)

“we sans love equals mob”

E.E. Cummings

31
73 poems (1963)

“true wars are never won”

E.E. Cummings book 1 × 1

Source: 1 x 1 (1944), XXX

“no sunbeam ever lies”

E.E. Cummings book 1 × 1

Source: 1 x 1 (1944), XXX

“Here life is, moves; faintly. A wrist. The faint throb of blood, precise, miraculous... And they talk of dying! The blood delicately descending and ascending: making an arm. Being an arm. The warm flesh, the dim slender flesh filled with life, slenderer than a miracle, frailer... These are the shoulders through which fell the world. The dangerous shoulders of Eve, in god's entire garden newly strolling.”

E.E. Cummings Him

Him (1927)

“milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone

for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea”

E.E. Cummings

"maggie and milly and molly and may" in Complete Poems: 1904-1962