Quote:
Originally Posted by Gail White
Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Meyer
True, cummings din't write like this, but he was quite good at invective. Consider these lines from one of his famous antimilitary poems:
i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or
and “I will not kiss your fucking flag”
and Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
“there is some shit I will not eat”
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Richard, isn't that poem by Karl Shapiro?
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No, Gail, it was Cummings. I've got it in several anthologies and in his
Complete Poems.
Also, just as a wee nit, and something I only learned very recently: Cummings grew to dislike seeing his name without the proper caps. He preferred to have people write his name the traditional way, even though as a poet he always used the lower-case version.
At least that's what I've read in several places.
Shapiro wrote a lot of war poems, but Cummings' signature style is all over the poem in question.