A list of Cummings' books and an explanation of how and why he chose his titles, including the book that has no title (often referred to as [No Title])
If you want to comment, choose a quotation from the text and share your thoughts on it. This is NOT on the final, but may help increase your overall understanding of cummings and his work.
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From Marissa P:
ReplyDeleteI found this whole section on what cummings had to say about "is 5" really interesting: " "If a poet is anybody,he is somebody to whom things made matter very little—somebody who is obsessed by Making...Ineluctable preoccupation with The Verb gives a poet one priceless advantage:whereas nonmakers must content themselves with the merely undeniable fact that two times two is four,he rejoices in a purely irresistible truth (to be found,in abbreviated costume,upon the title page of the present volume)."" He creates an image of poets as people who are verbs because they make things, while scientists, mathematicians, and other logical thinkers miss out by learning fact, not creating it. He doesn't want to study what others have said or done, he wants to make his own things. I think by saying a poet finds himself on his own title page is saying that the poems are the poet, because they came only from his/her mind, not from outside fact. He enjoys writing poems because they represent him and exactly what he thinks. I guess the overall idea is that cummings doesn't feel like he just writes poems and then they become one of his published works; even after they're published, they represent him as a person. So, the idea of "is 5" comes from the fact that the book contains five groups of poems and that each show a part of cummings..
I also thought the book of poems without a title ([No Title]) was interesting because cummings is always so precise with his punctuation, grammar, and word choice that I assume him to be equally precise with his titles. If he didn't give a book of poems a title, there must be a specific reason why he chose not to do so. The "Author" in his preface says "Such as the negatively fantastic delusion that something with a title on the outside and a great many printed pages on the inside is a book". This suggested to me that he left out a title to satirize books that have, in his opinion, no content but are only defined as books because of their title and "great many printed pages".