Poetry
Tulips and Chimneys
E. E. Cummings · 1923
Opening lines
Thou aged unreluctant earth who dost
with quivering continual thighs invite
the thrilling rain the slender paramour
to toy with thy extraordinary lust,
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
Sixty-six poems in two parts. The first, Tulips, opens with a long epithalamion in rhymed stanzas, then the capital letters fall away, the punctuation shifts, words are cut and stuck back together, and one comes apart syllable by syllable in a column. It contains songs, spring and its balloon man, love poems, war, portraits, including that of the late Buffalo Bill, in eleven lines in which death is addressed like a gentleman. The second, Chimneys, brings together three sequences of sonnets, including scenes from a brothel.
Context
The collection looks for a publisher for a long time. Thomas Seltzer accepts it in 1923, keeps only sixty-six pieces out of one hundred and fifty-two and replaces with a word the ampersand in the title, to which the author was attached. The rejected pieces feed two books of 1925, XLI Poems and &, whose title takes up the refused sign. The 1922 manuscript, which is now held to be the correct text, appeared only in 1976. The book followed by a year a prose account of his detention, which had already made its author known.
Who it is for
Short poems, with overturned typography and punctuation; the arrangement on the page is part of the meaning. Translated into French by Thierry Gillyboeuf.
Prizes and reception
Its author's first collection of verse; several pieces, including the Buffalo Bill poem, had first appeared in the magazine The Dial in 1920.
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