i thank You God for most this amazing by e e cummings

(You, seriously, should see the original here. The words themselves almost dance in and out of their lines.)

There are a handful of artists that are so absolutely amazing and who do things that come across as downright effortless that they inspire dozens or hundreds of imitators and if your primary interaction with what the original did is through his or her bastard children, you’re quite likely to hate the original artist. That’s pretty unfortunate because the problem isn’t the original. It’s those who saw that it looked effortless and then went on to say “I could do that!” when, seriously, it took a lifetime of practice to get something that perfect and that seamless.

Well, cummings was able to do so many things so very effortlessly and he did them so very perfectly. He had love poems that were so intimate and playful like “i like my body when it is with your body” and “if“, poems that deal with death that, instead of feeling sad, feel almost whimsical like “it is funny, you will be dead some day” and a laugh-out-loud poem called “nobody loses all the time“, and to round out the gorgeous triad of sex, death, and nature, his “the wind is a Lady with bright slender eyes” will make you remember one of the days long ago when you stood in a field of flowers (even if you never did).

See what he does there with capitalization and meter (let alone rhyme)? He throws them all out the window but… no, wait, he kept them. No wait, he lost them. No wait, there they are. Hidden.

I don’t blame you if you look at some of his stuff and immediately recoil and remember the stuff you wrote that, approximately, might have looked like the stuff e e cummings wrote if you looked at both of the poems upside down. Look! No capitalization! Look at the sentence breaks! Ugh! I hate this! I’d just ask to try to look again and see that this is the guy who did it well enough and gorgeous enough and made it look easy enough for you to say “i want to do that too”.