beauty obsolete modern poetry

This is E. E. Cummings, and as such modern poetry.

Which is far too beautiful for a post modern time.

Over the years, he has been judged irritating, pretentious, foolish, or simply illiterate. One review in 1932 called his poetry “an intolerable annoyance”; another from 1928 found only the “puerile imbecilities of pseudo-sophisticates”. And it isn’t only the professional critics who have objected to Cummings. I tried teaching his poetry to some undergraduates once, and was really quite shocked at the level of scorn and disapproval they felt for it.

The irony is that this article is bowdlerized. Cummings would disapprove.

The Rose

the rose
is dying the
lips of an old man murder

the petals
hush

mysteriously invisible mourners move
with prose faces and sobbing,garments
The symbol of the rose

motionless
with grieving feet and
wings
mounts

against the margins of steep song
a stallion swetneess    ,the

lips of an old man murder
the petals.

e e cummings

This will be hated by all true thinkers. It is beautiful, true and passionate: none of these are permitted.