“Nobody can construct you the bridge on which you, and solely you, should cross the river of life,” wrote the thirty-year-old Nietzsche. “The true and sturdy path into and thru expertise,” Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney recommended the younger greater than a century later in his magnificent graduation handle, “includes being true … to your personal solitude, true to your personal secret data.”
Each technology believes that it should battle unprecedented pressures of conformity; that it should struggle more durable than any earlier technology to guard that secret data from which our integrity of selfhood springs. A few of this perception stems from the ordinary conceit of a tradition blinded by its personal presentism bias, unaware of the previous’s contextual analogues. However a lot of it within the century and a half since Nietzsche, and particularly within the years since Heaney, is an correct reflection of the circumstances we have now created and regularly reinforce in our current informational ecosystem — a Pavlovian system of fixed suggestions, through which the best and commonest opinions are most readily rewarded, and dissenting voices are most readily punished by the unthinking mob.
Few folks within the two centuries since Emerson issued his exhortation to “belief thyself” have countered this culturally condoned blunting of individuality extra courageously and constantly than E.E. Cummings (October 14, 1894–September 3, 1962) — an artist who by no means cowered from being his unconventional self as a result of, within the phrases of his most incisive and competent biographer, he “despised concern, and his life was lived in defiance of all who dominated by it.”
A fortnight after the poet’s fifty-ninth birthday, a small Michigan newspaper revealed a brief, huge piece by Cummings beneath the title “A Poet’s Recommendation to College students,” radiating expansive knowledge on artwork, life, and the braveness of being your self. It went on to encourage Buckminster Fuller and was later included in E.E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised (public library) — that fantastic out-of-print assortment which the poet himself described as “a cluster of epigrams, forty-nine essays on numerous topics, a poem dispraising dogmata, and a number of other alternatives from unfinished performs,” and which gave us Cummings on what it actually means to be an artist.
Addressing those that aspire to be poets — little doubt in that broadest Baldwinian sense of wakeful artists in any medium and brave seers of human fact — Cummings echoes the poet Laura Using’s beautiful letters to an eight-year-old lady about being oneself and writes:
A poet is anyone who feels, and who expresses his emotions via phrases.
This will likely sound straightforward. It isn’t.
Lots of people assume or consider or know they really feel — however that’s pondering or believing or realizing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not realizing or believing or pondering.
Nearly anyone can study to assume or consider or know, however not a single human being will be taught to really feel. Why? As a result of everytime you assume otherwise you consider or , you’re plenty of different folks: however the second you’re feeling, you’re nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its finest, night time and day, to make you all people else — means to struggle the toughest battle which any human being can struggle; and by no means cease combating.
Cummings ought to know — simply 4 years earlier, he had fought that hardest battle himself: When he was awarded the celebrated Academy of American Poets annual fellowship — the MacArthur of poetry — Cummings needed to stand up to harsh criticism from traditionalists who besieged him with hate for the bravery of breaking with custom and being nobody-but-himself in his artwork. With a watch to that unassailable artistic integrity buoyed by relentless work ethic, he provides:
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in phrases, which means working just a bit more durable than anyone who isn’t a poet can presumably think about. Why? As a result of nothing is kind of as straightforward as utilizing phrases like anyone else. All of us of us do precisely this practically the entire time — and at any time when we do it, we’re not poets.
If, on the finish of your first ten or fifteen years of combating and dealing and feeling, you discover you’ve written one line of 1 poem, you’ll be very fortunate certainly.
And so my recommendation to all younger individuals who want to change into poets is: do one thing straightforward, like studying how one can blow up the world — until you’re not solely prepared, however glad, to really feel and work and struggle until you die.
Does that sound dismal? It isn’t.
It’s probably the most fantastic life on earth.
Or so I really feel.
Complement the completely invigorating E.E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised with a stunning illustrated celebration of Cummings’s artistic bravery, then revisit Pulitzer-winning poet Robert Penn Warren on what it actually means to search out your self and Janis Joplin on the braveness of being what you discover.
