The Closet Professor

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]
By E. E. Cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
                                                                  i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

About the Poem

“i carry your heart with me (i carry it in” by E.E. Cummings was first published in June 1952 in Poetry magazine. It is an unconventional sonnet, and as an unconventional poet, Cummings plays with the established styles of poetry for the benefit of meaning and aesthetics. It is important to note the aesthetics of his poetry play a role in the message being delivered, something which is clearly seen in this poem.

The poem details a powerful, romantic love from start to finish. Even the structure demonstrates this by breaking old-fashioned rules but still managing to be clear. The sweet intention is not lost; if anything, it is strengthened by the unconventionality. It mirrors the words of strength and unity, lack of fear. Everything in the speaker’s life, including the soul, rests in this love and in the very being of the person meant to receive the message. The unique structure of the poem also serves to demonstrate the oneness of the love the speaker feels. In addition, it also shows how the beauty of the love knows no bounds. In other words, it is not restricted by any old rules or traditions. Just as the speaker is not restricted in life due to the courage his or her love provides.

The overarching themes of this piece are love, admiration, and fortitude. The admiration of the speaker is not just assumed because he or she is in love, it is also evident in the writing itself. The line “for beautiful you are my world,my true)” shows the high esteem in which the lover is held. All three themes interweave and work with each other to make the poem even more beautiful, rather than each theme standing alone. This adds coherency to the fourth theme seen in the poem, unity. Though it may not be as explicit in the lines when read, unity is definitely a very present topic throughout the piece.

About the Poet

Edward Estlin (E.E.) Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School.

He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.

In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.

After the war, he settled into a life divided between his lifetime summer home, Joy Farm in New Hampshire, and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.

In 1920, The Dial published seven poems by Cummings, including “Buffalo Bill’s.” Serving as Cummings’ debut to a wider American audience, these “experiments” foreshadowed the synthetic cubist strategy Cummings would explore in the next few years. 

In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work toward further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.

The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted that Cummings is “one of the most individual poets who ever lived—and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings’s poems are loved because they are full of sentimentally, of sex, of more or less improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence.”

During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant.

At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.