E. E. Cummings' "[O sweet spontaneous]"
The Daily Poem
Goldberry Studios
4.6 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 14 May 2024
⏱️ 7 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
E.E. Cummings, in full Edward Estlin Cummings, (born October 14, 1894, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.—died September 3, 1962, North Conway, New Hampshire), American poet and painter who first attracted attention, in an age of literary experimentation, for his unconventional punctuation and phrasing. Cummings’s name is often styled “e.e. cummings” in the mistaken belief that the poet legally changed his name to lowercase letters only. Cummings used capital letters only irregularly in his verse and did not object when publishers began lowercasing his name, but he himself capitalized his name in his signature and in the title pages of original editions of his books.
- bio via Britannica.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome back to the Daily Poem, one of the many fine podcasts from Goldberry Studios Podcast Network. |
| 0:07.8 | I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, May 14, 2024. |
| 0:14.1 | Today's poem is by that whimsical wordsmith, E. Cummings, and it's called Oh Sweet Spontaneous. |
| 0:22.3 | The titles of Cummings poems are usually taken from their first lines, because he |
| 0:27.9 | shooed, among other things, titles, form, sentence structure, normal rules of capitalization |
| 0:38.0 | that's right |
| 0:38.9 | this poem |
| 0:40.4 | is we love him anyway |
| 0:42.3 | this poem is also continuing a theme |
| 0:45.1 | for the week |
| 0:45.6 | it's a tribute to spring |
| 0:47.9 | say a little more about that |
| 0:50.1 | after we've read it once |
| 0:51.2 | here is oh sweet |
| 0:53.4 | spontaneous oh sweet spontaneous that after we've read it once. Here is, O sweet, spontaneous. |
| 0:56.5 | O sweet spontaneous earth! |
| 0:58.7 | How often have the doting fingers of prurient philosophers pinched and poked thee? |
| 1:04.3 | Has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy beauty? |
| 1:07.7 | How often have religions taken thee upon their scraggie knees, squeezing and buffeting |
| 1:13.1 | thee that thou mightest conceive gods? But true to the comparable couch of death, thy rhythmic lover, |
| 1:20.6 | thou answerest them only with spring. |
| 1:36.3 | I sometimes have more than a little antipathy toward Cummings refusal to |
... |
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