Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, filling in for David Kern, and today is Thursday, February 11th. And it is just a few short days until Valentine's Day, the great celebration of love. And I'm sure you all are planning your dates or lamenting the fact that you have no date or, you know, like me,

working on your kids' Valentine Day cards for their classes and all that kind of thing.

But it is a big day in American culture for good or for ill.

And of course, today I'm going to read for you a love poem.

And it happens to be my favorite love poem in the whole world of all time.

And it is by the American poet E. E. Cummings. Cummings was born in 1894 and he lived until

1962 when he died at the age of 67. He was a wildly popular, extremely influential, and also very prolific poet. He wrote

approximately 2,900 poems. He also wrote two autobiographical novels, four plays, many essays.

He is regarded as one of the most important American poets of the 20th century.

And he is known for his free verse style, his modernist freeform poetry. He's very experimental with

vocabulary, punctuation, capitalization, all that kind of thing.

And we don't read a lot of him on the daily poem.

In spite of his influence, he's actually really hard to read out loud because he is such an experimental poet.

And also, we like formalist poetry, although we also read plenty of free form too.

But today I'm going to read E. E. Cummings because he wrote my favorite love poem of all time. So here it is. It is called Somewhere I Have Never Traveled

Gladly Beyond, and this is how it goes. Somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond any

experience, your eyes have their silence.

In your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which I cannot touch because they are too near.

Your slightest look easily will unclose me, though I have closed myself as fingers.

You open always, pedal by pedal,

myself, as spring opens, touching skillfully, mysteriously, her first rose. Or if your wish be to close me, I in my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly, as when the heart of this flower imagines the snow

carefully everywhere descending. Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of

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