"pity this busy monster, manunkind" is a poem by American poet
E. E. Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings, who was also known as E. E. Cummings, e. e. cummings and e e cummings (October 14, 1894 - September 3, 1962), was an American poet, painter, essayist, author and playwright. He wrote approximately 2,900 poems, two autobi ...
, first published in his 1944 book ''
1 × 1''. It is among his best-known poems.
The poem laments the triumph of
progress—defined in terms of science and technology—over nature, describing progress as a "comfortable disease", and declaring "A world of made / is not a world of born". To Cummings, the "busy monster" is a society bent on subverting nature and individual humanity, the loss of which is to be mourned. In closing, the poem's speaker suggests – with an ironic optimism – an escape to "a hell of a good
universe next door".
The poem relies on coined compound words and other wordplay to carry its meaning.
As with many of Cummings's poems, his idiosyncratic
orthography and
grammar provide an immediacy to the printed words.
Like other
modernist poets, Cummings uses unusual
typography to draw focus to the
typewriter as an instrument of the machine age.
Cummings considered the fourteen-line poem a
sonnet
A sonnet is a poetic form that originated in the poetry composed at the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The 13th-century poet and notary Giacomo da Lentini is credited with the sonnet's invention, ...
, by his own loose definition of the term.
References
External links
Text of the poem
Poetry by E. E. Cummings
1944 poems
Philosophical poems
American poems
Modernist poems
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