e.e. cummings

Cummings was the last Massachusetts
Transcendentalist. Margaret Fuller
divorced him, and let out a gusset,
Thoreau became his solitude doulah.

e.e. emerson taught him charity’s
cool effervescence, while e.e. channing
preached right throughout the hilarity
of light. Brook Farm was too busy canning

the plainest things, for cummings and his goings,
who was the railroad crossing between us
and Emily Dickinson. O the Boeings,
and the qlippoth of Schelling, first purposed

on the drawing boards of pencil lead prose !
Sharpened leads that snapped, were what e.e. chose.

Woodford Halse - 23 August 2025

e.e. cummings ( 1894 - 1962) died just before I was a year old, so we were sort of contemporaries briefly. I relate him to the Massachusetts Transcendentalists and to their Brook Farm project of the 1840s, to William Ellery Channing ( 1780 - 1842 ), to Ralph Waldo Emerson ( 1803 - 82 ), to Margaret Fuller ( 1810 - 50 ), to Henry Thoreau ( 1817 - 62 ), and to Emily Dickinson ( 1830 -86 ).

The Qlippoth of Schelling ? Almost a tautology, because qlippoth are kabbalistic shells or husks.

I do not write enough about the great Americans, but I shall try more.