This week we will be focusing on the sonnets of ee cummings. Cummings (1894-1962) was an American poet, playwright, and author, is often regarded as one of the most important American poets of the 20nth century.

Although he is associated with modernist free-form poetry, especially with his idiosyncratic syntax and lower case spellings, a number of the 2900 poems that he wrote over the course of his lifetime were in the sonnet form.

He often played with the form of the sonnet, stretching the rhyme scheme, or the structure, but not getting away from it entirely

If you’d like to see other poems on the Daily Sonnet by ee cummings, visit the ee cummings author page here.

For that I have forgot the world these days by ee cummings

For that I have forgot the world these days,
To enter at the smokeless lodge, and take
Life naked at primeval hands, to make
Clean comrades of large things in mighty ways;

That I have wrestled with the huge dismays
Which make the high head bow,
the strong heart quake,
That I have battled for a golden stake,

Richer by every terror and amaze,–
For that I have forgot the world her cries
In the vast painted silences, that men
Have meant me nothing, under the great skies,
Over the high hills of God’s caress,–

Ye pitying elements!–be with me when
I kiss the little feet of foolishness.