There's a comprehensive e. e. cummings biography.

Cummings was the poet that got me interested in poetry. I owned a volume of his complete works as a high school student, and it was one of the few books that I brought with me to college.

Here's the cummings poem I have always most unreasonably loved:

somewhere i have never travelled, 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 will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
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 your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Beautiful poem -- thank you.

Not to make it too easy, but is a starting point here the sublime and the beautiful? Roses are beautiful, faces can be beautiful. Poets admire them.

But the sublime state of being in love means one surrenders oneself to a radical openness and vulnerability. If in "poetry" the beautiful object is fragile, in cummings's poem, it is the speaker himself who is actually subject to "intense fragility."

It is the speaker himself who opens himself to the possibility (the danger) of being closed, covered, and rained on. Being in love requires openness, but being in love with a concept of the boundaries of time and space means accepting that that openness cannot exist without some future closure.

Just thought I'd take a stab at it. Thanks again for sharing it.

I'd be interested in the academian's take on my pet peeve in this post. Should it not be "... the poet who got me ..."

Tess, you beat me to it.

I've loved cummings since my high school English teacher introduced me to one of his poems ("o by the by, has anyone seen...). I, too, took his complete works with me to college.

That poem has always floored me. An intensely personal anecdote: In college I read it to an attractive fellow English major and it was the start of a short romance. I will always give credit to Cummings for that lovely season in my life, thus I will always cherish this poem.