Life & Wisdom Quote by E. E. Cummings

For Cummings, the poet is less a craftsman of products than a creature of process: someone allergic to the idea that poems are “things made” to be graded, shelved, sold, or politely “appreciated.” The jab is aimed at a culture that confuses art with artifact. If you treat a poem like a finished object, you start valuing it the way you value a chair: by durability, usefulness, polish. Cummings flips that logic. The poet’s identity, he argues, lives in the act of making itself: the obsessive, ongoing compulsion to form language into new shapes, even when the results look odd, unfinished, or socially inconvenient.

The capital-M “Making” is doing a lot of work. It elevates creation into a kind of secular vocation, while quietly mocking the industrial, commodified “made” of mass production. Cummings wrote in an early-to-mid 20th-century America that was increasingly mechanized, standardized, and managerially minded; his own style (lowercase “i,” fractured syntax, typographic play) was practically a refusal to let poetry behave like a well-manufactured unit. The subtext is defensive and defiant: the poet has to care less about the respectable noun (the poem) than the unruly verb (to make).

There’s also a moral implication. If “things made matter very little,” then prestige, approval, and permanence are poor guides. What matters is the maker’s attention: the willingness to risk failure, to keep beginning again, to stay loyal to the restless, unprofitable impulse that makes art feel alive rather than merely produced.