To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else-means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world-unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die. This is the most Fight Club line I've ever heard from a poet and I love it.
A Poet’s Advice To Students (e e cummings) A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words. This may sound easy. It isn’t. A lot of people think or believe or know they feel-but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling-not knowing or believing or thinking. Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else-means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time-and whenever we do it, we’re not poets. If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed. And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world-unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die. Does this sound dismal? It isn’t. It’s the most wonderful life on earth. Or so I feel.
The challenge of all art is, how to pour your feelings out, how to to share them with the world. Some do it on stage, we call them actors but you can't act unless you can also feel. Some do it with paint or clay, with stone or metal. Some use music, pouring emotion through an instrument to create a sound, while others take that sound and pour it through their bodies to create a vision. Poets use words to trap emotion on a page which, in the act of reading, is set free within the reader. The greatest poets can instill a sense of wonder, fear, joy, sorrow or even love, simply by the arrangement of 26 letters and a few punctuation marks. Poetry is the most accessible art form and the least valued, so that few hear the words of the greats until they are used in TV advertisements. And if that doesn't create a feeling, perhaps it's time to check pulses.
God this made me cry. Poetry ^ I’m 33 years old and have realized I’ve shunned my inner artist for decades. I am leaving a relationship, have no job and not much money, and my only dream now is to fully express my feelings through art. Thank you so much for eloquently articulating the artists path. I feel like I’m a kid again. Terrified, excited. Innocent, full of wonder. What will I create? How will i create?
Volvo is currently using parts of this, set to music to sell their S60. Luckily I had closed caption on and was able to track down this video. So much better than the car commercial!
I recognized that distinctive voice and intonation instantly. Not crazy about commercials but I feel less inclined to dislike the ones that point us to poets!
I was also bedeviled by this. I not only thought it was John Housman but thought it may be from the movie the Paper Chase were his student discovers the Professor's student notes and comes across an inspiring quote that changes his opinion of the gruff martinet.
Wonderfully enigmatic and a very pleasant voice. It's a bit as tho E E Cummings is slightly chastising his audience for maybe not feeling enough - if you can't engage your feelings then you'll never write a poem - but that's just my subjective interpretation in passing. I can empathise that feeling is the motivational heart of writing a poem - and for me, of composing a song. I find a bit of a conundrum in his statement that feeling, rather than thinking or knowing, makes someone nobody but themself - as that exterpolation, outside of words or creativity, can be very tedious, but I'm probably being too literal. E E Cummings of course can't be beat as the maestro of being more himself as a total unique-o as a poet and I wish I knew what was going on in his psyche that he'd define as feeling when he wrote a poem!
As great as cummings' poetry is, with the exception of his "Six Nonlectures" delivered at Harvard, I have often seen him as harshly judgmental. In readings and interviews, he frequently sounds like a born-to-the-blue, upper class "Boston Brahmin" relishing his own sense of self-importance. But I suppose it would be foolish to expect such an imaginative and creative mind to be filled with a gentle kindness. T.S. Eliot was a cold anti-Semite; Ezra Pound was a Nazi sympathizer; Frost was an irritable egotist; John Lennon abused his partners (both business and personal). I would love to have been pleasantly surprised to discover in cummings a wise, kind and generous soul, but that was not to be.
@@michaelfebbert737 Hmm ... Maybe you're right to say that I shouldn't be so critical of Nazi supporters and antisemites. Let me think about that a moment ... nah. They deserve the criticism.
I had the same feeling here re: his being judgmental. I really appreciate this extract from his lecture and it certainly fills me with inspiration, but it also made me chuckle because e e cummings strikes me as a poet who thinks a lot! Nearly every poem is as much an exercise on thinking as it is on feeling. He ruminates on the absurdity/multiplicity of words and pours a great amount of thought into how they appear, physically, on the page. It's almost impossible to go against popular style and invent something new if you're not thinking deliberately at some points. I still appreciate the clip and his insistence on feeling, but I remind myself that his is just one (slightly contradictory) perspective on poetry and that a lot of poets fall into a romantic delusion with their own words and thinking.
Also, as for kind, creative minds: I think there are other great poets who showcase this! Mary Oliver, Li Young Lee, Robert Frost are great poets who seem pretty down to earth. Of course, their poetry might not be inline with everyone's tastes exactly but just wanted to share that there are people who made/are making great poetry and appear to be kind human beings.
@@harashe1000 Thank you for your response. I agree that cummings was as much dedicated to intellectual exercise as emotional expression. Perhaps internal self-contradictory positions are inherent in the human mind.
