Poem-a-Day: "i shall imagine life"

A poem selected by Rachel Tiede, English 348:

"i shall imagine life" by e.e. cummings.

Read, find it in the library, or watch a video interpretation:


Published in 1958 in 95 Poems, this poem was part of the last poetry collection e. e. cummings published before his death in 1962. The poem does not actually have a title, but just a number. However, it is often referred to by the first line. Cummings was a popular poet throughout the 20th century. He was very well known for his unique style, playing with punctuation, sentence structure, and word structure, and won several awards for his writing, including Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, and the Bollingen Prize in Poetry. Some people did not enjoy him because they felt his poems were too confusing.

The poem “i shall imagine life (72)” is one of e. e. cummings' simpler, less structurally complex, and relatively lesser well known poems. cummings was popular in the 20th century for his unique syntactic style. This particular poem is short, but really speaks to what mankind perceives as beauty, and whether or not that beauty is legitimate or even if it matters.
~ Rachel Tiede, UW-Eau Claire student, English 348

April is National Poetry Month! UW-Eau Claire students in English 348 (Topics in American Literature) are celebrating National Poetry Month with the McIntyre Library.

Featured poems will be listed here in the order they appear on the blog.

UW-Eau Claire's celebration of National Poetry Month is on Facebook and Twitter!

Questions or comments? Robin Miller will try to help.