[love is more thicker than forget]

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1939

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Related Poems

“I Carry Your Heart with Me” by E.E. Cummings (1952)

One of the most familiar and often recited of Cummings’s love poems, this lyric, written late in Cummings’s career, offers a striking comparison of Cummings when he opts to write a more conventional poem, a poem that presents its argument, just as sweet and just as upbeat as “love is more thicker than forget” and similarly about how love fuses two separate hearts, but in a far more traditional structure.

“Fast Anchor’d Eternal, O Love!” by Walt Whitman (1882)

One of Whitman’s least-known love lyrics, one that appeared in his controversial Calamus collection, this short poem captures the essence of Cummings’s argument but without the flash and daring of Cummings’s formal experimentation. Cummings often acknowledged his debt to Whitman’s liberation of American verse from the historical weight of British formal structures. Here, Whitman asserts defiantly and honestly the physical and spiritual dimensions of love.

“In Excelsis” by Amy Lowell (1922)

Along with Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell exerted the most profound impact on Cummings’s development as a young poet. Here, Lowell’s exploration of love reveals her influence on Cummings. Although her lines are fuller, more traditional in the use of figurative language, and more lyrical than Cummings, the poem explores the same argument that Cummings would pursue: the contradictory nature of love that is as much physical as it is spiritual, as easy to understand as it is impossible to grasp.

Further Literary Resources

“The Structure and Poetry of E. E. Cummings” by Michael Pickett (2015)

The article represents the current interest in Cummings as both a poet and a painter, and how his radical reconstruction of the poetic line reflected his interest in Cubism. The article explores how Cummings sought to do to (or, perhaps, for?) the conventional line of poetry what the Cubists, principally Picasso and Braque, sought to do with conventional field of vision: shatter it and allow it to reform itself as part of an investigation into the implications of structure.

“E. E. Cummings and His Critics” by Norman Friedman (1964)

More than a generation after his pioneering work defining Cummings’s place in what he terms the “pantheon of American poetry,” Friedman here reflects on Cummings shortly after the poet’s death. The article provides a helpful overview of the critical stands both for and against Cummings’s revolutionary poetic line and weighs in on the idea that Cummings was a sentimentalist who was little more than his gimmicky lines. Friedman positions Cummings in the tradition that includes Emerson and Whitman.

“The Rebellion of E. E. Cummings” by Adam Kirsch (2005)

First published in The Harvard Magazine, this article traces Cummings’s revolutionary poetic language and radical form to his battles with first his legendary father and later with the Allied command in World War One. The anti-authority theme animates Cummings’s poetry not only in its willful and joyful romanticism and child-like naivete (set against the towering intellectual arguments and dense, often depressing themes of the Modernists) but as well in his careful crafting of lines that dispensed with grammar, punctuation, and syntax.

Listen to Poem

Cummings reads his poem “Love is More Thicker Than Forget”

What better resource than the poet himself? Cummings made this recording, along with more than 50 other of his shorter poems, as part of a 1950s Library of Congress project to create an archive of American poets reading their works. Cummings’s recitation highlights how the lines invite lingering over the luscious soft vowels and lingering consonants. Cummings’s voice relishes inventing unexpected breaks and nearly sings some of the passages. Listen to how his recitation rises to the challenge of words such as “moonly” and “deeper” and “least.” The reading is accompanied by a colorful graphic that matches the pitches and drops of the voice itself that further underscores the recitation power of the poem. It is available on YouTube.