“i carry your heart with me(i carry it in” by E. E. Cummings first appeared in the June 1952 issue of Poetry, and was published later in the collection Complete Poems: 1904–1962. It is not only a widely read love poem, but also a piece that exemplifies Cummings’s experimentations with punctuation, capitalization, typography, and other mechanical elements of poetry.
By the time Cummings published this poem, he was an established name in American poetry, and one of the most radical and most widely read avant-gardists of the time. Since the early stages of his career in the 1920s and 30s, Cummings had been exploring the poem as a visual object. He tinkered with capitalization and shifted lines, words, and even letters around the page in ways that were more radical than those of any other predecessor or contemporary. In “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in,” we see Cummings continuing this investigation—we see his signature lowercase “i,” his subversion of conventional indentation and enjambment, and his esoteric use of punctuation marks.
On the other hand, this poem is also one of Cummings’s most celebrated love poems. It explores love not only in the sense of a relationship between two individuals, but also as a way to understand the mysteries of the cosmos in which we live.
