Phäno-Blog

von e.e. cummings

“A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings 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 oder 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 it´s 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 else 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 our time - and whenenver we do it, we are 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.”

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