Spring is like a perhaps hand by E. E. Cummings

III

Spring is like a perhaps hand

(which comes carefully

out of Nowhere)arranging

a window,into which people look(while

people stare

arranging and changing placing

carefully there a strange

thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps

Hand in a window

(carefully to

and fro moving New and

Old things,while

people stare carefully

moving a perhaps

fraction of flower here placing

an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

--

About the author:

E(dward) E(stlin) Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 14, 1894.  He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School.  He received his B.A. in 1915 and his M.A. in 1916, both from Harvard.  His studies there introduced him to the avante garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.[...]

In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression.  Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work towards further evolution.  Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.

During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant.

At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost.  He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.