Cupid & Cummings.

Elliot, Frost, Tennyson - even Whitman, the best of the best cannot come close or even compete with the adoration my heart holds for E.E. Cummings.
Granted, a part of his poetry is somewhat provocative, and would have pushed the envelope 100 years ago...but I believe that Cummings and I are both two helpless and hopeless romantics at heart. If we were to run into each other on the street today, we would become the dearest of friends and I imagine we would spend hours and days in bookstores and coffee shops, talking about love and being in love and hating love and so on and so forth.

The most beloved E.E. Cummings poem there is, (at least personally speaking), is "somewhere i have never traveled" - as I read this poem years ago, it was as if Cupid took out that dreaded arrow and shot right at my heart.

I am in love with E.E. Cummings.

(and if you want to be too, read on)

somewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

The beauty of this poem is in its simplicity - which, I believe, some of the most beautiful things are: simple.

This poem can EVEN go without capitalization and punctuation ...
Honestly people, who can get away with that?

So go on ahead and read Thoreau's "Epitaph On The World", "Life in A Love" by Browning, or anything by Oscar Wilde (and I readily admit that I do love them all) but they just can't beat this.

(whether it's because of Cupid or Cummings, I don't know, I'm just clearly biased).