"pity this busy monster, manunkind" is a poem by American poet

E. E. Cummings Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), commonly known as e e cummings or E. E. Cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. During World War I, he worked as an ambulance driver and was ...

, first published in his 1944 book '' 1 × 1''. It is among his best-known poems. The poem laments the triumph of

progress Progress is movement towards a perceived refined, improved, or otherwise desired state. It is central to the philosophy of progressivism, which interprets progress as the set of advancements in technology, science, and social organization effic ...

—defined in terms of science and technology—over nature, describing progress as a "comfortable disease", and declaring "A world of made / is not a world of born". To Cummings, the "busy monster" is a society bent on subverting nature and individual humanity, the loss of which is to be mourned. In closing, the poem's speaker suggests – with an ironic optimism – an escape to "a hell of a good universe next door". The poem relies on coined compound words and other wordplay to carry its meaning. As with many of Cummings's poems, his idiosyncratic

orthography An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis. Most national ...

and

grammar In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rul ...

provide an immediacy to the printed words. Like other

modernist Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

poets, Cummings uses unusual

typography Typography is the art and technique of Typesetting, arranging type to make written language legibility, legible, readability, readable and beauty, appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, Point (typogra ...

to draw focus to the

typewriter A typewriter is a Machine, mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of Button (control), keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an i ...

as an instrument of the machine age. Cummings considered the fourteen-line poem a

sonnet A sonnet is a fixed poetic form with a structure traditionally consisting of fourteen lines adhering to a set Rhyme scheme, rhyming scheme. The term derives from the Italian word ''sonetto'' (, from the Latin word ''sonus'', ). Originating in ...

, by his own loose definition of the term.

References

External links

Text of the poem
Poetry by E. E. Cummings 1944 poems Philosophical poems American poems Modernist poems {{poem-stub