Pity this busy monster, mankind

Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e.e. cummings (in the style of some of his poems—see name and capitalization, below), was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. His body of work encompasses approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays and several essays, as well as numerous drawings and paintings. He is remembered as a preeminent voice of 20th century poetry, as well as one of the most popular.

Born into a Unitarian family, Cummings exhibited transcendental leanings his entire life

Many of his poems are sonnets, albeit often with a modern twist, and he occasionally made use of the blues form and acrostics. Cummings' poetry often deals with themes of love and nature, as well as the relationship of the individual to the masses and to the world. His poems are also often rife with satire.

While his poetic forms and themes share an affinity with the romantic tradition, Cummings' work universally shows a particular idiosyncrasy of syntax, or way of arranging individual words into larger phrases and sentences. Many of his most striking poems do not involve any typographical or punctuation innovations at all, but purely syntactic ones.

Pity this busy monster,manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:

your victum(death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness

-electrons deify one razorblade

into a mountainrange;lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen until unwish

returns on its unself.

A world of made

is not a world of born-pity poor flesh

and trees,poor stars and stones,but never this

fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if-listen:there's a hell

of a good universe next door;let's go

“Pity this busy monster,manunkind” is a poem that emphasizes Cummings's belief in nature and his opposition to those things—science, technology, and intellectual arrogance—that he believed attack the purity of nature. In the opening lines, Cummings makes it clear that man is un-kind—as opposed to being “mankind”—when he or she engages in “progress.” In this case, “Progress is a comfortable disease, one which uses electrons and lenses to “deify one razorblade/ into a mountainrange;lenses extend/ unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish/ returns on its unself.” For Cummings, progress contrasts with nature, as he suggests when he writes, “A world of made/ is not a world of born.”

The speaker in this poem, as revealed in the last line, represents progress but suggests the promise of nature; “We doctors,” he or she says, “know a hopeless case.” Hopelessness is the human-made cycle of progress, scientific progress. There is a way out, however, as the speaker points out in the concluding lines of the poem: “listen:there's a hell/ of a good universe next door;let's go.” Unlike this universe, composed of negative Cummings-created words such as “unwish” and “unself,” the next-door universe consists of wishes and selves—that is, real emotions and real individuals. Those realities, for Cummings, are the true realities.

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