POEM, OR BEAUTY HURTS MR. VINAL Lyrics

take it from me kiddo
believe me
my country,'tis of

you,land of the
Cluett
Shirt
Boston Garter and Spearmint
Girl With The Wrigley Eyes
(of you
land of the Arrow Ide
and Earl &
Wilson
Collars
)of you I
sing:land of Abraham Lincoln and Lydia E. Pinkham,
land above all of Just Add Hot Water And Serve
from every B. V. D.

let freedom ring

amen. I do however protest,anent the un
-spontaneous and otherwise scented merde which
greets one(Everywhere Why)as divine poesy per
that and this radically defunct periodical. I would

suggest that certain ideas gestures
rhymes,like Gillette Razor Blades
having been used and reused
to the mystical moment of dullness emphatically are
Not To Be Resharpened. (Case in point
if we are to believe these gently O sweetly
melancholy trillers amid the thrillers
these crepuscular violinists among my and your
skyscrapers—Helen & Cleopatra were Just Too Lovely,
The Snail's On The Thorn enter Morn and God's
In His andsoforth

do you get me?)according
to such supposedly indigenous
throstles Art is O World O Life
a formula:example, Turn Your Shirttails Into
Drawers and If It Isn't An Eastman It Isn't A
Kodak
therefore my friends let
us now sing each and all fortissimo A-
mer
I

ca, I
love,
You. And there're a
hun-dred-mil-lion-oth-ers
,like
all of you successfully if
delicately gelded (or spaded)
gentlemen(and ladies)—pretty

littleliverpil-
heated-Nujolneeding-There's-A-Reason
americans(who tensetendoned and with
upward vacant eyes,painfully
perpetually crouched,quivering,upon the
sternly allotted sandpile
—how silently
emit a tiny violetflavoured nuisance: Odor?
ono.

comes out like a ribbon lies flat on the brush

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About

Genius Annotation

In this poem Cummings mocks America’s consumerist culture, as well as the bland, superficial poetry he believed it encouraged. The title refers to “Earth Lover,” by Harold Vinal, which describes how nature is so beautiful that it brings the poet to tears.

According to critic Lewis H. Miller, Jr.:

“Cummings was quick to take an anti-acquisitive stance by insisting in ‘Poem, or Beauty Hurts Mr Vinal’ that America’s bad, anaemic poetry had much in common with the cloying appeals of America’s advertising. Both sprang from and contributed to a sterile, mechanized world which, as Cummings saw it, feeds on predictable, stock attitudes and responses. As an indictment of a consumer-oriented society and of the verbal and visual cliches which accompanied and promoted that society, ‘Poem, or Beauty Hurts Mr Vinal’ provides a unique antidote to the optimism of its time and to the consumer fetishism which continues to shape our individual and collective desires and goals….

“…Cummings' underlying comparison of bad poetry with the tired commercial phrases of his time is mischievously introduced by his selection of Mr Harold Vinal as a representative contemporary poet. Vinal, a New Englander like Cummings, had moved from his bucolic family compound in Maine to take up residency in New York City where he quickly became secretary of the Poetry Society of America and where he published his own poetry journal, Voices, a short-lived periodical to which Cummings applies the paradoxical, uncomplimentary modifiers, ‘radically defunct.’”

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