“No one can build a bridge for you to cross the river of life, only you.” wrote the thirty-year-old Nietzsche. “A true and solid way to enter and experience,” Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney advises young people more than a century later in his great first speech, “it involves being truthful … being alone, truthful in your private knowledge.”
Each generation believes that it must fight unprecedented pressures to conform; that it must be fought harder than any previous generation to protect that secret knowledge from which our selfish integrity springs. Some of this belief stems from the general arrogance of a culture blinded by its modern bias, ignorant of analogies to the past. But much of it in the century and a half since Nietzsche, and especially in the years since Heaney, is an accurate reflection of the conditions we have created and continue to reinforce in our current ecosystem – a Pavlovian system of continuous feedback, where simple and common ideas are easily rewarded, and dissenting voices are unimaginably punished.
Few people in the two centuries since Emerson issued his admonition to “trust yourself” have resisted this culturally sanctioned individualism with courage and consistency. EE Cummings (October 14, 1894–September 3, 1962)—an artist who was not afraid to be his unconventional self because, in the words of his witty and talented biographer, “he despised fear, and his life was lived in defiance of all who were governed by it.”
Two days after the poet's fifty-ninth birthday, a small Michigan newspaper published a short, great piece by Cummings under the title “A Poet's Advice to Readers,” dispensing extended wisdom on art, life, and the courage to be yourself. It went on to inspire Buckminster Fuller and was later incorporated into it EE Cummings: A Revised Edition (public library) – that wonderful out-of-print collection which the poet himself described as “a collection of epigrams, forty-nine essays on various subjects, a poem against theory, and several selections from unfinished plays,” and which gave Cummings what it really means to be an artist.
Addressing those aspiring poets – no doubt in that broad Baldwin sense of poets awake to any medium and bold visionaries of human truth – Cummings echoes poet Laura Riding's letters to an eight-year-old girl about being yourself and writes:
A poet is a person who feels, and expresses his feelings through words.
This may sound simple. That's not the case.
Many people think or believe or know that they feel – but that is thinking or believing or knowing; not a feeling. And poetry is a feeling – not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anyone can learn to think or believe or know, but no one can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or believe or know, you are many other people: but when you feel, you are not a person-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-you – in a world that is doing its best, day and night, to make everyone else – means fighting the hardest battle any man can fight; and don't stop fighting.
Cummings should know – just four years earlier, he had fought that very difficult battle himself: When he was awarded the annual fellowship of the Academy of American Poets – the MacArthur of poetry – Cummings had to face severe criticism from the cultural elite who surrounded him with hatred for daring to break with tradition and be nobody-but-himself in his art. In view of that unquestionable creative integrity fueled by a relentless work ethic, he adds:
As for expressing yourself in words, that means more work than anyone who is not a poet can imagine. Why? Because there is nothing as simple as using words like someone else. We all do this almost all the time – and whenever we do, we are not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of struggling with work and feeling, you find that you have written one line of one poem, you will be very lucky.
So my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something simple, like learning to blow up the world – unless you are not only willing, but happy, feeling and working and fighting until you die.
Does that sound disappointing? That's not the case.
It's the best life in the world.
Even if I feel it.
Fill the reinforcement completely EE Cummings: A Revised Edition with a beautifully illustrated celebration of Cummings' creative courage, and revisit Pulitzer-winning poet Robert Penn Warren's what it means to truly find yourself and Janis Joplin with the courage to be what you find.
