OF THIS BOOK there is also a special limited edition consisting of seventy-seven copies on special paper specially bound numbered and autographed of which seventy copies are for sale IS FIVE FIVE BOOKS by E. E. Cummings 1. The Enormous Room 2. Tulips and Chimneys 3. & 4. Xli Poems 5. Is Five ¶ by E. E. Cummings is [Illustration: 5] NEW YORK BONI & LIVERIGHT 1926 COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY BONI & LIVERIGHT ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED BY SAMUEL AIWAZ JACOBS AT THE POLYTYPE PRESS NEW YORK FOREWORD On the assumption that my technique is either complicated or original or both, the publishers have politely requested me to write an introduction to this book. At least my theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz. “Would you hit a woman with a child?--No, I’d hit her with a brick.” Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement. If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little--somebody who is obsessed by Making. Like all obsessions, the Making obsession has disadvantages; for instance, my only interest in making money would be to make it. Fortunately, however, I should prefer to make almost anything else, including locomotives and roses. It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my “poems” are competing. They are also competing with each other, with elephants, and with El Greco. Ineluctable preoccupation with The Verb gives a poet one priceless advantage: whereas nonmakers must content themselves with the merely undeniable fact that two times two is four, he rejoices in a purely irresistible truth (to be found, in abbreviated costume, upon the title page of the present volume.) E. E. Cummings. A LIST OF WHERE THESE POEMS have been published * England France Italy Austria and America * TITLE IS V FOREWORD vii ONE I-XL 1-55 TWO I-XI 57-72 THREE I-X 73-86 FOUR I-XVIII 87-107 FIVE I-V 109-115 ONE I FIVE AMERICANS I. LIZ with breathing as (faithfully) her lownecked dress a little topples and slightly expands one square foot mired in silk wrinkling loth stocking begins queerly to do a few gestures to death, the silent shoulders are both slowly with pinkish ponderous arms bedecked whose white thick wrists deliver promptly to a deep lap enormous mindless hands. and no one knows what (i am sure of this) her blunt unslender, what her big unkeen “Business is rotten” the face yawning said