A poet (Robert Frost?) said that poetry "begins in delight and ends in wisdom."  Or, if a poet didn't say that, he should have, because delight is poetry's proper effect, and wisdom its proper fruit.

A poet who wishes to produce both delight and wisdom must have three (at least) attributes:  he must have wit (for delight), perception (for wisdom), and a mastery of his craft.  The three are closely related, but we can treat them separately.  E.E. Cummings scores on all three counts.

Perhaps Cummings' technique would be the best place to start, since it is extremely unusual, and perhaps unique.  His poems are more recognizable than those of almost any other poet.  Perhaps what does the most to make them identifiable is his use of the rules of grammar:  by breaking them (or, rather, extending them), he gains new possibilities of meaning.

Capitalization, for instance, follows simple rules.  First words in sentences (and other significant words, like "I" and proper nouns) are capitalized.  But behind the rule there is a more general and more important "rule":  we capitalize those words we think are important.  When Cummings begins a poem "if i love You," capitalizing the "you," which normally would not be capitalized, and not capitalizing the "I," which normally would be, he can, by extending the underlying rule to break the superficial rule, make the line carry much more meaning than if he had said "if I love you."  Instead of being a simple statement of a possibility, the line says something about what that love would be.

Cummings also uses the spaces between words to add meaning to his poems. This, too, follows a very specific rule--one space between words, one after commas and two after periods.  In the poem about Buffalo Bill, Cummings mentions the cowboy's fantastic skill with a pistol, his amazing speed.  To get the idea of his quickness across, the poet does not put "one space between words," and says that Buffalo Bill could "break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat."  Again, extending a rule adds meaning to the poem.

The English language has a minimal system of gender and word inflection, so word order has come to be far more important as a carrier of meaning.  Cummings extends this, too:  he twists statements out of their natural order to emphasize certain words,  In the poem about Olaf, Cummings says "firstclassprivates" instead of "privates, first class."  Through this simple switch he adds a whole new (and sarcastic) meaning to the term.  In the poem beginning "i thank You God for most this amazing day," the words "this" and "most" are switched, and the accent on the word "most" is much stronger.  It is also closer to "thank You," so that it carries two meanings:  "i thank You most for this," and "i thank You for this most amazing."  Later in the poem Cummings mentions a "blue true dream" and the switch from "true-blue" accents the "blue" and saves the line from triteness.

Cummings also takes words that are obviously a certain part of speech, and forces them to act outside the limits of that part of speech.  "Who" and "which," for instance, are pronouns; but in one poem Cummings mentions "a which that walks like a who."  Much more vividly and in far fewer words than he could have in any other way, he gets the idea of bestiality across.  Probably the best known example of this device is the poem beginning "Anyone lived in a pretty how town."  The word "anyone" used as a subject (of the sentence and of the poem) makes it more universal, while at the same time making the subject a nonentity.  In another poem he says that "everybody never breathed quite so many kinds of yes."  "Everybody never" is much stronger than "nobody ever," and "yes" comes to symbolize an affirmation of life.

Almost as important as Cummings' technique in making his poems memorable is his wit.  Wit in poetry is different from wit in conversation.  It involves cleverness, but it is more than cleverness.  It is more a saying-it-better-than-it's-ever been-said-before; the reader feels as if he has just remembered something he didn't know he knew, and that for that moment the universe has been rolled into a ball.  It can be breathtaking; it is the delight in poetry.  Cummings is perhaps the wittiest of the modern poets.  In one poem he describes a land where it's always spring "and everyone's in love and flowers pick themselves."  Eternal spring and everyone-in-love are very normal images, but "flowers pick themselves" is striking and beautiful.  In a poem about spring the world is "mud-luscious" and "puddle-wonderful,"  The "busy monster, manunkind" is described this way in another poem:

Without a heart the animal
is very very kind
so kind it wouldn't like a soul
and couldn't use a mind

The play on words "manunkind" is a perfect description of the animal of the quatrain--he is not really evil but, rather, capable of neither evil nor good.

Many of Cummings' poems are love poems (unusual for a modern poet), and they contain some of his most lyrical passages, this one among them:

sweet spring is your
time is my time is our
time far springtime is lovetime
and viva sweet love

Probably, though, the most important of the three attributes is not wit or virtuosity, but perception--perception which, when dressed up with wit and put in poetic form can lead the reader to wisdom.  Poetry can do this well because of its conciseness, because every word carries far more weight than it would in prose.  Cummings does this, as we said before, by playing with the language, but he also does it in more traditional ways.

Poetic images begin as thought patterns that are present in the subconscious minds of both the poet and the reader.  The poet can bring these thought patterns to the conscious minds of his readers by using a phrase or sometimes just a word. This gives a poem its appearance of "saying a lot in a few words."  To be effective an image must be precise.  What the poet means when he says that "all the world's a stage" must correspond as exactly as possible to what the reader thinks when he sees "world" and "stage" mentioned together.  Connotations of words are, of course, rooted completely in experience; and since the poet's experience cannot have been exactly the same as that of any of his readers, the connotations he wishes to accompany an image will very rarely be duplicated by those he draws forth.  But unless there is a fairly close correspondence, the poet (and his poem) has failed.  "What this poem means to me" is a dangerous title for a explication, and there is a more correct side to most arguments about the meaning of a line.

"Classical" poets (poets up into the nineteenth century) had an advantage over modern poets.  They could be sure that almost all of their readers had had the same kind of education, especially in literature and mythology.  They could be sure, for instance, that a reference to the Odyssey would not go unnoticed. But when modern society attempted universal education, the common education of those who were literate disappeared, and many allusions lost their usefulness.

Deprived of a vast body of literature for easy allusions, modern poets could turn in two directions, one fairly new.  T.S. Eliot is probably the best example of this approach.  He makes obscure allusions anyway, apparently without worrying about whether or not his readers will understand them.  He usually accompanies his poems with a set of notes (and where he does not, his editors dig for him) but the only way to really  understand Eliot's poetry is to read the works he alludes to first.  Eliot creates his own background, and demands a great deal from his readers.

The other approach is not new; it has been the basis of most poetic images since the first poet clapped his hands in rhythm.  The poet must find those areas of experience which are most nearly universal, and evoke the memory of them in the most effective (and concise and precise) way he can devise.  This demands a great deal of  sensitivity (perception) from a poet, and the ones (like Shakespeare and Homer) who have succeeded are the greatest poets that ever were.

Cummings, far the most part, has taken the second tack.  Many of his poems are based on contemporary experience nearly universal within the American society right now.  But right now won't last very long, and those poems probably won't last much longer.  But in most of his poems he tries to play the puppeteer pulling universal heartstrings.

One of his most perceptive poems is the one beginning "Jehovah buried, Satan dead," in which he makes much the same point as Dostoevsky does in "The Grand Inquisitor" and C.S. Lewis does in "Screwtape Proposes a Toast."  A people who no longer believe in God, he says, must also cease to believe in Satan; not believing in supernatural good, they will not long believe in evil, and when they do not they will have to rework the criteria for the rightness or wrongness of their actions.  Affluence ("Much") and progress ("Quick") replace God as the ultimate good.  Acts once considered evil no longer are, and goodness is redefined as submission, meekness, conformity.  Imagination goes the way of immortality--poets are considered mad.  People have always avoided pain, but now they avoid pleasure, too.  Man is sick, not really worthy to be called man--at least not in the sense that "King Christ" could "call himself a man."

That is roughly "what the poem means to me," but it says far more than I have yet said, in fewer words than I have already used.  It shows Cummings' technique, his wit, and his wisdom.  He is perhaps the most delight-full of the modern poets.