dumbfoundry

One admirer of his verse he never met was Marilyn Monroe. Playwright Arthur Miller, Monroe's husband in the late 1940s and early 1950s, remembered Monroe's discovery in a bookstore of Cummings's verse:

"It was odd to watch her reading Cummings to herself, moving her lips - what would she make of poetry that was so simple yet so sophisticated? ... There was apprehension in her eyes when she began to read, the look of a student afraid to be caught out, but suddenly she laughed in a thoroughly unaffected way at the small surprising turn in the poem about the lame balloon man - "and it's spring!" The naive wonder in her face that she could so easily respond to a stylised work sent a filament of connection out between us. "And it's spring!" she kept repeating on our way out to the car, laughing again as though she had been handed an unexpected gift. How pleased with her fresh reaction Cummings would have been."

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Monday, April 25, 2005 at 2:49 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.