I Am VerticalBut I would rather be horizontal. I am not a tree with my root in the soil Sucking up minerals and motherly love So that each March I may gleam into leaf, Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted, Unknowing I must soon unpetal. Compared with me, a tree is immortal And a flower-head not tall, but more startling, And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring. Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars, The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors. I walk among them, but none of them are noticing. Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping I must most perfectly resemble them-- Thoughts gone dim. It is more natural to me, lying down. Then the sky and I are in open conversation, And I shall be useful when I lie down finally: The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me." I Am Vertical", 28 March 1961 . Sylvia Plath
About This Quote

In the poem "I Am Vertical" by E. E. Cummings, he expresses that he is not a tree that relies on the ground to live, rather than the sky. A tree is rooted in the ground and uses it to grow and thrive, but E.E.

Cummings prefers to be in the air and look down on things. The poem is written with a sense of humor and ends with him saying "And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring." Early life and education: Cummings was born in Mount Vernon, Westchester County, New York, USA, on March 18th 1894. He was born into a family of six children, three boys and three girls.

One of his sisters died in infancy and another sister died during World War I (1914-18). His parents were both from affluent families who had amassed great wealth through business ventures. His father was a bank president while his mother was an accomplished artist.

She had been the model for many of her husband’s portraits. However she had suffered from a nervous breakdown due to a fateful relationship with a married man. She later married E.E.

Cummings’ father in what ended up being a marriage for convenience only due to her fragile state of mind at the time of their initial meeting. In spite of this, she was very supportive of her children although she rarely showed affection towards them which led them to develop their own individual personalities as an outgrowth of this lack of support by their mother. Cummings himself described his siblings as having been “two months shy” of school age when he learned to read at age 4 for which he would later recall being “wonderfully proud” but would later lose this pride when recalling how easily he could recite entire pages from memory without even opening his eyes afterwards despite spending less than 10 minutes reading each page aloud prior to that day which would end up being a result of him only reading complete books only once every few years throughout most of his childhood.

According to his sister Madeline Elizabeth Cummings, Cummings did not speak until he was nearly four years old because “he couldn’t pronounce words” much like how he could not pronounce words when writing poetry at age 35 years later much later having become one of our most well known poets whose original name was Edgar Eugene Edson though he went by this name until 1913 though after seeing the movie 'Edith Wharton' (1917) starring And

Source: The Collected Poems

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