What A Writer - Analysis

Breaking the sanctity of the word

The poem’s central claim is simple and forceful: e.e. cummings mattered because he treated language as something you could risk, bend, and dirty in order to make it alive again. Bukowski frames that risk as a departure from reverence—he admired cummings for stepping away from the idea that words must be handled with clean gloves. The praise is not academic; it’s visceral. Cummings’s lines don’t merely “innovate,” they cleaved through the muck, suggesting writing as physical labor in a filthy world. What Bukowski values is not refinement but effective cuts—language that can slice.

That’s why the need is described as urgent: How desperately it was needed! The speaker imagines a literary climate where writers languished in antiquated, weary ways. The word languished carries bodily exhaustion, as if old styles aren’t just outdated but suffocating. The admiration here is also relief: cummings didn’t simply offer a new technique; he offered oxygen.

The predictable flood of copying

The poem then pivots from celebration to a resigned realism: Naturally, the imitators followed. That Naturally is doing a lot of work—it treats imitation as an inevitability, almost a law of artistic ecosystems. Bukowski places cummings in a long chain of poets who become templates, listing Keats, Shelley, Swinburne, Byron. The list serves as a reminder that even the most electrifying originality quickly gets reduced to a recognizable style other people can wear. There’s a quiet tension here: cummings’s rebellion against the sanctity of language becomes, in the hands of imitators, its own kind of sanctified mannerism.

Only one: the poem’s hard simplicity

The ending insists on scarcity: Yet, there remained only / One e.e. cummings. / Of course. The tone turns blunt, almost impatient with anyone who still needs persuading. Bukowski’s final images—One sun. / One moon.—make originality feel like a natural fact rather than a prize society hands out. At the same time, those celestial comparisons sharpen the contradiction: if genius is as singular as the sun, why do so many people keep trying to counterfeit its light? The poem answers by implication: because we crave illumination, but most of us settle for resemblance.

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

If cummings is one sun, then the imitators are not merely lesser artists; they are people trying to live off reflected brightness. The unsettling suggestion is that imitation isn’t just laziness—it’s dependency. Bukowski’s praise, then, doubles as a warning: when a breakthrough becomes a fashion, the breakthrough is already being buried.