A Salesman Is An It That Stinks Excuse - Analysis

Dehumanizing the salesman into a smell

The poem’s central claim is blunt and corrosive: a salesman is not a person but an it, and that it stinks. Cummings doesn’t merely insult a profession; he treats selling as a process that strips the human down to an object with an odor. The opening—a salesman is an it that stinks—reads like a definition, the way a dictionary pins a word down. But the definition is moral, almost biological: selling is figured as a kind of rot you can smell. By choosing it rather than he or they, the poem makes the salesman’s identity impersonal and disposable, as if the role replaces the self.

Excuse Me as a shove, not politeness

The word Excuse right after stinks, followed by the broken, jostling Me, turns courtesy into aggression. Instead of a polite interruption, Excuse / Me sounds like someone forcing space in a crowd, then launching a rant. The speaker’s voice is contemptuous and impatient, piling up near-nonsense titles and names—president, jennelman, misder finger—to suggest that status language is itself part of the con. If you can be president of some slippery you were say, you can also be any invented authority; the poem treats public respectability as another sales pitch.

Nothing matters—except the stink

A key tension in the poem is that it insists everything is isn’t / important and absolutely doesn’t / matter, yet it cannot stop naming and sorting. The speaker declares indifference to scale—millions of other punks versus a handful—and even to place, whether in lonjewray or shrouds. That invented lonjewray can be heard as lingerie, or luxury, or “long juree”—the exact meaning doesn’t settle, which helps the point: sales ooze into every zone, from intimate fabric to funeral cloth. The refrain-like return—it stinks—is what survives all the supposed differences. The poem’s logic is: you can change the costume, the crowd size, the setting, even the occasion of life or death, but the odor remains.

To please: the poisonous innocence

The poem pivots when it says a salesman is an it that stinks to please. That phrase introduces a sickening kind of innocence: the salesman’s purpose is framed as pleasing, the nice social motive that usually excuses manipulation. Then the speaker knocks the excuse down: whether to please itself or someone else / makes no more difference. The contradiction sharpens here: pleasure is supposed to be relational, a bond between people, but the salesman has already been reduced to it, so please becomes just a mechanism—self-serving or other-serving, it’s the same stink in a different bottle.

Everything is merchandise, even democracy

The long list of goods is where the poem shows its teeth. It’s not just that the salesman sells snakeoil and vac / uumcleaners; the list jumps wildly to include hate, education, terror, and even democ / ra(caveat emptor)cy. That parenthetical caveat emptor—buyer beware—treats democracy like a suspicious product with fine print. The poem’s anger is that the sales mentality doesn’t stop at objects; it colonizes moral and civic life, turning rights, fear, and ideals into items on a pitchman’s tray. Even strawberries are caught in the same breath as terror, as if innocence and harm are equally usable so long as they move units.

A chilling ending: the practiced familiarity of harm

The closing phrase—Think We’ve Met—sounds like a social opener, the way a stranger tries to disarm you with false familiarity. But it runs straight into subhuman rights Before, which flips the small talk into menace. The poem ends by implying that this sales “pleasing” is how people get coaxed into accepting the unacceptable: the friendly pitch is a doorway to stripping others of rights. The tone, already scathing, becomes colder here, as if the speaker’s real target has been revealed: not merely annoying persuasion, but persuasion as a tool that makes brutality seem normal.

The hardest question the poem leaves us

If education and democracy can be sold alongside hate and terror, what is left that cannot be packaged as to please? The poem forces an ugly possibility: that the stink is not in any particular product, but in the habit of treating everything—people included—as something to be moved, closed, and cleared.