somewhere i have never
travelled,gladly beyond
Edward Estlin Cummings, known to most of his
readers as e. e. cummings, first published “some-
where i have never travelled,gladly beyond” in
1931 in his poetry collection, ViVa. As with all of
his other poems, the author did not give this poem
an actual title. For purposes of identification, edi-
tors simply refer to each of cummings’s poems by
its first line. The poem is very clearly a love poem,
and cummings is renowned for his love poetry.
Critics, however, have singled this poem out as one
of cummings’s best love poems.
The poem details the profound feelings of
love that the speaker has for his beloved, and his
wonder over this mysterious power that the woman
has over him. Over the course of the short poem,
the speaker examines and praises this power, and
notes how his beloved has transformed him. The
speaker in the poem may or may not be cummings
himself, although the intensity of emotion ex-
pressed in the poem leads one to believe that the
poet is describing his own experiences. When
cummings published “somewhere i have never
travelled,gladly beyond,” he had been married to
Anne Barton for two years. While Barton might
have been the source of the poem’s inspiration,
this inspiration would have been short-lived, for
cummings and Barton divorced a year later, in- A current copy of the poem can be found
inE. E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904–1962,
which was published in hardcover by Liveright
in 1994.
e. e. cummings
1931
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