kumrads die because they're told

kumrads die because they're told)
kumrads die before they're old
(kumrads aren't afraid to die
kumrads don't
and kumrads won't
believe in life) and death knows why

(all good kumrads you can tell
by their altruistic smell
moscow pipes good kumrads dance)
kumrads enjoy
s.freud knows whoy
the hope that you may mess your pance

every kumrad is a bit
of quite unmitigated hate
(travelling in a futile groove
god knows why)
and so do i
(because they are afraid to love

e.e. cummings, 1935

Cummings grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, among society socialists; his parents were big movers in the Unitarian church and friends with people like William James. In World War I he volunteered for the ambulance corps but was eventually arrested for writing anti-war letters home. He had little interest in politics until a friend talked him into visiting the Soviet Union in 1931. The friend presumably hoped that Cummings would be converted to communism, but the opposite: he came home a violent anti-communist and began writing poems like this. I was immediately struck by this because so many westerners who went to the Soviet Union in that era came home impressed and enthusiastic; but the horror was there for anyone with eyes to see, even before the purges and the famine.

No, I don't really understand his insistence on peculiar spellings and omitted punctuation. Maybe it was that his poems were actually very traditional (some of them sonnets, even) so he had to do something to make his work seem interesting and avant garde. Most of Cummings' poems are untitled, so they are known either by their first line or by their number in his collected works. This is 40.