If we can manage to set aside the distinctive typography — the missing capitals, the odd parentheses, the deliberate indentations — a curious vision of E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) swims into view. Oh, he’s still a modernist, still in the new waves of poetry that the modernists brought. But he was also as sentimental a poet as serious poetry has known.

Or at least as sentimental as a poet can be while striving to abolish sentimentality. He wrote some deliberately sarcastic poetry — “next to of course god america i,” of course, but even one of his best-known poems, “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls,” has a deadly sarcastic edge: “one still finds / delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles? / perhaps.”

To dig into his collected poems, however, is often to see a man drawn to sentimental topics and desperately seeking a way to desentimentalize them. He want to strip them of their over-worn phrasings and easy thoughts — while not stripping them of whatever it was that gave rise to their place as sentimental topics. Cummings is Longfellow crossed with H.D. 

His repeated reference to the moon, for example, has been insufficiently appreciated as an element in this struggle. “little child,” he writes in one poem, “sleep . . . / big moon / (enter / us).” Or think of the poem “love is more thicker than forget”: “love is,” he writes, “most mad and moonly / and less it shall unbe / than all the sea.” Or “the moon(with white wig and polished buttons)would take you away.” Or “the moon over death over edgar the moon.” Or “a moon is / as round as)Death.”

Or take “the moon looked into my window,” today’s Poem of the Day in The New York Sun, in honor of Cummings’s October 14 birthday. He collected it in his 1926 volume, “is 5,” the second of poems in that book with the word “moon” in the title. In the poem, the moonlight slips through the window like a lover, her small hands fingering his tie and shirt, “playing with a button.”

Then the moonlight slips back out the window as the arc across the sky moves the moon beyond the window: “she did not fall / she went creeping along the air / over houses / roofs.” The thought is sentimental, as so often with E.E. Cummings’ poetry. And as often in his inventive forms, the modernistic poem puts that thought stripped of as much sentiment as the poet can manage.

the moon looked into my window
by E.E. Cummings

the moon looked into my window
it touched me with its small hands
and with curling infantile
fingers it understood my eyes cheeks mouth
its hands(slipping)felt of my necktie wandered
against my shirt and into my body the
sharp things fingered tinily my heart life

the little hands withdrew, jerkily, themselves
quietly they began playing with a button
the moon smiled she
let go my vest and crept
through the window
she did not fall
she went creeping along the air
                               over houses
                                          roofs

And out of the east toward
her a fragile light bent gatheringly

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.