Known as the poet who didn't use capitals or punctuation, ee cummings loved life and the natural world. But he also loved satirising the pretensions of American politicians, and their uses and misuses of patriotism. That's certainly what he does in his acclaimed 1926 sonnet, '"next to of course god america', which crashes together some of the USA's revered foundational texts to great effect. His use of wit puts him in a very different league to the British war poets.

Peggy Reynolds begins the new series of Adventures in Poetry by exploring the impact and wider associations of cummings' poem. She hears about the circumstances in which Cummings wrote it: serving in the Ambulance Corps during the First World War, he was detained by the French for over 3 months, under suspicion of being a German spy. Professor David Herd of the University of Kent, an expert on Twentieth Century American poetry, argues that after undergoing such imprisonment, it's perhaps no surprise that Cummings had cause to parody the consequences of politicians resorting to tub-thumping patriotic rhetoric at times of crisis. We hear how the poem still speaks to people today, among them American journalist Michael Goldfarb, who was an unembedded reporter in Iraq during the 2003 invasion.

Producer: Mark Smalley. Show less