E. E. Cummings' headstone is written in ALLCAPS!

I encountered this image today at Libraryland.  I can only assume it represents the headstone on the poet's grave.  There is a certain disconnect for me to see this written in all capital letters, because I was so enamored of Cummings' poetry as a collegiate English major, that for many years thereafter I wrote all of my correspondence using only lower case letters.

I remember sitting in a coffee house in Cambridge in the late 1960s, explaining the construction of this poem -

l(a

le
af

fa
ll
s)

one
l
iness

to a student from Rhode Island School of Design.  I remember having this poem thumbtacked to a wall above my dormitory desk:

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

And this one I had completely memorized (though I had to look it up for the blogpost today):

it may not always be so; and i say
that if your lips, which i have loved, should touch
another's, and your dear strong fingers clutch
his heart, as mine in time not far away;
if on another's face your sweet hair lay
in such a silence as i know, or such
great writhing words as, uttering overmuch,
stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

if this should be, i say if this should be -
you of my heart, send me a little word;
that i may go unto him, and take his hands,
saying, Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face, and hear one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands.

E. E. Cummings was a fascinating poet for a liberal arts student of the 1960s to encounter.