Emotion vs. Intellect in Ode to the Nightingale and Since Feeling Comes First We must seek guidance from the emotions... not the mind. This Romantic philosophy is represented in the works of "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats and "Since Feeling is First" by E.E. Cummings. Each poet addresses the complex relationship between following one's emotions and passions as opposed to one's thoughts. While Cummings advocates living life fully to escape the confines of thought, Keats suggests death as the only possible means of overcoming this human consciousness. Cummings's "Since Feeling is First" compares the inadequacy of mental analysis with the beauty of emotional spontaneity "discuss[ing] feeling and the abandonment of inhibition to greater forces" (Heyen 133). For the poet, acute perception comes from feeling, not from thought, which allows us to "see" only indirectly. In other words, the beauty of the experience is, in itself, evidence of the power of beauty. Cummings thus wants the reader to “render the image of what we see, forgetting all that existed before us” (Cohen 42). Such a statement is not a condemnation of rationality, but rather an affirmation of the mystery of things, which is more compatible with feeling than with knowledge, presupposing the latter as a loveless form of measurement. For Cummings the mind is a villain only when it is dissociated from feeling. However, with its first line, it is very important to convince the reader of its premise that “feeling comes first.” Because Cummings is writing a poem of seduction. He is telling the woman in the poem, in a carpe diem way reminiscent of seventeenth-century style, to make good use of time, to act on feelings, to abandon her "syntax" in... the middle of the paper. .....raff, Gerald. Poetic declaration and critical dogma. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1980. Heyen, William. "In consideration of Cummings." Southern Humanities Review Spring. 1983: 131-42. Jarrell, Randall. "The craft of poetry". Fall of the partisan revision. 1950:724-31.Knight, G. Wilson. Studies on the starry dome in the poetry of vision. New York: Barnes and Noble Inc., 1960.Maurer, Robert E. “Latter-day Notes on the Language of E. E. Cummings.” E. E. Cummings: A Collection of Critical Essays. 1972: 79-99.Vivante, Leone. English poetry and its contribution to the knowledge of a creative principle. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Wesolek, George. “E.E. Cummings: A Reconsideration.” Renaissance autumn. 1965: 3-8.Williams, Meg Harris. Inspiration in Milton and Keats. Totowa: Barnes and Noble Books, 1982.