Buffalo Bill's

 My friend came back from Cody, Wyoming and we were talking about Buffalo Bill in the car. Her flight came in near midnight.  I thought of the poem, "Buffalo Bill's / defunct."  I have it memorized, not surprisingly.  I remember explaining the poem to my father when I was a teenager. He wanted to know why Cummings wrote out the word "Mister" rather than using "Mr." I explained this to him.  Now BB died in 1917. Tulips & Chimneys, where the Cummings poem appeared, came out in 1923. In 1917 EEC had published some poems in a volume called 8 Harvard Poets, with a mixture of late Victorian style poems and some modernist ones. He might have written the first draft of the poem in 1917, after Buffalo Bill's death.  I don't know the exact date of the poem, but it feels occasional.  Clearly he had begun the modernist style already, as evidenced by the Harvard poems. He was about 23 years old,  a bit younger than Williams, Pound, H.D, Marianne Moore, Eliot.  (The other modernist American poets.)  

I don't know poems that early that talk about the death of a pop culture celebrity in colloquial, even profane language (Jesus / he was a handsome man).  It's almost like a Frank O'Hara poem. Buffalo Bill was a showman, using his status as Western hero to put on spectacles for the public, "breaking onetwothreefourfive pigeons just like that." The poem is an homage, but with an ironic edge too.  

Cummings never became a better poet than he was with his first book. It is all there from the beginning, the humor and sentimentality, the typography. This poem is among his best.