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E.E. Cummings

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E.E. Cummings
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  • Born: 14 October 1894
  • Birthplace: Cambridge, Massachusetts
  • Died: 3 September 1962 (stroke)
  • Best Known As: The experimental poet who spelled his name without capitals

Name at birth: Edward Estlin Cummings

Whimsical and experimental, E.E. Cummings was a popular American poet of the early 20th century. Cummings' first published work was his 1922 novel The Enormous Room, based on his time in a French prison camp during World War I. He became more widely known as an avant garde poet, thanks to his unconventional use of typography, syntax and sometimes scandalous (at the time) choices of words and topics. He had a fondness for scattering words unevenly across a page, and liked to spell his own name as e.e. cummings, leading generations of college students to remember him as the guy who didn't capitalize his own name. He is often mentioned in the same breath with Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot and other groundbreaking literary figures of the era between the world wars. His collections of poetry include Tulips and Chimneys (1923), No Thanks (1935) and Ninety-Five Poems (1958).

Cummings attended Harvard, receiving a B.A. in 1915 and a M.A. in 1916 before his World War I service... His 1925 poem i like my body when it is with your includes the famous opening lines:

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.

 
 
Artist:

e.e. cummings

  • Born October 14, 1894 in Cambridge, MA
  • Died September 03, 1962 in Conway, NH
  • Country: USA

Biography

Edward Estlin Cummings (who famously signed his poetry e.e. cummings) was a paradoxical poet who combined playfulness with seriousness; close attention to rhythm and rhyme with wild experimentation in grammar, spelling, and punctuation; and complicated ideas and images with simple words. Despite the experimental quality of his work, he was tremendously popular during his lifetime, a tribute rarely given to poets. In fact, critics tended to trivialize his work, characterizing it as naïve and sentimental. He studied at Harvard University. Morally opposed to combat, he served in World War I as an ambulance volunteer, in France, where he was briefly imprisoned for his anti-war statements. After the war, he settled in Paris, then considered the literary capital of the world and artistic home to such diverse figures as Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. Cummings later returned to the United States, continuing, nevertheless, to travel throughout his life. His poetry's vividness and quirkiness have attracted many composers, who usually provide his poems with delicate, subtle settings to showcase their typically whimsical tones. These composers include Aaron Copland, Randall Shin, Morton Feldman, Peter Dickinson, Celius Dougherty, Wim de Ruiter, Ellen Mandel, Daniel Asia, Dan Welcher, Stanworth Beckler, Gwyneth Walker, and Pat Donaher. ~ Ann Feeney, All Music Guide

 
Writer:

e e cummings

  • Born: Oct 14, 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts
  • Died: Sep 03, 1962 in North Conway, New Hampshire
  • Occupation: Writer
  • Active: '20s
  • Major Genres: Avant-garde / Experimental
  • Career Highlights: The Fall of the House of Usher
  • First Major Screen Credit: The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

Biography

One of the United States's best known poets of the 20th century, e.e. cummings wrote the original treatment from which the 1928 avant-garde version of The Fall of the House of Usher was filmed. ~ All Movie Guide

 
Biography: Edward Estlin Cummings

The American poet Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962) presented romantic attitudes in technically experimental verse. His poems are not only ideas butcrafted physical objects which, in their nonlogical structure, grant fresh perspectives into reality.

In his publications E. E. Cummings always gave his name in lowercase letters without punctuation (e e cummings); this was part of his concern for the typography, syntax, and visual form of his poetry. He worked in the Emersonian tradition of romantic transcendentalism, which encouraged experimentation, and may have been influenced also by Walt Whitman, the poet that Ralph Waldo Emerson had personally encouraged.

Born in Cambridge, Mass., on Oct. 14, 1894, of a prominent academic and ministerial family, E. E. Cummings grew up in the company of such family friends as the philosophers William James and Josiah Royce. Had he lived in Emerson's time, he too might have been described as a "Boston Brahmin." His father, Edward Cummings, after teaching at Harvard, became the nationally known Congregational minister of the Old South Church in Boston, preaching a Christian-transcendentalist theology. Eventually Cummings came to espouse a positive position similar to that of his father, but not before an early period of rebellion against the stuffiness of Cambridge ladies, the repressiveness of conventional moralism, and the hypocrisy of the churches.

After receiving his bachelor of arts degree (1915) and master's degree (1916) from Harvard, Cummings became an ambulance driver in France just before America entered World War I. He was imprisoned for 3 months on suspicion of holding views critical of the French war effort, and this experience provided the material for his first book, The Enormous Room (1922), an experiment in blending autobiographical prose reporting with poetic techniques of symbolism.

Early Career

Cummings's transcendentalism, which stressed individual feeling over "objective" truth in a period when critical canons of impersonal, rationalistic, and formalistic poetry were being articulated, resulted in early rejection of his work. For several decades he had to pay for the publication of his books, and reviewers revealed very little understanding of his intentions. His first volume of verse, Tulips and Chimneys (1923), was followed by a second book of poems 2 years later. Though Cummings received the Dial Award for poetry in 1925, he continued to have difficulty in finding a publisher.

In the 10 years following 1925 only two volumes of Cummings's poems were published, both at his own expense: is 5 (1926) and W (ViVa; 1931). In that decade Cummings also arranged for the publication of one experimental play, Him (1927), and a diary like account of a trip to the U.S.S.R., Eimi (1933). With characteristic sarcasm Cummings named the 14 publishers who had rejected the manuscript of No Thanks (1935) in the volume itself and said "Thanks" to his mother, who had financed its publication.

Poetic Techniques

Despite his dedication to growth and movement, and in contrast to his reputation as an experimenter in verse forms, Cummings actually tended to lack fresh invention. Especially in the 1930s, when he felt most alienated from his culture and his fellow poets, he repeated himself endlessly, writing many versions of essentially the same poem. He tended to rely too much on simple tricks to force the reader to participate in the poems, and his private typography, although originally expressive and amusing, became somewhat tiresome. Cummings's other stylistic devices - the use of low dialect to create satire and the visual "shaping" of poems - often seem selfindulgent substitutes for original inspiration.

However, Cummings's most characteristic device, the dislocation of syntax and the breaking up and reconstituting of words, was more than just another trick when it operated organically within the context of a poem's meaning. When he wrote, in one of his own favorite poems, "i thank You God for most this amazing," he emphasized the nonlogical quality of the statement by its syntactical ambiguity. "Most" intensifies the entire line in its displaced position and indicates why he thanks God; it moves "this amazing" toward "most amazing" in an authentic recreation of the miraculous process of the natural world. In general, Cummings's best dislocations expressed his belief in that miraculousness of the ordinary which logical syntax could not convey, bringing the reader to a freshness of perception that was Cummings's way toward illumination.

Poetic Achievement

The love poems and religious poems represent Cummings's greatest achievements; usually the two subjects are interrelated in his work. For example, "somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond" is one of the finest love lyrics in the English language, and Cummings's elegy on the death of his beloved father, "my father moved through dooms of love," is a profoundly moving tribute. Often he used a dislocated sonnet form in these poems, but what makes them memorable is not their formal experimentalism but their unique combination of sensuality with a sense of transcendent spirit. Cummings wrote some of the finest celebrations of sexual love and the religious experience of awe and natural piety produced in the 20th century, precisely at a time when it was highly unfashionable to write such poems.

Early in his career Cummings had divided his time between New York and Paris (where he studied painting); later, between New York and the family home in North Conway, N.H. He was always interested in the visual arts, and his paintings and drawings, late impressionist in style, were exhibited in several one-man shows in the 1940s and 1950s.

Ripening into Honor

After World War II a new generation of poets in rebellion against their immediate predecessors began to find in Cummings an echo of their own distinctly Emersonian ideas about poetry, and Cummings began to receive the recognition that had eluded him so long. In 1950 the Academy of American Poets awarded this self-described "failure" a fellowship for "great achievement," and his collected Poems, 1923-1954 (1954) won praise in critical quarters which earlier had tended to downgrade Cummings for his unfashionable lyric romanticism.

Harvard University honored its distinguished alumnus by asking Cummings to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1952-1953, his only attempt at formal artistic autobiography, later published as i: six nonlectures (1953). In the lectures Cummings said that perhaps 15 poems were faithful expressions of his stance as artist and man. The total number of truly memorable short poems is certainly higher than this modest figure but still only a fraction of the nearly 1,000 poems published in his lifetime.

Although Cummings did not "develop" as a poet either in terms of ideas or of characteristic style between the publication of Tulips and Chimneys and his final volume, 73 Poems (1963), his work does show a deepening awareness and mastery of his special lyrical gift as poet of the mysteries of "death and forever with each breathing," with a corresponding abandonment of earlier defensive-offensive sallies into ideology and criticism. His finest single volume, 95 Poems (1958), illustrates Cummings's increasing ability toward the end of his life to give content to his abstractions through the artifact of the poem-object itself, rather than depending entirely on pure rhetoric. If only a tenth of his poems should be thought worthwhile, Cummings will have been established as one of the lasting poets America has produced.

Late Works and Influence

Cummings's Collected Poems was published in 1960. In addition to the works mentioned, Cummings published several other experimental plays, a ballet, and some 15 volumes of verse. Shortly before his death at North Conway on Sept. 3, 1962, Cummings wrote the texts to accompany photographs taken by his third wife, Marion Morehouse. Titled Adventures in Value (1962), this work exemplifies his lifelong effort to see intensely and deeply enough to confront the miraculousness of the natural. Poets of neoromantic inclinations consider him, along with William Carlos Williams, one of their artistic ancestors, although Cummings produced no significant stylistic followers.

Further Reading

Good discussions of Cummings and his work include Charles Norman, The Magic-Maker: E. E. Cummings (1958); Norman Friedman, E. E. Cummings: The Growth of a Writer (1964); Barry A. Marks, E. E. Cummings (1964); and Robert E. Wegner, The Poetry and Prose of E. E. Cummings (1965). There is a section on Cummings in Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets: From the Puritans to the Present (1968).

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Edward Estlin Cummings

(born Oct. 14, 1894, Cambridge, Mass., U.S. — died Sept. 3, 1962, North Conway, N.H.) U.S. poet and painter. Cummings attended Harvard University. His experience in World War I of being held in a detention camp because of a censor's error gave rise to his first prose book, The Enormous Room (1922). His first book of poems, Tulips and Chimneys (1923), was followed by 11 more. Cummings's poetry, rooted in New England traditions of dissent and self-reliance, attracted attention for its lack of capitalization, eccentric punctuation and phrasing, and often childlike playfulness, which won it a wide readership. His Norton lectures at Harvard were published as i: six nonlectures (1953).

For more information on Edward Estlin Cummings, visit Britannica.com.

 
Fairy Tale Companion: E. E. Cummings

Cummings, E. E. (Edward Estlin Cummings, 1894–1962), American poet, essayist, and artist. Known for his dramatic experiments in typography and syntax, Cummings also wrote some charming but fairly conventional fairy tales for his daughter: ‘The Old Man Who Said “Why”’, ‘The Elephant and the Butterfly’, ‘The House that Ate Mosquito Pie’, and ‘The Little Girl Named I’ (collected in 1965 with illustrations by John Eaton). His 1932 essay ‘A Fairy Tale’ has little to do with fairy tales, but celebrates art as detached from economics and politics and even ‘life’.

— Elizabeth Wanning Harries

 
US History Companion: Cummings, E. E.

(1894-1962), poet, autobiographical novelist, painter. As the son of Edward Cummings, a Unitarian minister who had been executive secretary of the World Peace Foundation, Cummings fit naturally into literary and classical studies at Harvard. There he collected data and sharpened the irreverent wit that would yield such lines as "The Cambridge ladies live in furnished souls, ... They speak of God and Longfellow, both dead." Following the latest trends in art, he moved to New York in 1916 and became a cubist painter of some note, exhibiting two paintings in the Society of Independents Show (1919), where Marcel Duchamp's infamous "readymade" porcelain urinal debuted. In Cambridge and in New York's bohemian Greenwich Village, and later in Paris, he befriended many poets and artists, most notably Hart Crane and Gertrude Stein, and worked at his writing.

In his earliest collection, Tulips and Chimneys (1923), he was both iconoclastic and Emersonian (that is, individualistic yet secretly religious), punningly playful and transcendentally depressed about the relationship of the individual to society, the artist to "mostpeople." Emulating European avant-gardist syntactic dislocations and visual poetry, "e. e. cummings," whose unique signature of typed lowercase letters adopted in 1923 signals his idiosyncrasy, is perhaps best known for typographical distortions, neologisms, and surprising juxtapositions of free and fixed verse forms, high- and lowbrow allusions.

More stunningly than his hundreds of short poems or the infamous Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, i: six nonlectures (1952-1953), his autobiographical war narrative, The Enormous Room (1922), and his satire/travelogue of Soviet bureaucracy, eimi (1933), show the range of emotional responses of an alienated and powerless--if selfish and ethnocentric--American individualist to the world's absurd economic and political institutions. Quite differently from the realism of contemporaneous antiwar action novels, The Enormous Room depicts the humor and horror at the margins of World War I. In the close quarters of a concentration camp, with sundry foreigners, criminals, corrupt guards, and his American friend, B (John Slater Brown), the narrator only half ironically employs allegorical names and religiophilosophical concepts adapted from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.

Like all of Cummings's art, The Enormous Room wobbles among serious psychological sketches, a proto-beatnik fascination with lower-class or marginal camaraderie, and an elitist send-up of American bourgeois values. For example: "The great American Public has a handicap which my friends at La ferte did not as a rule have--education. Let no one sound an indignant yawp at this. I refer to the fact that ... there is and can be no authentic art until the bons trucs (whereby we are taught to see and imitate on canvas and in stone and by words in this so-called world) are entirely and thoroughly and perfectly annihilated by that fast and painful process of Unthinking which may result in a minute bit of purely personal Feeling. Which minute bit is Art."

Banished, for the most part, from academe and serious criticism by Edmund Wilson's characterization of Wallace Stevens as "master in a particular vein" and Cummings as "precisely not," as well as Allen Tate's 1932 "heresy of unintelligence," his works nevertheless lead an underground life and enjoy great popularity. If critics reject him for a general irreverence, for writing mere typographical gimmickry, or for his proto-cold war caricature of the Soviet Union, his poems remain accessible, memorable, and of historical interest.

Author:

Kathryne V. Lindberg

See also Expatriates and Exiles; Literature.


 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Cummings, E. E.
(Edward Estlin Cummings), 1894–1962, American poet, b. Cambridge, Mass., grad. Harvard, 1915. His poetry, noted for its eccentricities of typography, language, and punctuation, usually seeks to convey a joyful, living awareness of sex and love. Among his 15 volumes of poetry are Tulips and Chimneys (1923), Is 5 (1926), and 95 Poems (1958). A prose account of his war internment in France, The Enormous Room (1922), is considered one of the finest books ever written about World War I. Cummings was also an accomplished artist whose paintings and drawings were exhibited in several one-man shows.

Bibliography

See his Complete Poems, 1913–1962 (2 vol., 1972); biographies by R. S. Kennedy (1980) and C. Sawyer-Lauçcanno (2004); N. Friedman, Cummings: The Growth of a Writer (1980).

 
Works: Works by E. E. Cummings
(1894-1962)

1922The Enormous Room. Cummings's first publication is a fictionalized account of his wartime incarceration in a French prison camp on an erroneous charge of treason. Cummings turns imprisonment into the means for discovering personal freedom, a quest that is echoed by allusions to John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. The work abandons conventional chronology, breaks the rules of normal syntax, and employs slang and improvisational techniques.
1923Tulips and Chimneys. Cummings's first collection shows his characteristic eccentric use of grammar and punctuation, though many of the poems are also formally and typographically conventional. Some of his best-known poems are represented, including "All in green went my love riding," "ladies and gentlemen this little girls," and "Buffalo Bill's defunct." The original manuscript was cut down by the publisher, and Cummings privately printed the deleted poems in 1925 in a collection titled &.
1925XLI Poems. Cummings's third collection combines a selection of poems from his original Tulips and Chimneys manuscript with some newer work. Cummings then arranges for the remaining poems from his manuscript to be privately printed in a volume titled &. Both volumes are well received and establish his reputation for experimentation.
1926is 5. The title is the answer to the calculation two-plus-two, indicative of the transformative power of the poet's verse. Included are highly regarded poems such as "nobody loses all the time," "ponder, darling, these busted statues," the antiwar poem "my sweet old etcetera," and the elegy of a conscientious objector, "i sing of Olaf glad and big."
1927him. Cummings warns the audience in the program for the Provincetown Playhouse production of his experimental drama, "Don't try to understand it." Most could only comply in a play whose main characters are named Me and Him, women in rocking chairs knit, and an actor playing Mussolini tells a group of adoring homosexuals that he will destroy communism. The play, which manages twenty-seven performances, anticipates the theater of the absurd.
1931ViVa. Cummings is at his most experimentally daring in this collection of seventy poems showing his characteristic scrambling of syntax, diction, and typography. It includes the much-anthologized "somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond," Cummings's impassioned defense of love, nature, and the individual.
1933Eimi. One of Cummings's strongest works is this account of his travels in Russia, which celebrates the power of the individual in the face of the regimentation and repression of Soviet life.
1935E. E. Cummings. No Thanks. The title and dedication of Cummings's collection refer to the fourteen publishers who rejected this collection of unconventional and experimental poems, bound not on the left but at the top, like a stenographer's pad.
1938Collected Poems. Cummings's most popular and most important work from his previous collections receives mixed reviews, with some critics praising the poet's innovations and others decrying his exhibitionism.
194050 Poems. Cummings's collection is greeted as more of the same by reviewer Louise Bogan, who describes the poet as "irrevocably stuck in the past."
19441 × 1. The poet's eleventh collection ranges in style from his characteristic linguistic and typographical experiments to sonnets with themes of the tawdriness of the age and the sustenance of the individual human identity. Fellow poet Marianne Moore proclaims the collection Cummings's "book of masterpieces."
1950Xaipe: Seventy-One Poems. Taking its title from the Greek word for "rejoice," Cummings's collection of lyrics celebrates "the great advantage of being alive," and, as one reviewer observes, his technical and typographical dislocations are strategies "by which he surprises us into awareness."
1954Poems, 1923-1954. Bringing together all the work of Cummings's previous ten collections, the volume prompts reviewer David Burns to assert that "it should now be apparent that Cummings is one of the finest lyric poets and social satirists America has yet produced."
195895 Poems. This is the last collection of new poems published during Cummings's lifetime. Cummings also publishes E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany, a collection of prose pieces.
196373 Poems. The posthumously published collection of verse draws appreciation from reviewers such as Lionel Abel, who states that the work shows Cummings at "his most unfoolish and poetical best" in which "there is more ecstasy and less argumentation for ecstasy than in most of his earlier books."

 
Quotes By: E.E. (Edward. E.) Cummings

Quotes:

"At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks."

"America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still."

"Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink"

"I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart."

"Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination."

"The earth laughs in flowers."

See more famous quotes by E.E. (Edward. E.) Cummings

 
Wikipedia: E. E. Cummings
E. E. Cummings
Enlarge
E. E. Cummings

Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), popularly known as E. E. Cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, and playwright. His body of work encompasses more than 900 poems, several plays and essays, numerous drawings, sketches, and paintings, as well as two novels. He is remembered as a preeminent voice of 20th century poetry, as well as one of the most enduringly popular.

Name

E. E. Cummings' publishers and others have sometimes echoed the unconventional capitalization in his poetry by writing his name in lower case and without periods. Cummings himself used both the lowercase and capitalized versions, but according to his widow did not, as reported in the preface of one book,[1] have his name legally changed to e. e. cummings. He did, however, write to his French translator that he preferred the capitalized version ("may it not be tricksy").[2] Today, one Cummings scholar considers that for the poet to have signed his name all-lowercase may have been a gesture of humility, but for others to do so would be an act of condescension.[3]

Education

From 1911 to 1916, Cummings attended Harvard University, from which he received a B.A. degree in 1915 and a Master's degree for English and Classical Studies in 1916. While at Harvard, he befriended John Dos Passos and roomed in the freshman dormitory, Thayer (room 306), named after the family of one of his Harvard acquaintances, Scofield Thayer.[4] Several of Cummings' poems were published in the Harvard Monthly as early as 1912, Cummings himself laboring on the school newspaper alongside fellow Harvard Aesthetes Dos Passos and S. Foster Damon. In 1915, his poems were published in the Harvard Advocate.

From an early age, Cummings studied Greek and Latin. His affinity for each manifests in his later works, such as XAIPE (Greek: "Rejoice!"; a collection of poetry), Anthropos (Greek: "mankind"; the title of one of his plays), and "Puella Mea" (Latin: "My Girl"; the title of his longest poem).

In his final year at Harvard, he was influenced by avant garde writers such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. Cummings graduated magna cum laude in 1916, delivering a controversial commencement address entitled "The New Art". This speech gave him his first taste of notoriety, as he managed to give the false impression that the well-liked imagist poet, Amy Lowell, whom he himself admired, was "abnormal". For this, Cummings was chastised in the newspapers. In 1920, Cummings' first published poems appeared in a collection of poetry entitled Eight Harvard Poets.

Life

In 1917, Cummings enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corp, along with his college friend John Dos Passos. The novelty of automotives, and thus ambulances, made driving acceptable to young, well educated men in the US. (World War I saw more well-known writers in medical service than any other war in history because of this. At least 23, including Hemingway, were enlisted in ambulance corps, an interesting and unusual percentage). Due to an administrative mix-up, Cummings was not assigned to an ambulance unit for five weeks, during which time he stayed in Paris. He became enamored with the city, to which he would return throughout his life.

On September 21 1917, just five months after his belated assignment, he and a friend, William Slater Brown, were arrested on suspicion of espionage (the two openly expressed pacifist views on the war). They were sent to a military detention camp, the Dépôt de Triage, in La Ferté-Macé, Orne, Normandy, where they languished for 3½ months. Cummings' experiences in the camp were later related in his novel The Enormous Room about which F. Scott Fitzgerald opined, "Of all the work by young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives- 'The Enormous Room' by e e cummings....Those few who cause books to live have not been able to endure the thought of its mortality." [citation needed]

He was released from the detention camp on December 19 1917, after much intervention from his politically connected father. Cummings returned to the United States on New Year's Day 1918. Later in 1918, he was drafted into the army. He served in the 73rd Infantry Division at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, until November 1918.

Cummings returned to Paris in 1921 and remained there for two years before returning to New York. During the rest of the 1920s and 1930s he returned to Paris a number of times, and traveled throughout Europe, meeting, among others, Pablo Picasso. In 1931 Cummings traveled to the Soviet Union and recounted his experiences in Eimi, published two years later. During these years Cummings also traveled to Northern Africa and Mexico and worked as an essayist and portrait artist for Vanity Fair magazine (1924 to 1927).

Poetry

Despite Cummings' affinity for avant-garde styles, much of his work is traditional. Many of his poems are sonnets, and he occasionally made use of the blues form and acrostics. Cummings' poetry often deals with themes of love and nature, as well as the relationship of the individual to the masses and to the world. His poems are also often rife with satire.

While his poetic forms, and even themes, show a close continuity with the romantic tradition, his work universally shows a particular idiosyncrasy of syntax, or way of arranging individual words into larger phrases and sentences. Many of his most striking poems do not involve any typographical or punctuational innovations at all, but purely syntactic ones.

As well as being influenced by notable sources modernists including Stein and Pound, Cummings' early work drew upon the imagist experiments of Amy Lowell. Later his visits to Paris exposed him to Dada and surrealism, which in turn permeated his work. He also liked to incorporate nature and death imagery into much of his poetry.

While some of his poetry is free verse (with no concern for rhyme and scansion), many of his poems have a recognizable sonnet structure of 14 lines, with an intricate rhyme scheme. A number of his poems feature a typographically exuberant style, with words, parts of words, or punctuation symbols scattered across the page, often making little sense until read aloud, at which point the meaning and emotion become clear. Cummings, who was also a painter, understood the importance of presentation, and used typography to "paint a picture" with some of his poems.[5]

The seeds of Cummings' unconventional style appear well established, even in his earliest work. At age six he wrote to his father:

FATHER DEAR. BE, YOUR FATHER-GOOD AND GOOD,
HE IS GOOD NOW, IT IS NOT GOOD TO SEE IT RAIN,
FATHER DEAR IS, IT, DEAR, NO FATHER DEAR,
LOVE, YOU DEAR,
ESTLIN.

Following The Enormous Room, his first published work was a collection of poems entitled Tulips and Chimneys (1923). This collection was the public's first encounter with his characteristic eccentric use of grammar and punctuation.

Some of Cummings's most famous poems do not involve much, if any, odd typography or punctuation, but still carry his unmistakable style. For example, the aptly titled "anyone lived in a pretty how town" begins:

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

"why must itself up every of a park" begins as follows:

why must itself up every of a park
anus stick some quote statue unquote to
prove that a hero equals any jerk
who was afraid to dare to answer "no"?

Cummings' unusual style can be seen in his poem "Buffalo Bill's/ defunct" from the January 1920 issue of The Dial.
Enlarge
Cummings' unusual style can be seen in his poem "Buffalo Bill's/ defunct" from the January 1920 issue of The Dial.

Readers sometimes experience a jarring, incomprehensible effect because the poems do not act in accordance with the conventional combinatorial rules that generate typical English sentences. (For example "Why must itself..." or "they sowed their isn't [...]"). His readings of Gertrude Stein in the early part of the century probably functioned as a springboard into this aspect of his artistic development (in the same way that Robert Walser's work acted as a springboard for Franz Kafka). In some respects, Cummings' work is more stylistically continuous with Stein's than with any other poet or writer.

In addition, a number of Cummings' poems feature, in part or in whole, intentional misspellings; several feature phonetic spellings intended to represent particular dialects. Cummings also made use of inventive formations of compound words, as in "in Just-", which features words such as "mud-luscious" and "puddle-wonderful".

Many of Cummings' poems address social issues and satirize society (see "why must itself up every of a park", above), but have an equal or even stronger bias toward romanticism: time and again his poems celebrate love, sex and the season of rebirth (see "anyone lived in a pretty how town" in its entirety).

His talent extended to children's books, novels, and painting. A notable example of his versatility is an introduction he wrote for a collection of the comic strip Krazy Kat.

Examples of Cummings' unorthodox typographical style can be seen in his poem "the sky was candy luminous...".

Plays

During his lifetime, Cummings published four plays: HIM (1927), Anthropos: or, the Future of Art (1930), Tom: A Ballet (1935), and Santa Claus: A Morality (1946).

  • HIM, a three-act play, was first produced in 1928 by the Provincetown Players in New York City. The production was directed by James Light. The play's main characters are "Him", a playwright, and "Me", his girlfriend. Cummings said of the unorthodox play:
"Relax and give the play a chance to strut its stuff—relax, stop wondering what it is all 'about'—like many strange and familiar things, Life included, this play isn't 'about,' it simply is. . . . Don't try to enjoy it, let it try to enjoy you. DON'T TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT, LET IT TRY TO UNDERSTAND YOU."[6]
  • Anthropos, or the Future of Art is a short, one-act play that Cummings contributed to the anthology Whither, Whither or After Sex, What? A Symposium to End Symposiums. The play consists of dialogue between Man, the main character, and three "infrahumans", or inferior beings. The word anthropos is the Greek word for "man", in the sense of "mankind".
  • Tom, A Ballet is a ballet based on Uncle Tom's Cabin. The ballet is detailed in a "synopsis" as well as descriptions of four "episodes", which were published by Cummings in 1935. It has never been performed. More information about the play as well as an illustration can be found at this webpage from the E. E. Cummings Society.
  • Santa Claus: A Morality was probably Cummings' most successful play. It is an allegorical Christmas fantasy presented in one act of five scenes. The play was inspired by his daughter Nancy, with whom he was reunited in 1946. It was first published in the Harvard College magazine the Wake. The play's main characters are Santa Claus, his family (Woman and Child), Death, and Mob. At the outset of the play, Santa Claus' family has disintegrated due to their lust for knowledge (Science). After a series of events, however, Santa Claus' faith in love and his rejection of the materialism and disappointment he associates with Science are reaffirmed, and he is reunited with Woman and Child.

The final decade

In 1952, his alma mater, Harvard, awarded Cummings an honorary seat as a guest professor. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he gave in 1952 and 1953 were later collected as i:six nonlectures.

Cummings spent the last decade of his life traveling, fulfilling speaking engagements, and spending time at his summer home, Joy Farm, in Silver Lake, New Hampshire.

He died at the age of 67 in North Conway, New Hampshire.

Awards

During his lifetime, E. E. Cummings received numerous awards in recognition of his work, including:

Personal life

E. E. Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894, to Edward and Rebecca Haswell Clarke Cummings. Cummings' father was a professor of sociology and political science at Harvard University and later a Unitarian minister. He and his son were close, and Edward was one of his son's most ardent supporters. Raised in a liberal family, Cummings was writing poetry as early as 1904 (age 10). His only sibling, a sister, Elizabeth, was born six years after he was.

In his youth, Cummings attended Cambridge Latin High School. Early stories and poems were published in the Cambridge Review, the school newspaper.

In 1926, Cummings' father was killed in a car accident. Though severely injured, Cummings' mother survived. Cummings detailed the accident in the following quote, from Richard S. Kennedy's biography of Cummings, Dreams in the Mirror:[7]

"... a locomotive cut the car in half, killing my father instantly. When two brakemen jumped from the halted train, they saw a woman standing – dazed but erect – beside a mangled machine; with blood spouting (as the older said to me) out of her head. One of her hands (the younger added) kept feeling her dress, as if trying to discover why it was wet. These men took my sixty-six year old mother by the arms and tried to lead her toward a nearby farmhouse; but she threw them off, strode straight to my father's body, and directed a group of scared spectators to cover him. When this had been done (and only then) she let them lead her away."

His father's death had a profound impact on Cummings and his work, who entered a new period in his artistic life. Cummings began to focus on more important aspects of life in his poetry. He began this new period by paying homage to his father's memory in the poem "my father moved through dooms of love".[8]

Born into a Unitarian family, Cummings exhibited transcendental leanings his entire life. As he grew in maturity and age, Cummings moved more towards an "I, Thou" relationship with his God. His journals are replete with references to “le bon Dieu” and as well prayers for inspiration in his poetry and artwork (such as “Bon Dieu! may I some day do something truly great. amen.”). Cummings "also prayed for strength to be his essential self ('may I be I is the only prayer--not may I be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong'), and for relief of spirit in times of depression ('almighty God! I thank thee for my soul; & may I never die spiritually into a mere mind through disease of loneliness')."[1]

I thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

Cummings died in 1962 in North Conway, New Hampshire, after having a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 67. He is interred at Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.

Marriages

Cummings was married three times, including a long common-law marriage.

Cummings's first marriage, to Elaine Orr, began as a love affair in 1919 while she was married to Scofield Thayer, one of Cummings's friends from Harvard. The affair produced a daughter, Nancy, born on December 20, 1919. Nancy was Cummings's only child. After obtaining a divorce from Thayer, Elaine married Cummings on March 19, 1924. However, the marriage ended in divorce less than nine months later, when Elaine left Cummings for a wealthy Irish banker, moved to Ireland and took Nancy with her. Under the terms of the divorce Cummings was granted custody of Nancy for three months each year, but Elaine refused to abide by the agreement. Cummings did not see his daughter again until 1946.

Cummings married his second wife Anne Minnerly Barton on May 1, 1929. They separated three years later in 1932. That same year, Anne obtained a Mexican divorce that was not officially recognized in the United States until August 1934.

In 1932, the same year he and Anne separated, Cummings met Marion Morehouse, a fashion model and photographer. Although it is not clear whether the two were ever legally married, Morehouse lived with Cummings until his death in 1962. Morehouse died in 1969.

Bibliography

Further reading

A number of books have been written about E. E. Cummings, notably:

  • Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings, by Richard S. Kennedy
  • E. E. Cummings: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Norman Friedman
  • E. E. Cummings: The Art of his Poetry, by Norman Friedman
  • E. E. Cummings: A Bibliography, by George James
  • "A Concordance to the Complete Poems of E.E.Cummings", by Katharine McBride

Notes

  1. ^ Friedman, Norman (1964). E. E. Cummings: The Growth of a Writer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 
  2. ^ Friedman, Norman (1995). "Not "e. e. cummings" Revisited". Spring 5: 41-43. Retrieved on 2007-05-12. 
  3. ^ Friedman, Norman (1992). "NOT "e. e. cummings"". Spring 1: 114-121. Retrieved on 2005-12-13. 
  4. ^ Harvard Freshman Pamphlet, 1996.
  5. ^ Landles, Iain (2001). "An Analysis of Two Poems by E.E. Cummings". SPRING, The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society 10: 31–43. 
  6. ^ p. 295, Kennedy (1980)
  7. ^ p. 293, Kennedy (1980)
  8. ^ Lane, Gary (1976). I Am: A Study of E. E. Cummings' Poems. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, p. 41–43.kvhg. ISBN 0-7006-0144-9. 

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Audio recordings

Public domain poetry and readings:

CD of Cummings reading 42 of his poems:


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