e.e. cummings Biography

Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), abbreviated E. E. Cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, and playwright. His publishers and others have sometimes echoed the unconventional capitalization in his poetry by writing his name in lower case, as e. e. cummings; Cummings himself did not approve of this rendering.

Cummings is probably best known for his poems and their unorthodox usage of capitalization, layout, punctuation and syntax. There is extensive use of lower case; word gaps, line breaks and gaps appear in unexpected places; punctuation marks are omitted or misplaced, interrupting sentences and even individual words; grammar and word order are sometimes strange. Many of his poems are best understood when read on the page. When read in the correct fashion, his poems often paint a syntactical picture as vital to the understanding of the poem as the words themselves.

Despite Cummings' affinity for avant-garde styles and for unusual typography, much of his work is traditional. Many of his poems are sonnets, and he occasionally made use of the blues form and acrostics as well. 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 often satirical as well. But, 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.

During his lifetime, he published more than 900 poems, along with two novels, several plays and essays, as well as numerous drawings, sketches, and paintings. He is remembered as one of the preeminent voices of 20th century poetry.

From 1911 to 1916 Cummings attended Harvard, 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. Several of Cummings' poems were published, beginning in 1912, in the Harvard Monthly, a school newspaper on which Cummings worked with fellow Harvard Aesthetes Dos Passos and S. Foster Damon, and in 1915 in the Harvard Advocate.

From an early age, Cummings studied the classical languages of Greek and Latin. His affinity for both can be seen in his later works, such as XAIPE (the title of one of his collections and "Rejoice!" in Greek), Anthropos (the title of one of his plays and "mankind" in Greek), and "Puella Mea" (the title of his longest poem, and "My Girl" in Latin).

In his final year at Harvard, he came under the influence of the works of avant garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. Cummings graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1915, and delivered a controversial commencement address, entitled "The New Art". This speech gave him his first taste of notoriety as he managed to give the impression that he thought the well-liked imagist poet, Amy Lowell was "abnormal," when his intention was to praise her. Cummings was chastised in the newspapers.

In 1917, Cummings' first published poems appeared in a collection of poetry entitled Eight Harvard Poets. That same year Cummings went to France as a volunteer for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in World War I. Due to an administrative mix-up, Cummings was not assigned to an ambulance unit for five weeks, during which time he stayed in Paris. Cummings 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 concentration 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."

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).

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.

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. As a painter, Cummings understood the importance of presentation, and used typography to "paint a picture" with some of his poems.

Even in his earliest work the seeds of Cummings' unconventional style seem well established. At age six Cummings wrote to his father:

FATHER DEAR. BE, YOUR FATHER-GOOD AND GOOD,


Cummings has been criticized for allowing himself to become static in technique, and accordingly showing a lack of artistic growth. He has also been labeled by some as a misanthrope due to his sometimes harsh satire. For a time there was a claim that some of his early works feature racist and anti-semitic overtones. However, it is more often noted by critics that although his approach to form did not often vary, his messages grew stronger, harsher, and more effortlessly romantic in his final years.

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).

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

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

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

E. E. Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 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.

Among other free contemporary (2006) public domain poetry and public domain readings, interpretations/readings of Cummings' poetry can be heard/downloaded from LibriVox.org here:

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