Ee cummings short biography

e.e. cummings grew up a Unitarian. His life embodied endless conflict between radical individualism and faith in love. The following biography reveals the volcano of his uniquely creative soul.

Edward Estlin Cummings was born (1894) and brought up on a quiet street north of the Harvard Yard, one where distinguished professors lived. William James and Josiah Royce were neighbors, and Charles Eliot Norton had a wooded estate nearby that bordered on Somerville and its Irish tenements. Cambridge in the early l900s . . . good manners, tea parties, Browning, young women with their minds adequately dressed in English tweeds. I think it was T.S. Eliot who said that life there was so intensely cultured it had ceased to be civilized. The younger poet’s family was part of that life. Edward Cummings, the father (Harvard ’83), had been an instructor in sociology, but then had become a clergyman, preaching in Boston as the assistant, the colleague, and finally the successor of Edward Everett Hale at the South Congregational Society, Unitarian. Sometimes on Sundays little Estlin, as the family called him, passed the plate. The father, famous for rectitude, was also president of the Massachusetts Civic League and was later executive head of the World Peace Foundation.

The son attended a public high school, Cambridge Latin, where he tells us that the admired principal was a Negro. Sending Estlin there was apparently one of his father’s democratic ideas, and another—when the son went on to Harvard, class of ’15—was to have him live at home for the first three years. That encouraged his bookish habits and also cut him off from college life, including the club system and its societies, waiting clubs, and final clubs‚—always something ahead to make students act with propriety for fear of being blackballed. Cummings joined nothing but the Musical Society and the board of a literary magazine that had published some of his early

American author (1894–1962)

For the politician and civil rights advocate, see Elijah E. Cummings.

Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), commonly known as e e cummings or E. E. Cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. During World War I, he worked as an ambulance driver and was imprisoned in an internment camp, which provided the basis for his novel The Enormous Room in 1922. The following year he published his first collection of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys, which showed his early experiments with grammar and typography. He wrote four plays; HIM (1927) and Santa Claus: A Morality (1946) were the most successful ones. He wrote EIMI (1933), a travelog of the Soviet Union, and delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in poetry, published as i—six nonlectures (1953). Fairy Tales (1965), a collection of short stories, was published posthumously.

Cummings wrote approximately 2,900 poems. He is often regarded as one of the most important American poets of the 20th century. He is associated with modernistfree-form poetry, and much of his work uses idiosyncratic syntax and lower-case spellings for poetic expression. M. L. Rosenthal wrote:

The chief effect of Cummings' jugglery with syntax, grammar, and diction was to blow open otherwise trite and bathetic motifs through a dynamic rediscovery of the energies sealed up in conventional usage ... He succeeded masterfully in splitting the atom of the cute commonplace.

For Norman Friedman, Cummings's inventions "are best understood as various ways of stripping the film of familiarity from language to strip the film of familiarity from the world. Transform the word, he seems to have felt, and you are on the way to transforming the world."

The poet Randall Jarrell said of Cummings, "No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and the special reader.

Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School. He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.

In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.

After the war, Cummings settled into a life divided between his lifetime summer home, Joy Farm in New Hampshire, and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.

In 1920,

In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work toward further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.

The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted that Cummings is “one of the most individual poets who ever lived—and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings’s poems are loved because they are full of sentimentall

E.E. Cummings (1894-1962) is a poet beloved for his unpretentious, irreverent, and rule-breaking approach to modernism.

Cummings was born in Cambridge, Mass. and educated at Harvard (1911-1916), spending four years in undergraduate study followed by one year as a Masters student. In 1917, during the Great War, he volunteered as an ambulance driver in France. After three months at the Front, he and his friend, William Slater Brown, were arrested on account of frank letters written by Brown concerning atrocities of war, the demoralization of the French soldiers, and other topics displeasing to the French censors. Cummings and Brown were deemed “undesirable in the war zone” and incarcerated in a detainment centre at La Ferté-Macé: Cummings later recounted these experiences in his first work of prose, The Enormous Room (1922). In the following year, Thomas Seltzer published Cummings’s first solo collection of poetry: Tulips and Chimneys (1923). (Seltzer stripped more than half of the poems from the manuscript and altered the title; the preferred text is now Tulips & Chimneys(1922 ms), which restores Cummings’s cherished ampersand along with the rejected poems.)

In the 1920s, Cummings flourished in the little magazines of modernism. His fortunes outside of the little magazines, and beyond the 1920s, fluctuated greatly. Weathering the bad times, he published over the course of his lifetime many volumes of poems; two long works of prose (The Enormous Room and Eimi); plays; casual short stories, miscellaneous prose, and satires; a book of short fairy tales for children; and more. He was, in addition, a visual artist, and he was committed throughout his life to his painting and sketching.

Why E.E. Cummings and not ee cummings? Lower-case cummings was a persona, created as much by Cummings’s readers as by Cummings himself. There is no evidence that Cummings ever intended that he should be “known” as ee cummings. (See Friedman, Norman. 19