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E. E. Cummings (1894-1962)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=157

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on E. E. Cummings including a biography, audio files, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cummings/cummings.htm

This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on E. E. Cummings.

BIOGRAPHY

Poet and painter, Edward Estlin Cummings was born into the household of Unitarian Minister and former Harvard Professor Edward Cummings who, along with his wife Rebecca Haswell Clarke Cummings, encouraged Cummings to pursue his creativity especially in poetry. Cummings graduated from Harvard College in 1915 and received an A.M. from Harvard the next year. His early verse was included in the collection Eight Harvard Poets published in 1917, the year Cummings also volunteered for the Ambulance Corps serving in France during World War I. Arrested with his friend William Slater Brown on suspicion of espionage, owing to some of Slater's pacifist letters, Cummings was held in detention at a concentration camp at La Ferté-Macé for four months, which he writes about in his autobiographical book The Enormous Room (1922). After serving in the 73rd Infantry until November 1918, Cummings lived in New York and exhibited his artwork modeled on cubist principles that also shaped the new compositional innovations to modern poetry. Making dynamic use of the page as a compositional space, Cummings subverted the authenticity of the speaking voice in favor of visual manipulations of punctuation and typography, unusual and playful phrasings, disruption of syntax, and other unconventional formal techniques. Such early experimentation appeared in three volumes Tulips and Chimneys (1923), XLI Poems (1925), and & (1925). The youthful exuberance of these first volumes was tempered by two failed marriages. A new critical temper enters his verse in the volumes 5 (1926), ViVa (1931), and No Thanks (1935). A six-week trip to the Soviet Union in 1931 provided the impetus for Cummings's parody, modeled on Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso of bureaucratic communism in Eimi (1933). In 1934, Cummings's entered into a relationship with Marion Morehouse that would last the rest of his life, much of which was spent at the poet's summerhouse "Joy Farm" in Madison, New Hampshire. A New optimism is evident in 50 Poems (1940), 1 X 1 (1944), and Xaipe (1950) that reflects, in part, Cummings's reunion with the daughter of his first marriage, Nancy. She had lost contact with her father when Elaine Orr left Cummings, taking Nancy with her to Ireland in 1925. In his final years, Cullen received broad recognition for his poetic achievement both as a public reader of his work and in the awards of a special citation from the National Book Award Committee (1955), a Bollingen Prize (1958), and a Ford Foundation grant. Four years after his final volume of verse 95 poems was published, Cummings died in New Hampshire after suffering a stroke at Joy Farm.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Cohen, Milton A. Poet and Painter: The Aesthetics of E. E. Cummings's Early Work. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987.

Friedman, Norman. (Re)Valuing Cummings: Seven Essays on the Poet, 1962-93. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1996.

Kennedy, Richard S. Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings. London: Liveright, 1994.

—. E. E. Cummings Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.

Kidder, Rushworth. E. E. Cummings: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

Rotella, Guy L., Ed. Critical Essays on E. E. Cummings. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER