American poet and painter who first attracted attention for his eccentric
punctuation, but the commonly held belief that Cummings had his name legally
changed to lowercase letters is erroneous. Despite typographical eccentricity
and devotion to the avant-garde, Cummings's themes are in many respect quite
traditional. He often dealt with the antagonism between an individual and
masses, but his style brought into his poems lightness and satirical tones. As
an artist Cummings painted still-life pictures and landscapes to a professional
level.
Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink.
(from 'Humanity i love you', 1925)
Edward E. Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father was a
Harvard teacher and later a Unitarian minister. Cummings was educated at
Cambridge High and Latin School, and from 1911 to 1916 he attended Harvard,
where he met John Dos Passos. Cummings became an aesthete, he began to dress
unconventionally, and dedicated himself to painting and literature. He graduated
in 1915 with a major in classics.
With Dos Passos and others he published in 1917 Eight Harvard Poets.
During the last years of World War I, he drove an ambulance in France.
Indiscreet comments in the letters of a friend led to Cummings's arrest and
incarceration in a French concentration camp at La Ferté-Macé. Later, he found
out he had been accused of treason, but the charges were never proved. This
experience gave basis for Cummings's only novel, The Enormous Room
(1922), in which he drew acidly funny sketches of the jailers and sympathetic
portraits of prisoners. It was followed by collections of verse, Tulips and
Chimneys (1923), which contrasted the evils of war to the 'sweet spontaneous
earth' and XLI Poems (1925). In the 1920s and1930s Cummings divided his
time between Paris, where he studied art, and New York, where he had a child
with a friend's wife.
In Paris Cummings met the poets Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, and Archibald
MacLeish. His friends also included the philosopher A.J. Ayer, who had a short
affair with his wife, Marion Morehouse. She was twelve years Cummings's junior,
a former Ziegfield showgirl and one of the leading models of the age. Cummings's
friendship with Ayer lasted over twenty-five years. Once Cummings took Ayer to
see the legendary stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. "You walk on tightropes as if they
lay on the ground," Cummings wrote in a birthday poem to Ayer, "and always, bird
eyed, notice more than we notice you notice".
Cummings supported himself by painting portraits and writing for Vanity
Fair. Throughout the 1920s, he contributed to The Dial, perhaps
America's greatest literary journal. & (1925) and is 5 (1925), inspired
by Apollinaire, were written in the poet's new style. The books presented his
radical experiments with punctuation and typography, and he used lower letter
cases in his own name. Grammatical anarchism, a modern extension of romanticism,
was a both result of the poet's hostility to mass society and his attempt to
find a new way to write on old subjects: "Since feeling is first / who pays any
attention / to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you".
(from 'since feling is first', 1926) In the line "mOOn
Over tOwns mOOn" (1935), which showed the movement of the full moon, the letters
became pictorial signs.
Cummings believed that modern mass society was a threat to individuals.
"Progress is a comfortable disease," Cummings once wrote. He was interersted in
cubism, and jazz, which had not became mass entertainment, and contemporary
slang, an unorthodox form of language. In his poems Cummings often expressed his
rebellious attitude towards religion, politics, and conformity."the
Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls / are unbeautiful and have
comfortable minds / (also,with the church's protestant blessings /
daughters,unscented shapeless spirited) they believe in Christ and Longfellow,
both dead". (from 'the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished
souls', 1923) But Cummings also celebrated the joy of life and the beauty
of natural world, of which people have unluckily estranged themselves.
"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."
(from 'anyone lived in a pretty how town', 1940)
In 1927 his play him was produced by the Provincetown Players in New
York City. During these years he exhibited his paintings and drawings, but they
failed to attract as much critical interest as his writings. In 1931 Cummings
travelled in the Soviet Union and recorded later his impressions in Eimi
(1933), a version of Dante's descent into Hell, in which he saw the Russians as
"undead." However, on leaving Russia he also translated Louis Aragon's Le
Front Rouge, a poem influenced by Mayakovsky.
When Cummings did not find a publisher for No Thanks, a collection of
poetry, he published it himself. From 1952 to 1953 Cummings was a professor at
Harvard. His series of lectures were appeared under the title i: six
nonlectures. In 1957 he received a special citation from the National Book
Award Committee for Poems, 1923-1954, and in 1957 he won the Bollinger
Prize. Cummings was married three times. He died on September 3, 1962, in North
Conway.
For further reading:The
Magic-Maker by Charles Norman (1958); E.E.
Cummings, the Art of His Poetry by N. Friedman (1960); E.E. Cummings
and the Growth of a Writer by N. Friedman (1964);
E.E. Cummings by B.A. Marks (1965);
E.E. Cummings: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by N. Friedman
(1972); E.E. Cummings, a Remembrance of Miracles by B.K. Dumas
(1974); Dreams in a Mirror
by Richard S. Kennedy (1979);
Critical Essays on E.E. Cummings, ed. by G.H.
Rotella (1984)
Selected works:
Eight Harvard Poets, 1917 (with others)
The Enourmous Room, 1922
Tulips and Chimneys, 1923
&, 1925
XLI Poems, 1925
is 5, 1926
him, 1927 (play)
by e e cummings, 1930
CIOPW, 1931
W, 1931
Eimi, 1933
no thanks, 1935
Tom, 1935 (a ballet from H.E.B. Stowe's novel Uncle Toms Cabin)
One Over Twenty, 1937
Collected Poems, 1938
New Poems, 1938
50 Poems, 1940
1 x 1, 1944
Anthropos: The Future of Art, 1945
Santa Claus, 1946
Eimi, 1948
XAIPE, 1950
i, six nonlectures, 1953
Poems 1923-1954, 1954
95 Poems, 1958
A Miscellany, 1958
Adventures in Value, 1962
73 Poems. 1964
Fairy Tales, 1965
E.E. Cummings, a Miscellany Revised, 1965
A Miscellany Revised, 1965
Complete poems, 1968
Three Plays and a Ballet, 1968
Selected Letters of e e cummings, 1969
Complete Poems: 1913-1962, 1972
Poems 1905-1962, 1973
Uncollected Poems (1910-1962), 1981
1981; Etcetera: the Unpublished Poems of e e cummings, 1983