E. E. Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962) was an American poet, writer, and painter.
Cummings is probably best known for the unusual style used in many of his poems, which includes unorthodox usage of capitalisation and punctuation, with unexpected punctuation interrupting sentences and even individual words. Several of his poems are also typeset on a page in an unusual fashion, and appear to make little sense until read aloud.
Life
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. Raised in a liberal family, Cummings was writing poetry as early as 1904 (age 10).
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. Also while at Harvard, he met and befriended John Dos Passos. Cummings' first text was also published in 1912 in the Harvard Monthly, a school newspaper which Cummings worked on with his friends John Dos Passos and S. Foster Damon.
Cummings graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1915, and delivered the commencement address, entitled "The New Art". 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. His first published poems appeared in a collection of poetry entitled Eight Harvard Poets in 1917.
Cummings went to France in 1917 as a volunteer for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in the First World War. However, after five months, he and a friend, William Slater Brown, were arrested on 21 Septemeber 1917 on suspicion of espionage (the two openly expressed pacifist views on the war). The two were sent to a detention camp in La Ferte Mace in Normandy for 3½ months. Cummings' experiences in the camp are later related in his novel The Enormous Room.
He was released from the camp in late 1917, after much intervention from his father. Cummings returned to the United States on New Years' 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, France 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 travelled throughout Europe, meeting, among others, Pablo Picasso. In 1931 Cummings travelled to the Soviet Union and recorded his experiences in Eimi, published two years later. During these years Cummings also travelled to Northern Africa and Mexico.
In 1926, Cummings' father, whom he was close to, and was one of his most ardent supporters, was killed suddenly and tragically in a car accident. Though severely injured, Cummings' mother survived, and lived for more than twenty years until her death in 1947. Cummings detailed the accident in the following quote, from Richard S. Kennedy's biography of Cummings, Dreams in the Mirror:
- "... 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, 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".
Cummings was married three times, first to Elaine Orr, with whom he had a daughter, Nancy, and later to Anne Barton and Marion Morehouse. His first two marriages ended in divorce, with his marriage to Elaine Orr lasting less than nine months.
Cummings died in 1962 in North Conway, New Hampshire, after having a stroke at the age of 67.
Cummings' style
While some of his poetry is free verse (with no concern for rhyme and scansion), many of his poems have a recognisable sonnet structure of 14 lines, with an intricate rhyme scheme. A number of his poems feature a typographically exhuberant 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.
Many of Cummings' poems address social issues and satirise society, but have an equal or even stronger bias toward romanticism: time and again his poems celebrate love, sex and spring. 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 his favorite comic strip, Krazy Kat.
An example of Cumming's unorthodox typographical style can be seen in his poems "the sky was candy luminous..." and "a leaf falls on loneliness".
Capitalisation of Cummings' name
His name is frequently written in lowercase, e.e. cummings, as the lowercase form was a concept for a cover design by one of his publishers. However, Cummings himself capitalised his name. Stories claiming that Cummings preferred a lowercase version of his name or even so much legally changed his name to the lowercase version are false.
Awards
During his lifetime, E. E. Cummings recieved numerous awards in recognition of his work, including:
- Dial Award (1925)
- Guggenheim Fellowship (1933)
- Shelley Memorial Award for Poetry (1944)
- Fellowship of American Academy of Poets (1950)
- Guggenheim Fellowship (1951)
- Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard (1952-1953)
- Special citation from the National Book Award Committee for his Poems, 1923-1954 (1957)
- Bollingen Prize in Poetry (1957)
- Boston Arts Festival Award (1957)
Published works
- Eight Harvard Poets (1917)
- The Enormous Room (1922), a novel based on his war experiences.
- Tulips and Chimneys (1923)
- &, (1925)
- XLI Poems (1925)
- is 5 (1926)
- Him (1927)
- {No Title} (1930)
- Anthropos or The Future of Art (1930)
- CIOPW (1931)
- ViVa? (1931)
- Eimi (1933)
- No Thanks (1935)
- Tom (1935)
- Collected Poems (1938)
- 50 Poems (1940)
- 1 x 1 (1944)
- Santa Claus, A Morality (1946)
- Xaipe (1950)
- i: six nonlectures (1953)
- Poems 1923-1954 (1954)
- 95 Poems (1958)
- 73 Poems (1963)
External links
The E. E. Cummings Society
Listening
- UbuWeb: e.e. cummings from the album lunapark 0,10
Poems and Biographies
- E. E. Cummings selected poems, letters, and photographs
- Americanpoems.com: e e cummings a short biography and selected poems.
- Modern American Poetry: E. E. Cummings a collection of analytical essays on selected poems