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| E. E. Cummings |
Today, The Grandma has received a new visit of one of her closest friends, Jordi Santanyí. Jordi is a writer and he loves Literature. He spends hours and hours talking with The Grandma about authors and their works. They have been talking about Edward Estlin Cummings, the American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright who was died on a day like today in 1962.
Jordi and The Grandma think that the best way to pay homage to E. E. Cummings is talking about his life and his amazing works, especially his poems.
Edward Estlin "E. E." Cummings (October 14, 1894-September 3, 1962), often styled as e e cummings, as he is attributed in many of his published works, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright.
He wrote approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays, and several essays.
He is often regarded as one of the most important American poets of the 20th century.
Cummings is associated with modernist free-form poetry. Much of his work has idiosyncratic syntax and uses lower case spellings for poetic expression.
Edward Estlin Cummings was born on October 14, 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Edward Cummings and the former Rebecca Haswell Clarke, a well-known Unitarian couple in the city. His father was a professor at Harvard University who later became nationally known as the minister of South Congregational Church (Unitarian) in Boston, Massachusetts. His mother, who loved to spend time with her children, played games with Cummings and his sister, Elizabeth.
From an early age, Cummings' parents supported his creative gifts. Cummings wrote poems and drew as a child, and he often played outdoors with the many other children who lived in his neighborhood. He grew up in the company of such family friends as the philosophers William James and Josiah Royce.
More information: Poets
Many of Cummings' summers were spent on Silver Lake in Madison, New Hampshire, where his father had built two houses along the eastern shore. The family ultimately purchased the nearby Joy Farm where Cummings had his primary summer residence.
Cummings wanted to be a poet from childhood and wrote poetry daily from age 8 to 22, exploring assorted forms. He graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1915 and received a Master of Arts degree from the university in 1916.
In his studies at Harvard, he developed an interest in modern poetry, which ignored conventional grammar and syntax, while aiming for a dynamic use of language. Upon graduating, he worked for a book dealer.
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| E. E. Cummings |
In 1917, with the First World War ongoing in Europe, Cummings enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps. On the boat to France, he met William Slater Brown and they would become friends. Due to an administrative error, Cummings and Brown did not receive an assignment for five weeks, a period they spent exploring Paris. Cummings fell in love with the city, to which he would return throughout his life.
During their service in the ambulance corps, the two young writers sent letters home that drew the attention of the military censors. They were known to prefer the company of French soldiers over fellow ambulance drivers. The two openly expressed anti-war views; Cummings spoke of his lack of hatred for the Germans.
On September 21, 1917, five months after starting his belated assignment, Cummings and William Slater Brown were arrested by the French military on suspicion of espionage and undesirable activities. They were held for three and a half months in a military detention camp at the Dépôt de Triage, in La Ferté-Macé, Orne, Normandy.
They were imprisoned with other detainees in a large room. Cummings' father failed to obtain his son's release through diplomatic channels, and in December 1917 he wrote a letter to President Woodrow Wilson. Cummings was released on December 19, 1917, and Brown was released two months later.
Cummings used his prison experience as the basis for his novel, The Enormous Room (1922), about which F. Scott Fitzgerald said, 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.
More information: Poetry Foundation
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 12th Division at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, until November 1918.
Cummings returned to Paris in 1921 and lived there for two years before returning to New York. His collection Tulips and Chimneys was published in 1923 and his inventive use of grammar and syntax is evident. The book was heavily cut by his editor. XLI Poems was published in 1925. With these collections, Cummings made his reputation as an avant garde poet.
During the rest of the 1920s and 1930s, Cummings returned to Paris a number of times, and traveled throughout Europe, meeting, among others, artist Pablo Picasso.
In 1931 Cummings traveled to the Soviet Union, recounting his experiences in Eimi, published two years later. During these years Cummings also traveled to Northern Africa and Mexico. He worked as an essayist and portrait artist for Vanity Fair magazine (1924–1927).
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| E. E. Cummings |
In 1926, Cummings' parents were in a car crash; only his mother survived, although she was severely injured.
His father's death had a profound effect on Cummings, who entered a new period in his artistic life. He began to focus on more important aspects of life in his poetry. He started this new period by paying homage to his father in the poem my father moved through dooms of love.
In the 1930s Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs was Cummings' publisher; he had started the Golden Eagle Press after working as a typographer and publisher.
In 1952, his alma mater, Harvard University, awarded Cummings an honorary seat as a guest professor.
Cummings spent the last decade of his life traveling, fulfilling speaking engagements, and spending time at his summer home, Joy Farm, in Silver Lake, New Hampshire.
He died of a stroke on September 3, 1962, at the age of 67 at Memorial Hospital in North Conway, New Hampshire.
Cummings was buried at Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts. At the time of his death, Cummings was recognized as the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost.
Cummings' papers are held at the Houghton Library at Harvard University and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
According to his
testimony in EIMI, Cummings had little interest in politics until his
trip to the Soviet Union in 1931. He subsequently shifted rightward on
many political and social issues. Despite his radical and bohemian
public image, he was a Republican, and later, an ardent supporter of
Joseph McCarthy.
More information: English with a Smile
Despite Cummings' familiarity with avant-garde styles, likely affected by the Calligrammes of French poet Apollinaire, according to a contemporary observation, much of his work is quite traditional. Many of his poems are sonnets, albeit often with a modern twist. He occasionally used the blues form and acrostics.
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 also often rife with satire.
While his poetic forms and themes share an affinity with the Romantic tradition, Cummings' 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 punctuation innovations at all, but purely syntactic ones.
As well as being
influenced by notable modernists, including Gertrude Stein and Ezra
Pound, Cummings in his early work drew upon the imagist experiments of
Amy Lowell. Later, his visits to Paris exposed him to Dada and
Surrealism, which he reflected in his work. He began to rely on
symbolism and allegory, where he once had used simile and metaphor. In
his later work, he rarely used comparisons that required objects that
were not previously mentioned in the poem, choosing to use a symbol
instead. Due to this, his later poetry is frequently more lucid, more
moving, and more profound than his earlier.
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| E. E. Cummings |
Cummings also liked to incorporate imagery of nature and death into much of his poetry.
While some of his poetry is free verse, with no concern for rhyme or meter, many 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. Cummings, who was also a painter, understood the importance of presentation, and used typography to paint a picture with some of his poems.
Following his autobiographical novel, The Enormous Room, Cummings' first published work was a collection of poems titled Tulips and Chimneys (1923). This work was the public's first encounter with his characteristically eccentric use of grammar and punctuation.
Some of Cummings' most famous poems do not involve much, if any, idiosyncratic typography or punctuation, but they still carry his unmistakable style, particularly in unusual and impressionistic word order.
Cummings' work often does not proceed in accordance with the conventional combinatorial rules that generate typical English sentences. In addition, a number of Cummings' poems feature, in part or in whole, intentional misspellings, and several incorporate phonetic spellings intended to represent particular dialects.
Cummings also made use of inventive formations of compound words, as in his poem in Just, which features words such as mud-luscious, puddle-wonderful, and eddieandbill. This poem is part of a sequence of poems titled Chansons Innocentes; it has many references comparing the balloonman to Pan, the mythical creature that is half-goat and half-man.
More information: Interesting Literature
Literary critic R.P. Blackmur has commented that this use of language is frequently unintelligible because Cummings disregards the historical accumulation of meaning in words in favour of merely private and personal associations.
Fellow poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, in her equivocal letter recommending Cummings for the Guggenheim Fellowship he was awarded in 1934, expressed her frustration at his opaque symbolism. If he prints and offers for sale poetry which he is quite content should be, after hours of sweating concentration, inexplicable from any point of view to a person as intelligent as myself, then he does so with a motive which is frivolous from the point of view of art, and should not be helped or encouraged by any serious person or group of persons... there is fine writing and powerful writing, as well as some of the most pompous nonsense I ever let slip to the floor with a wide yawn... What I propose, then, is this: that you give Mr. Cummings enough rope. He may hang himself; or he may lasso a unicorn."
Many of Cummings' poems are satirical and address social issues but have an equal or even stronger bias toward romanticism: time and again his poems celebrate love, sex, and the season of rebirth.
Cummings also wrote children's books and novels. A notable example of his versatility is an introduction he wrote for a collection of the comic strip Krazy Kat.
More information: Learn No Do New Tonic
Once we believe in ourselves,
we can risk curiosity, wonder,
spontaneous delight, or any experience
that reveals the human spirit.
E. E. Cummings
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