E E Cummings

E. E. Cummings (Edward Estlin Cummings), 1894-1962, American poet, b. Cambridge, Mass., grad. Harvard, 1915. His poetry, noted for its eccentricities of typography, language, and punctuation, usually seeks to convey a joyful, living awareness of sex and love. Among his 15 volumes of poetry are Tulips and Chimneys (1923), Is 5 (1926), and 95 Poems (1958). A prose account of his war internment in France, The Enormous Room (1922), is considered one of the finest books ever written about World War I. Cummings was also an accomplished artist whose paintings and drawings were exhibited in several one-man shows.

Bibliography: See his Complete Poems, 1913-1962 (2 vol., 1972); biographies by R. S. Kennedy (1980) and C. Sawyer-Lauçcanno (2004); N. Friedman, Cummings: The Growth of a Writer (1980).

Cummings, E. E. ( Edward Estlin Cummings) (1894–1962), American poet. His first book, The Enormous Room (1922), an account of his three-month internment in a French detention camp in 1917, won him an immediate international reputation. Tulips and Chimneys (1923) was the first of 12 volumes of poetry. Strongly influenced by the English Romantic poets, by Swinburne, and by Pound, and marked by Dada and the jazz age, the early poems attracted attention more for their experimental typography and technical skill than for their considerable lyric power. In Eimi (1933), a typographically difficult but enthralling journal of a trip to Russia, he broke in disillusion from his earlier socialist leanings, and thenceforth his work reflected his increasingly reactionary social and political views. His Complete Poems: 1910–1962 was published in 1980.

Cummings, E.E. ( Edward Estlin) (1894–1962) US poet. His first work was a novel, The Enormous Room (1922), which describes his imprisonment in a French detention centre. His reputation rests on his poetry, which usually exhibits sentimental emotion and/or cynical realism. It is famously characterized by unconventional spelling, punctuation and typography. His verse was collected in Complete Poems 1913–1962 (1972).