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1894-1962 poet and painter Edward Estlin Cummings was born in In his works, Cummings experimented
radically with form, punctuation, spelling and syntax, abandoning traditional
techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of
poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling
into his signature style and not pressing his work towards further evolution.
Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers,
for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to
subjects such as war and sex. At the time of his death in 1962, he was the
second most widely read poet in the At College, among the ones he saw often were Dos Passos, the conservative poet Robert Hillyer (though with some distrust on both sides), and two very rich young men, James Sibley Watson and Scofield Thayer, who greatly admired his poems and drawings. He got his degree from Harvard (magna cum laude) with honors in Literature, Greek and English. At the Commencement, wherein he spoke on behalf of the graduates, he shocked his classmates and their parents—those who listened—by speaking on "The New Art," with examples from Amy Lowell and Gertrude Stein. At one point, he was in full revolt against almost
everything—except personal integrity—that From 1923 to 1926 Cummings published four books of poetry: Tulips and Chimneys, & (he wore his titles cut short), XLI Poems, and Is 5. Many or most of the poems in all four were written either at college or during the burst of activity and experiment that followed his release from the detention barracks at La Ferte. However, none of these first four books was a popular success. With Cummings the critics were severe: they condemned his fleshly realism, his experiments with typography, and his custom of using a small "i" for the first-personal pronoun. "e.e. Cummings" they called him, with a visible curl of the lip. But the more his work was condemned by critics, the more it was admired by many of the younger writers and the more he was adopted as one of their spokesmen, along with Dos Passos and Hemingway. A new book of poems, VV (which he also called "ViVa"), appeared in 1931 and was a mild disappointment to his readers. Mostly the book deals with the same themes as his earlier work, but it is less exuberant than Is 5—much less of a hurrah than the title promises—and it speaks less directly for the poet's generation. Cummings lived into the late summer of 1962 and continued working to the last day. His career, if not his opinions, had been remarkably self-consistent. Except for his painting, carried on through the years, and except for a few lively incursions into prose—of which The Enormous Room is the most durable—he had never worked at any trade except that of writing verse. "Peintre et poete," he had told a French policeman who asked his profession before arresting him in 1923. Poet and painter—and nothing else—he remained to the end. Sources: www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=157 www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/cummings.html |
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