History Focus
October 14

American poet and painter who first attracted attention, in an age of literary experimentation, for his eccentric punctuation and phrasing..

Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894. He received his B.A. in 1915 and his M.A. in 1916, both from Harvard.

During the First World War, Cummings worked as an ambulance driver in France. He was interned in a prison camp by the French authorities for his outspoken anti-war convictions. This experience deepened Cummings' distrust of officialdom and was symbolically recounted in his first book, The Enormous Room. In the 1920s and '30s he divided his time between Paris, where he studied art, and
New York City. Later he settled into a life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris.

In his work, 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.

In all he wrote 12 volumes of verse, assembled in his two-volume Complete Poems (1968). Cummings' moods were alternately satirical and tough or tender and whimsical. He frequently used the language of the streets and material from burlesque and the circus. His erotic poetry and love lyrics had a childlike candour and freshness. At the time of his death in 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost.

Cummings' name is often styled "e.e. cummings" in the mistaken belief that the poet legally changed his name to lowercase letters only. Cummings used capital letters only irregularly in his verse and did not object when publishers began lowercasing his name, but he himself capitalized his name in his signature and in the title pages of original editions of his books. 

Sources: Encyclopedia Britanica | Microsoft(R) Encarta(R)