E. E. Cummings Books

Franklin Library books:
Collected Poems of  E. E. Cummings - 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature - 1977


E. E. (Edward Estlin) Cummings (1894-1962) was an American poetry writer, and author who was born in Cambridge Massachusetts. E. E. Cummings was a Harvard University Graduate, and attended high school at Cambridge Latin High School. He served as an ambulance driver in World War One, and was wrongfully sentenced to prison for 3 months on the accusation of treason by France. The novel The Enormous Room (1922) by E. E. Cummings was written as a reflection of his time prison. However despite his wrongful prison time, E. E. Cummings remained in France following World War One and began to study art and write poetry. Following the war and time spent learning about art, he began to spend time in American with frequent travel back to France. During this time the first book of poetry by E. E. Cummings was published titled Tulips and Chimneys (1923). Following the death of his father in a car accident, he described the event in i: six nonlectures (1953) a collection of his lectures at Harvard University.

The poetry of E. E. Cummings is notable for its eccentric typography, use of slang, distorted syntax, and use of Jazz style rhythms. His poetry can be viewed as basically sentimental verges and lyrics. Of the notable novels and books of poetry by E. E. Cummings are The Enormous Room (1922), Tulips and Chimneys (1923), XLI Poems (1925), is 5 (1926), HIM (1927), ViVa (1931), Eimi (1933), No Thanks (1935), Collected Poems (1960), 50 Poems (1940), 1 × 1 (1944), XAIPE (1950), i—six nonlectures (1953), Poems, 1923-1954 (1954), and 95 Poems (1958). The following books were published after E. E. Cummings died in 1962: 73 Poems (1963), and Fairy Tales (1965).

 

At the time of his death in 1962, E. E. Cummings was, next to Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in America. Combining Thoreau's controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited bohemian, Cummings, together with Pound, Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. He is recognized on the one hand as the author of some of the most beautiful lyric poems written in the English language, and on the other as one of the most inventive American poets of his time in the worlds of Richard Kostelanetz, "the major American poet of the middle-twentieth-century."