E.E. Cummings (1894-1962)
E(dward) E(stlin) Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and educated
at Harvard University. In the early 1920's he lived in both New York
City (where he was affiliated with the Dial magazine group, which
included the poet Marianne Moore) and Paris (where he met the poets
Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, and Archibald MacLeish). In his later years he
lived primarily in New York. Cummings has always had a mixed critical
reception, but at the time of his death he was one of the best-known and
best-liked American poets. Like his paintings, Cummings' poems reflect
his devotion to the avant-garde; he was influenced by the impressionist
and cubist movements in the visual arts and by imagism, vorticism, and
futurism in literature. Through his radical experiments with syntax,
typography, and line, he de-familiarized common subjects and thus
challenged conventional ways of percieving the world. Yet he respected
many poetic conventions: regular rhyme schemes and traditional forms
are often discernable under the fractured surface of his poems; the sonnet
was a particular favorite. His satires of "mostpeople" who blindly make
their way through the "unworld" are often scathing, and his poems convey
an anarchistic, rebellious stance toward politics and religion, but Cummings,
who celebrated joy, beauty, and sexual love, shared the Transcendentalists'
faith in humanity and their appreciation of the natural world.
(From The Norton Anthology of Poetry fourth edition)