e e cummings: Bio & Intro

e e cummings

Poems: http://www.imsa.edu/~junkee/Cummings/Poems/

Edward Estlin Cummings

1894-1962

Quick Bio:

Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 14, 1894. He earned a BA from Harvard and volunteered to go to France during World War I with the Ambulance Corps. After the war, he stayed in Paris, writing and painting, and later returned to the US. He died in Conway, New Hampshire, in 1962.

Cummings is one of the most innovative contemporary poets, though in some ways is oddly traditional. He drops or distorts punctuation and syntax, but at the same time uses rhymes and off-rhymes more characteristic of earlier styles. Cummings published more than nine hundred poems and other works, some listed below.

FAQs:

What is cummings' love history?

E. E. Cummings married three times. His first marriage to Elaine Orr (who left her husband for him) lasted only 6 months. His second marriage, to Ann Barton was a stormy, passionate one lasting only a few years. He at last met Marion Morehouse, an actress, model, and photographer, whom he married and lived with for the remaining 30 years of his life.

Does he have any children?

Cummings had one daughter, Nancy, from his first marriage.

How do you really spell his name?

Some say "e. e. cummings" is the spelling legalized by the author himself as his signature to his poems, but this is apparently a myth. You may have to draw your own conclusions here, there isn't much in the way of consensus.

Collections

Tulips & Chimneys

(1922)

& (1925)

Is 5 (1926)

W (1931)

no thanks (1935)

New Poems (1938)

50 Poems (1940)

1 x 1 (1944)

XAIPE (1950)

95 Poems (1958)

73 Poems (1963)

Excerpt from the introduction to New Poems

The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople

-it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike.

Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootof-

minusone. You and I are human beings;mostpeople are snobs.

Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to most-

people? Catastrophe unmitigated. Socialrevolution. The cultured

aristocrat yanked out of his hyperexclusively ultravoluptuous super-

palazzo,and dumped into an incredibly vulgar detentioncamp swarming

with every conceivable species of undesireable organism. Mostpeople

fancy a garanteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness.

If mostpeople were to be born twice they'd improbably call it dying-

you and i are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human

beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the mystery of

growing:the mystery which happens only and whenever we are faithful

to ourselves. you and i wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it

becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now;and now is much too busy being a

little more than everything to seem anything,catastrophic included.

Life,for mostpeople,simply isn't. Take the socalled standardofliving.

What do mostpeople mean by "living"? They don't mean living. They

mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal

passivity which science,in its finite but unbounded wisdom,has suc-

ceeded in selling their wives. If science could fail,a mountain's a mammal.

Mostpeople's wives can spot a genuine delusion of embryonic omni-

potence immediately and will accept no subsitutes.

-luckily for us,a mountain is a mammal....

-e. e. cummings

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