E.E. Cummings
Cummings grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father was a sociology professor at Harvard and a noted Unitarianclergyman. Demonstrating a strong interest in poetry and art from an early age, Cummings enjoyed the full support and encouragement of his parents. He attended Harvard from 1911 to 1915, studying literature and writing daily. He eventually joined the editorial board of the Harvard Monthly, a college literary magazine, where he worked with his close friends S. Foster Damon and John Dos Passos. In his senior year he became fascinated by avant-garde art, modernism, and cubism, an interest reflected in his graduation dissertation, "The New Art." In this paper, Cummings extolled modernism as practiced by Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and Pablo Picasso. He also began incorporating elements of these styles into his own poetry and paintings. His first published poems appeared in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets in 1917. These pieces feature experimental verse forms and the lower-case personal pronoun "i"--symbolizing both the humbleness and the uniqueness of the individual--that became his trademark. The copy editor of the book, however, mistook Cummings's intentions as typographical errors and made "correcti
The thematic concerns of Cummings's first three volumes of verse are repeated in is 5 (1926), in which the author also included satiric and anti-war pieces, notably "my sweet old etcetera" and "i sing of Olaf glad and big," a poem about the death of a conscientious objector. W(ViVa) (1931) contains sonnets and other poems attacking conservative and uncreative thinking. Along with his barbs at society, Cummings also composed such lyrical poems as "somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond," in which he extolled love, nature, the mystery of faith, individualism, and imaginative freedom. The collection No Thanks (1935), written in response to his trip to the Soviet Union, treats thetheme of artistic freedom in an especially powerful manner. 50 Poems (1940) contains such popular pieces as "anyone lived in a pretty how town" and an elegy to his father, "my father moved through dooms of love." 1 x 1 (1944) solidified Cummings's reputation as one of America's premier poets. It presents a more optimistic, lif -affirming viewpoint than do the poems written during Cummings's period of personal and political disaffection in the 1930s. Structured in a pattern of darkness moving toward light, 1 x 1 begins with poems that denigrate businessmen and politicians and ends with poems praising nature and love. In his late verse--XAIPE: Seventy-One Poems (1950), 95 Poems (1958), and the posthumously published 73 Poems (1963)--Cummings effects a softer, more elegiac note, recalling his early affinity for New England Transcendentalism and English Romanticism.
Some topics in this essay:
XLI Poems,
Collected Poems,
Soviet Union,
Pablo Picasso,
Prize Poetry,
Harvard Poets,
Tulips Chimneys,
Unitarianclergyman Demonstrating,
Dos Passos,
Seventy-One Poems,
tulips chimneys,
50 poems,
xli poems,
original manuscript,
soviet union,
1 1,
cummings remains,
pablo picasso,
love nature,
artistic freedom,
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Approximate Word count = 1201
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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