E. E. Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings, commonly known as e e cummings or E. E. Cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. During World War I, he worked as an ambulance driver and was imprisoned in an internment camp, which provided the basis for his novel The Enormous Room. The following year he published his first collection of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys, which showed his early experiments with grammar and typography. He wrote four plays, the most successful of which were HIM and Santa Claus: A Morality. He wrote EIMI, a travelog of the Soviet Union, and delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in poetry, published as i—six nonlectures. Fairy Tales, a collection of short stories, was published posthumously.
Cummings wrote approximately 2,900 poems. He is often regarded as one of the most important American poets of the 20th century. He is associated with modernist free-form poetry, and much of his work uses idiosyncratic syntax and lower-case spellings for poetic expression. M. L. Rosenthal wrote:
For Norman Friedman, Cummings's inventions "are best understood as various ways of stripping the film of familiarity from language to strip the film of familiarity from the world. Transform the word, he seems to have felt, and you are on the way to transforming the world."
The poet Randall Jarrell said of Cummings, "No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and the special reader." James Dickey wrote, "I think that Cummings is a daringly original poet, with more vitality and more sheer, uncompromising talent than any other living American writer." Dickey described himself as "ashamed and even a little guilty in picking out flaws" in Cummings's poetry, which he compared to noting "the aesthetic defects in a rose. It is better to say what must finally be said about Cummings: that he has helped to give life to the language."
Early life and education
Edward Estlin Cummings was born on October 14, 1894, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Edward Cummings and Rebecca Haswell, a well-known Unitarian upper-class couple in the city. His father was a professor at Harvard University who later became nationally known as the minister of South Congregational Church in Boston, Massachusetts. His mother, who loved to spend time with her children, played games with Edward and his sister, Elizabeth. From an early age, Cummings's parents supported his creative gifts. Cummings wrote poems and drew as a child, and he often played outdoors with the other children who lived in his neighborhood. He grew up in the company of family friends such as the philosophers William James and Josiah Royce. Many of Cummings's summers were spent on Silver Lake in Madison, New Hampshire, where his father had built two houses along the eastern shore. The family ultimately purchased the nearby Joy Farm where Cummings had his primary summer residence.He expressed transcendental leanings his entire life. As he matured, Cummings moved to an "I, Thou" relationship with God. His journals are replete with references to "le bon Dieu," as well as prayers for inspiration in his poetry and artwork. Cummings "also prayed for strength to be his essential self, and for relief of spirit in times of depression ".
Cummings wanted to be a poet from childhood and wrote poetry daily from age 8 to 22, exploring assorted forms. He studied Latin and Greek at Cambridge Latin High School. He attended Harvard University, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa society in 1915. The following year, he received a Master of Arts degree from the university. During his studies at Harvard, he developed an interest in modern poetry, which ignored conventional grammar and syntax and aimed for a dynamic use of language. His first published poems appeared in Eight Harvard Poets. Upon graduating, he worked for a book dealer.
Military service
In 1917, with the First World War going on in Europe, Cummings enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, a civilian volunteer organization. On the boat to France, he met William Slater Brown and they quickly became friends. Due to an administrative error, Cummings and Brown did not receive an assignment for five weeks, a period they spent exploring Paris. Cummings fell in love with the city, to which he would return throughout his life.During their service in the ambulance corps, the two young writers sent letters home that drew the attention of the military censors. They were known to prefer the company of French soldiers over fellow ambulance drivers. The two openly expressed anti-war views, Cummings spoke of his lack of hatred for the Germans. On September 21, 1917, five months after starting his belated assignment, Cummings and William Slater Brown were arrested by the French military on suspicion of espionage and undesirable activities. They were held for three and a half months in a military detention camp at the Dépôt de Triage, in La Ferté-Macé, Orne, Normandy.
They were imprisoned with other detainees in a large room. Cummings's father made strenuous efforts to obtain his son's release through diplomatic channels; although advised his son's release was approved, there were lengthy delays, with little explanation. In frustration, Cummings's father wrote a letter to President Woodrow Wilson in December 1917. Cummings was released on December 19, 1917, returning to his family in the U.S. by New Year's Day, 1918. Cummings, his father, and Brown's family continued to agitate for Brown's release. By mid-February, he, too, was America-bound. Cummings used his prison experience as the basis for his novel, The Enormous Room, about which F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "Of all the work by young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives—The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings ... Those few who cause books to live have not been able to endure the thought of its mortality." Later in 1918 he was drafted into the army. He served a training deployment in the 12th Division at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, until November 1918.
Career
Cummings returned to Paris in 1921, and lived there for two years before returning to New York. His collection Tulips and Chimneys was published in 1923, and his inventive use of grammar and syntax is evident. The book was heavily cut by his editor. XLI Poems was published in 1925. With these collections, Cummings made his reputation as an avant-garde poet.During the rest of the 1920s and 1930s, Cummings returned to Paris a number of times, and traveled throughout Europe. In 1931 Cummings traveled to the Soviet Union, recounting his experiences in Eimi, published two years later. During these years Cummings also traveled to Northern Africa and Mexico, and he worked as an essayist and portrait artist for Vanity Fair magazine.
In 1926, Cummings's parents were in a car crash; only his mother survived, although she was severely injured. Cummings later described the crash in the following passage from his i: six nonlectures series given at Harvard in 1952 and 1953:
His father's death had a profound effect on Cummings, who entered a new period in his artistic life. He began to focus on more important aspects of life in his poetry. He started this new period by paying homage to his father in the poem "my father moved through dooms of love".
In the 1930s, Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs was Cummings's publisher; he had started the Golden Eagle Press after working as a typographer and publisher.
Personal life
Marriages
Cummings's relationship with Elaine Orr began as a love affair in 1918, while she was still married to Scofield Thayer, one of Cummings' friends from Harvard. During this time, he wrote a large portion of his erotic poetry. The couple had a daughter while Orr was still married to Thayer. After Orr divorced Thayer, Cummings and Orr married on March 19, 1924. Thayer had been registered on the child's birth certificate as the father, but Cummings legally adopted her after his marriage to Orr. Although his relationship with Orr stretched back several years, the marriage was brief. On a trip to Paris, Orr met and fell in love with the Irish nobleman, future politician, author, journalist, and former banker Frank MacDermot. The couple separated after two months of marriage and divorced less than nine months later.Cummings then married Anne Minnerly Barton on May 1, 1929. This was his second and final marriage. They separated three years later, in 1932. That same year, Minnerly obtained a Mexican divorce; it was not officially recognized in the United States until August 1934. Anne died in 1970 aged 72.
His longest relationship, with Marion Morehouse, began in 1934, and lasted until his death.
In 1917, before his first marriage, Cummings shared several passionate love letters with a Parisian prostitute, Marie Louise Lallemand. Despite Cummings's efforts, he was unable to find Lallemand upon his return to Paris after serving at the front.
In 1934, Cummings met Marion Morehouse, a fashion model and photographer. It is not clear whether the two were ever formally married. Morehouse lived with Cummings until his death. He lived at 4 Patchin Place, Greenwich Village, New York City, where Cummings had resided since September 1924.
Political views
According to his testimony in EIMI, Cummings had little interest in politics until his trip to the Soviet Union in 1931. He subsequently shifted rightward on many political and social issues. Despite his radical and bohemian public image, he was a Republican and later an ardent supporter of Joseph McCarthy. Cummings was a longtime friend and correspondent of CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton.Later life and death
In 1952, his alma mater, Harvard University, awarded Cummings an honorary seat as a guest professor. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he gave in 1952 and 1955 were later collected as i: six nonlectures.Cummings spent the last decade of his life traveling, fulfilling speaking engagements, and spending time at his summer home, Joy Farm, in Silver Lake, New Hampshire. He died of a stroke on September 3, 1962, at the age of 67 at Memorial Hospital in North Conway, New Hampshire. Cummings was buried at Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts. At the time of his death, Cummings was recognized as the "second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost".
Cummings's papers are held at the Houghton Library at Harvard University and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.