by jessie sidhu and liz abramov e.e. cummings

 Most known as e.e. cummings  Edward Estlin Cummings  2900 poems  2 autobiographical novels  4 plays  Artist as well  1962, second most widely read poet in the USA (after Robert Frost) Background Info

 Carnbridge, MA 1894  Began writing  Harvard  B.A.  M.A.  Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound  st Book Eight Harvard Poets Biography

 Named after his father, Edward Cummings  Father-Harvard Graduate  Married three times  Married Marion Morehouse (model/actress)  30 yrs Biography

 5 months ambulance driver in World War II  Sent to French prison camp  Novel: The Enormous Room  Traveled through Europe  Pablo Picasso  Elizabethan Song, 18 th Century Satire, Pindaric Ode  Buried in Boston, MA (1962) Biography

 Academy of American Poets Fellowship  Two Guggenheim Fellowships  Charles Eliot Norton Professorship (Harvard)  Bollinger Prize in Poetry (1958)  Ford Foundation Grant Honors

 Very unique style  “Disordered syntax” + “typographical disarrangements”  “Arranged derangement”, integers of the word  curve of ‘e’, rhythm of ‘m’, astonishment of ‘o’  Word coinage  kept already existing root words, joining to them new affixes Poets Style

 “Tmesis”  his signature  Varied use of parentheses  “Visual stanza” not rhyme/ meter, but shape thought  Free verse  Visual appearance of most poems=based on interest in contemporary art forms Poets Style

 Strange use of space + punctuation marks  Comma used where period is expected  Words were literary art  If the printer messed up on a word- interfere with his “arrangement”  Themes of poems  Love + nature  Incorporated imagery about nature and death Poets style

 At early age, most critics thought of him as a potential lyric & satiric poet  Critics believed that his innovative verse techniques & his lyric/satiric talents successfully blended  Structure of poems connected to meaning of poems Positive Criticism

 Thought techniques were:  Cheap and shallow  not poetic  Style made critics upset, said it was;  Unusual and thought style to call attention to itself rather than to describe a theme  Objected explicit treatment of sexuality  Believe style didn’t evolve throughout career  Structure drew readers’ attention from actual poem  Many critics believed he didn’t develop much as a writer through his career Negative Criticism

e.e. cummings “I am someone who proudly and humbly affirms that love is the mystery-of-mysteries… that ‘an artist, a man, a failure’ is… a naturally and miraculously whole human being… whose only happiness is to transcend himself, whose every agony is to grow.”  Unique poet  Original artist  Incredible modernist poet of consequence