1. Edward estlin cummings
American Poet and Artist
Born: October 14, 1894, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Died: September 3, 1962, North Conway, Conway, New Hampshire

2. CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
Home to Harvard University
Father was a Professor of Sociology at Harvard
Later became a Unitarian minister
E.E. graduated with a Master’s degree from Harvard
Helped establish the school’s literary magazine, The Harvard Monthly

3. World war 1 Enlisted as an Ambulance Driver in 1917.
Sent letters back home with anti-war views, professing he didn’t hate the Germans.
Arrested and held for 3 ½ months
Returned home and then was drafted again in
Wrote a novel about the experience, The Enormous Room

4. Cummings’ relationships
Married twice
1: (1924 – 1924)
2: (1929 – 1932)
Had one daughter
Was in a common-law relationship for 30 years (1932 – 1962) until his death

5. ideologies
E.E. Cummings

6. Spring is a symbol of rebirth and new beginnings.
Cummings sees Spring as representative of nature’s cycles and dominion over people and their ideas.

7. Cummings often speaks as a lover speaking to his love.
He prizes love highly as a natural phenomenon in contrast to society’s dictates

8. mass thought, group conformity, and commercialism.
POLITICAL SATIRE
Individuality. Much of his literary effort was directed against what he considered the principal enemies of this individuality—
mass thought, group conformity, and commercialism.
Cummings satirized what he called “mostpeople,” that is, the herd mentality found in modern society.

9. Carpe diem and memento mori
Life is short, so seize the day
Death will come for us all

10. Play
M. L. Rosenthal wrote in The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction: “The chief effect of Cummings’ jugglery with syntax, grammar, and diction was to blow open otherwise trite and bathetic motifs through a dynamic rediscovery of the energies sealed up in conventional usage.... He succeeded masterfully in splitting the atom of the cute commonplace.”

11. Non hero
The sign of his private self was the lower case “i,” which he used to refer to the speaker in many of his poems. It stood for a vulnerable, sensitive antihero, wide-eyed with wonder before the world and readily assertive of his natural feelings.