E. E. Cummings
- E.E. Cummings: BritannicaE.E. Cummings, in full Edward Estlin Cummings, (born October 14, 1894, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.—died September 3, 1962, North Conway, New Hampshire), American poet and painter who first attracted attention, in an age of literary experimentation, for his unconventional punctuation and phrasing...
- E. E. Cummings: Poetry FoundationEdward Estlin (E.E.) Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He attended the Cambridge Latin High School, where he studied Latin and Greek. Cummings earned both his BA and MA from Harvard, and his earliest poems were published in Eight Harvard Poets (1917). As one of the most innovative poets of his time, Cummings experimented with poetic form and language to create a distinct personal style...
Research & Reference
- E.E. Cummings: BiographyE.E. Cummings was an innovative poet known for his lack of stylistic and structural conformity, as seen in volumes like Tulips and Chimneys and XLI Poems. After self-publishing for much of his career, he eventually found wide recognition. A playwright and visual artist as well, Cummings died on September 3, 1962...
- E. E. Cummings: Whitney Museum of ArtPeruse the paintings of poet E. E. Cummings through the Whitney Museum of Art.
- E. E. Cummings: Yale UniversityBorn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard University where he received both his B.A. and M.A., Edward Estlin Cummings went on to become one of the most widely read American poets of his generation...
E. E. Cummings: An American Original
- E. E. Cummings: An American OriginalThe Harvard-educated writer, who preferred to sign his name in all lowercase, is known for the eccentricity of the typography and punctuation he employed to reinforce the rhythm and meaning of words. His poems truly leap off the page when performed aloud. This program, which celebrated the beauty of the individual, is set in a re-creation of New York’s Greenwich Village, where e. e. cummings lived for nearly 40 years.
Author's Works & Perspectives
50 poems
In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.
Complete poems, 1904-1962
At the time of his death in 1962, E. E. Cummings was, next to Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in America. Combining Thoreau's controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited bohemian, Cummings, together with Pound, Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. He is recognized on the one hand as the author of some of the most beautiful lyric poems written in the English language, and on the other as one of the most inventive American poets of his time in the worlds of Richard Kostelanetz, "the major American poet of the middle-twentieth-century."
Poetry of E.E. Cummings Performed
- Poetry of E.E. Cummings PerformedWilliam Shatner, Tom Poston, Eleanor Ayer, Frances Sternhagen, James Broderick, and Ralph Bunker perform EE. Cumming's poetry and George Santayana's essays on this episode of Camera Three.