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 born on October 14, 1894, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He came of age in the early 20th century, a period when many writers were testing old forms and looking for a new language for modern life. Cummings became closely associated with modernist free-form poetry, and much of his work used idiosyncratic syntax, unusual grammar, and lower-case spellings as part of its poetic expression.

He was raised in a well-known Unitarian, upper-class family. His father, Edward Cummings, was a professor at Harvard University and later became nationally known as minister of South Congregational Church in Boston. His mother, Rebecca Haswell Clarke Cummings, spent time playing with Edward and his sister, Elizabeth, and both parents supported his creative gifts from an early age. Cummings wrote poems and drew as a child, played outdoors with neighborhood children, and grew up around family friends including philosophers William James and Josiah Royce. Summers at Silver Lake in Madison, New Hampshire, and later at Joy Farm, also formed part of the world he returned to.

Cummings wanted to be a poet from childhood and wrote poetry daily from age 8 to 22, trying assorted forms. He studied Latin and Greek at Cambridge Latin High School, then attended Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1915 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He received a Master of Arts degree from Harvard the following year. At Harvard, he became interested in modern poetry that ignored conventional grammar and syntax and aimed for a more dynamic use of language. His first published poems appeared in Eight Harvard Poets in 1917.

World War I changed the course of his early adult life. In 1917, Cummings enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, a civilian volunteer organization. On the boat to France he met William Slater Brown, who became a close friend. The two spent time in Paris before receiving assignments, and Cummings fell in love with the city, returning to it throughout his life. Their letters home drew the attention of military censors; they were known to prefer the company of French soldiers, and both expressed anti-war views. In September 1917 they were arrested by the French military on suspicion of espionage and undesirable activities and held for three and a half months at La Ferté-Macé in Normandy. Cummings later used that prison experience as the basis for his novel The Enormous Room, published in 1922.

After the war, Cummings published his first poetry collection, Tulips and Chimneys, in 1923. Over his lifetime he wrote approximately 2,900 poems. He also wrote four plays, with HIM in 1927 and Santa Claus: A Morality in 1946 among the most successful. His other works included EIMI, a 1933 travelog of the Soviet Union, and the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in poetry, published as i—six nonlectures in 1953. Fairy Tales, a collection of short stories, appeared after his death in 1965.

What still gives Cummings’s writing its force is the sense that language can be made strange in order to make experience fresh again. His journals show a lifelong spiritual seriousness, including the prayer “may I be I,” which fits the independence of his art. Critics saw that independence clearly. Norman Friedman wrote that Cummings’s inventions stripped “the film of familiarity from language” and from the world. James Dickey said he “helped to give life to the language.” That is why his poems continue to meet readers with surprise, play, and a stubborn wish to be fully oneself.