Edward
Estlin Cummings was born and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusettes. His parents
were both liberals who fully supported him from an early age to pursue the arts
and poetry. His father was a Harvard professor and a Unitarian minister. Cummings
attended Harvard from 1911 to 1915, enjoying literature more and more, writing
daily, and rejecting the conformist culture. He graduated with a degree in classics.
Upon graduation, Cummings was employed at a mail-order book company, and began to write full-time. With the onset of World War I, Cummings volunteered for the French Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service. He was particularily delighted with Paris, entranced by the bohemian atmosphere. He also discovered Pablo Picasso’s artwork, which became an inspiration later on in his own cubist works. While working for the ambulance service, Cummings was wrongfully arrested and held in an interment camp for four months, charged with espionage. Fortunately for the rest of the world, this was the setting for his first book, “The Enormous Room,” which recounts his experience. It is filled with many of the themes that would become prominent in his works for the rest of his life, including individual against society, against the government, and against all forms of authority. It contained a witty and satirical voice that would landmark most of his work.
"Progress is a comfortable disease,” E. E. Cummings once wrote, which sets the tone magnificently for his life. Cummings was an American poet and painter whose innovative and controversial verse placed him at the forefront of the modernist movement. He rejected conformity, and lived this way through his poetry. His use of eccentric punctuation, idiomatic speech, compressed words, dislocated syntax, and unusual typography, line division, and capitalization made him famous, and allowed him to capture the particulars of a single movement or moment in time in each line that he wrote. His inspiration for his eccentric and unusual writing came from his artwork, as he was a devote student modernist art forms such as cubism and futurism.
Cummings list of works include The Enormous
Room (1922), Him (1927), CIOPW (1931), EIMI (1933), Tom (1935), Santa Claus
(1946), i: six nonlectures (1953), Adventures in Value (1962), A Miscellany
Revised (1965), Fairy Tales (1965), Selected Letters (1969).
E. E. Cummings died of a stroke on September 3rd, 1962. He remains one of the
most beloved and remembered poets of his time, and is the second most read poet
after his death, next to Robert Frost. He will always be remembered for his
fun, playful spirit and satirical way of looking at authority. His works, in
his own words, are, “ecstasy and anguish, being and becoming; the immortality
of the creative imagination and the indomitability of the human spirit.”
Information taken from:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cummings/cummings.htm
http://www.empirezine.com/spotlight/cummings/cummings.htm
Biography
Poems and biography of E.E. Cummings
Americans Poems website of E. E. Cummings.
E.E.Cummings self-portrait and links
Website with links to sources about Cummings, including an oil painting self-portrait.
E. E. Cummings - The Academy of American Poets
Academy of American Poets website about E. E. Cummings.
An Artist Remembered: E.E. Cummings biography
Biography of E. E. Cummings as done by the Washington Post.
E. E. Cummings' biograpical timeline.
Very comprehensive site of collections of selected poems, early letters of E. E. Cummings, and pictures of E. E. Cummings' early life.
Biography, including information about his first book.
Biography and list of selected works.
Chronology of E. E. Cummings life, including links to other sources.
E. E. Cummings' Journal
Spring, The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society
Website of Spring, The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society.
Commentary of the capitalization of E.E. Cummings' name.
The Enormous Room
The Enormous Room: Notes and Links
Website devoted to Cummings' autobiography, The Enormous Room. Includes study guides for each chapter and links to other sources.
E.E.Cummings. The Enormous Room. 1920.
Full online text of The Enormous Room.
Explanation of what exactly E. E. Cummings did in Paris before he was arrested during World War I.
Places, People, and Publications
All about the people, places and publications E. E. Cummings wrote about in his lifetime.
E. E. Cummings' Artwork
The Paintings of E. E. Cummings
Pictures and explanations of E. E. Cummings' artwork.