E.E Cummings (1894-1962)

E(dward) E(stlin) Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard University. In the early 1920s he lived in both New York City (where he was affiliated with the Dial magazine group, which included the poet Marianne Moore) and Paris (where he met the poets Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, and Archibald MacLeish). In his later years he lived primarily in New York. Cummings has always had a mixed critical reception, but at the time of his death he was one of the best-known and best-liked American poets. Like his paintings, Cummings’ poems reflect his devotion to the advantage; he was influenced by the impressionist and cubist movements in the visual arts and by imagism, vorticism, and futurism in literature. Through his radical experiments with syntax, typography, and line, he defamiliarized common subjects and thus challenged conventional ways of perceiving the world. Yet he respected many poetic conventions: regular rhyme schemes and traditional forms are often discernible under the fractured surface satires of “mostpeople” who blindly make their way thought the “unworld” are often scathing, and his poems convey an anarchistic, rebellious stance toward politics and religion, but Cummings, who celebrated joy, beauty, and sexual love, shared the Transcendentalists’ faith in humanity and their appreciation of the natural world. (Biographical Summary from Norton's Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.)