more photos (1)

E.E. Cummings’s Followers (3,893)

E.E. Cummings

Born

in Cambridge, Massachusetts, The United States

October 14, 1894

Died

September 03, 1962

Genre

Poetry

edit data

Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School.

He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.

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 Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School.

He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.

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.

After the war, he settled into a life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.

In 1920, The Dial published seven poems by Cummings, including "Buffalo Bill ’s.” Serving as Cummings’ debut to a wider American audience, these “experiments” foreshadowed the synthetic cubist strategy Cummings would explore in the next few years.

In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work toward further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.

The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted that Cummings is “one of the most individual poets who ever lived—and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings’s poems are loved because they are full of sentimentally, of sex, of more or less improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence.”

During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant.

At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.

source: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/e-... ...more

Combine Editions
E.E. Cummings’s books

Average rating: 4.23 · 90,449 ratings · 3,822 reviews · 263 distinct works • Similar authors

	100 Selected Poems 4.29 avg rating — 28,996 ratings — published 1923 — 31 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962 by E.E. Cummings, George J. Firmage (Editor) 4.35 avg rating — 21,341 ratings — published 1991 — 11 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Selected Poems by E.E. Cummings, Richard S. Kennedy (Editor) 4.22 avg rating — 14,030 ratings — published 1960 — 14 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Enormous Room 3.68 avg rating — 2,512 ratings — published 1922 — 235 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	95 Poems by E.E. Cummings, George J. Firmage (Editor) 4.25 avg rating — 1,977 ratings — published 1958 — 17 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Tulips & Chimneys by E.E. Cummings, Richard S. Kennedy (Introduction) 4.34 avg rating — 1,389 ratings — published 1923 — 20 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Erotic Poems by E.E. Cummings, George James Firmage (Editor) 3.96 avg rating — 1,490 ratings — published 2010 — 14 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Selected Poems, 1923-1958 4.18 avg rating — 1,099 ratings — published 1960 — 17 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Selection of Poems by E.E. Cummings, Horace Gregory (Introduction) 4.37 avg rating — 722 ratings — published 1965 — 8 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	73 Poems by E.E. Cummings, George J. Firmage (Afterword) 4.09 avg rating — 720 ratings — published 1963 — 16 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

More books by E.E. Cummings…

Quotes by E.E. Cummings (?)

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”
― E.E. Cummings

tags: attributed-no-source, courage

17086 likes

“I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)I am never without it (anywhere
I go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling)
I fear no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet)I want no world (for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)”
― E.E. Cummings

tags: love, poetry

11175 likes

“To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”
― E.E. Cummings

tags: poetry

6537 likes

See all E.E. Cummings's quotes »

Polls

Who is your favorite poet? (add to this list if needed)

Charles Bukowski

38 votes, 15.0%

E. E. Cummings

21 votes, 8.3%

Edgar Allan Poe (write-in)

19 votes, 7.5%

Robert Frost (write-in)

15 votes, 5.9%

Emily Dickinson

13 votes, 5.1%

Sylvia Plath

12 votes, 4.7%

Pablo Neruda (write-in)

10 votes, 4.0%

Mary Oliver

7 votes, 2.8%

Langston Hughes

7 votes, 2.8%

Allen Ginsberg

7 votes, 2.8%

william shakespear (write-in)

6 votes, 2.4%

Rumi (write-in)

6 votes, 2.4%

Walt Whitman (write-in)

6 votes, 2.4%

Rainer Maria Rilke (write-in)

5 votes, 2.0%

T.S. Elliot (write-in)

5 votes, 2.0%

Dorothy Parker (write-in)

4 votes, 1.6%

William Blake (write-in)

4 votes, 1.6%

D. H. Lawrence (write-in)

4 votes, 1.6%

Fernando Pessoa (write-in)

4 votes, 1.6%

Lord Alfred Tennyson (write-in)

4 votes, 1.6%

Nikki Giovanni

3 votes, 1.2%

John Keats (write-in)

3 votes, 1.2%

Federico García Lorca (write-in)

3 votes, 1.2%

Charles Baudelaire (write-in)

3 votes, 1.2%

Sherman Alexie

2 votes, 0.8%

Adrienne Rich

2 votes, 0.8%

Wallace Stevens (write-in)

2 votes, 0.8%

Andrea Gibson (write-in)

2 votes, 0.8%

Dylan Thomas (write-in)

2 votes, 0.8%

Dante (write-in)

2 votes, 0.8%

anne sexton (write-in)

2 votes, 0.8%

Seamus Heaney (write-in)

2 votes, 0.8%

Hart Crane (write-in)

2 votes, 0.8%

John Donne (write-in)

2 votes, 0.8%

Marge Piercy (Author)

1 vote, 0.4%

Li Young Lee

1 vote, 0.4%

Naomi Shihab Nye

1 vote, 0.4%

FERLINGHETTI, Lawrence

1 vote, 0.4%

Audre Lorde

1 vote, 0.4%

Mark Doty (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Gwendolyn Brooks (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Geoffrey Chaucer (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Stephen Crane (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Ellen Hopkins (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Ted Hughes (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Al Berto (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Mario Benedetti (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Percy Shelley (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Alexander Pope (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

E.E. Cummings (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Philip Levine (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Rafał Wojaczek (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Gérard de Nerval (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

A. Kamalei (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

cesar vallejo (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Arthur Rimbaud (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Lewis Carroll (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Jack Kerouac (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Martin Espada

0 votes, 0.0%

Stephen Dunn

0 votes, 0.0%

Dmitry Prigov

0 votes, 0.0%

Wisława Szymborska

0 votes, 0.0%

Suheir Hammad

0 votes, 0.0%

Hiroyuki Nishigaki

0 votes, 0.0%

253 total votes

19 comments

More...

Topics Mentioning This Author

topics	posts	views	last activity
Cult Books & Misc...: Cult Poets/Poetry	2	86	Jan 12, 2011 07:39PM
All the pages you...: Alisa's Book-o-ramma	46	196	Mar 23, 2011 02:50AM
Reading with Style: SP11 20.4 - A Poet's Non-Poetry	14	113	Mar 29, 2011 04:48PM
Reading with Style: SP11 Reading w/Style Completed Tasks	931	311	Jun 01, 2011 05:15AM
Brain Pain: Suggestions for "Brain Pain Poetry"	81	234	Jun 01, 2012 04:30AM
Reading with Style: Spring 2012 Reading w/Style Completed Tasks	998	270	Jun 01, 2012 04:59AM

More…

E.E. Cummings’s Followers (3,893)

E.E. Cummings

Combine EditionsE.E. Cummings’s books

Polls

Topics Mentioning This Author

Combine Editions
E.E. Cummings’s books