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Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
and started to write poetry as a student at Harvard. His first
literary success, however, was a prose account of his experiences
as an ambulance driver in World War I, where he had been imprisoned
by his own side for expressing disdain for the bureaucratic
French army. After the war he divided his time between France,
Greenwich Village in New York City, and his family's home
in New Hampshire, writing several volumes of poetry while
working as a professional painter. His poetry is notable for
its celebration of the individual against society and for
its visually distinctive experimentation with capitalization,
punctuation, and line breaks. Cummings's works include
The Enormous Room (1922) and The Complete Poems
(1991).
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