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Biography
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).
Explorations
Cummings's poems have a unique and interesting look on
the printed page, and we can see resemblances between his
work and poems of Carl Sandburg,
Vachel Lindsay, and other open-form poets who worked to reconcile
verse with modern democratic values and to speak to a large
audience. If Cummings is a "clever" and "agreeable" poet
among the Modernists, is he in any sense profound? Does his
love of irony intensify his achievement as an artist?
1. Poem, or Beauty Hurts Mr. Vinal includes
many American commercial product names and language from
advertisements. What do you see as the theme of the poem?
How does this theme develop from the opening of the poem
to the final lines?
2. Several of these poems address death. How is death
conceived of by Cummings? Are there similarities to the
way in which Whitman conceives
of death? Or to William Carlos Williams's
conception of it? Consider the presentation of death in
three poems by Cummings.
3. Cummings is fond of irony, especially in his closing
stanzas and lines. Describe how he uses irony and how it
advances or undercuts important themes in his poems.
Other sites to consult:
Academy
of American Poets Cummings page.
Includes a biography, bibliography, seven poems,
and an audio
file of Cummings reading "why must itself up every
of a park." Also features links to other Cummings
sites on the Web and to the AAP online exhibition "The
Modernist Revolution: Make It New!" in which Cummings
is discussed.
An
Unofficial E. E. Cummings Starting Point.
Includes a chronology and annotated bibliography
and links. (Site maintained by Douglas M. Wipf.)
Who
pays (any) attention to the syntax of things.
A student site that includes a biography, audio clips,
pictures, poems, and links.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cummings/cummings.htm:
Modern American Poetry’s E.E. Cummings page.
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=157&CFID=9020342&CFTOKEN=13372336:
The Academy of American Poets’ E.E. Cummings page.
http://www.gvsu.edu/english/Cummings/Index.htm: Spring:
The Journal of the E.E. Cummings Society.
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