E. E. Cummings
(1894–1962)

E. E. Cummings once said that poetry is "the only thing that matters." Cummings's ingenious, daring experiments with the look of poetry on the printed page have insured that his poems can never be mistaken for those of anyone else.

Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894, the son of a clergyman and a professor. While he was still a child, he formed the ambition of becoming a poet and began to practice toward his goal: He wrote a poem a day between the ages of eight and 22.

As a student at Harvard University, Cummings started to experiment with the bold innovations that would mark his poetry throughout his career. He altered conventional syntax and punctuation; he coined new words; he experimented with complex stanza patterns; and—most striking of all—he used new visual patterns on the page to call attention to a poem's rhythm, structure, or theme.

Cummings graduated from Harvard with honors. In 1917, during World War I, he traveled overseas as a member of a volunteer ambulance corps. Because of some chance comments in Cummings's letters home, French censors suspected him (wrongly) of treason, and Cummings was imprisoned in a detention camp for three months. Later in the war, Cummings was drafted into the United States Army.

Cummings published his first book, The Enormous Room, in 1922. This work was a fictionalized account of his imprisonment in France during the war. In this book, Cummings stressed the importance and the dignity of the individual in mass society—a theme to which he returned repeatedly throughout his career. For Cummings, the ironic absurdity of being imprisoned by his own side during the war was balanced by the opportunity the episode gave him for contemplation and inner growth.

During the 1920s, Cummings lived in a small apartment in Greenwich Village in New York City. Active as a painter as well as a poet, he enjoyed a period of great creativity during these years—gaining numerous commissions for pictures and publishing four volumes of poetry. These collections were generally well reviewed. "No modern poet to my knowledge," wrote one critic, "has such a clear, childlike perception as E. E. Cummings—a way of coming smack against things with unaffected delight and wonder. This candor … results in breathtakingly clean vision." One of Cummings's early biographers commented that the poet's experiments with syntax and punctuation "are best understood as various ways of stripping the film of familiarity from language in order to strip the film of familiarity from the world. Transform the word, he seems to have felt, and you are on the way to transforming the world."

In 1933, after a journey to Russia (then called the Soviet Union), Cummings published a travel diary entitled Eimi (the Greek word for "I am"). In this book, he bitterly attacked the communist dictatorship for what he believed was its dehumanizing repression of the individual.

Over the next 20 years, the style of Cummings's poetry changed very little, and some critics began to question this apparent lack of development. In 1959, however, fellow poet James Dickey praised Cummings as a "daringly original poet, with more vitality and more sheer, uncompromising talent than any other living American writer." Cummings received the Bollingen Prize for poetry, a highly coveted award given by Yale University, in 1957.

In 1952, Cummings was chosen to deliver the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton lectures on poetry at Harvard. He later published these lectures in book form with a typically playful title: i: six nonlectures. Humor and a zest for life are seldom absent in Cummings's work, and his poetry often celebrates love. Summing up his work in the Harvard lectures, he declared, "I am someone who proudly and humbly affirms that love is the mystery-of-mysteries." Cummings died in North Conway, New Hampshire, in 1962.

Typography is the art of designing and arranging material printed from type. At first glance, the most distinctive feature of a Cummings poem is its unconventional look on the page. Cummings experimented with many typographical conventions: for example, capitalization (or the lack of it), punctuation, line breaks, hyphenation, and verse breaks. Although these features frequently produce humor and give his poetry an air of playfulness, Cummings's use of graphic design also jolts the reader, often offering new insights into a poem's subject matter and new angles of vision on the poet's themes.

For example, in "spring is like a perhaps hand," the two stanzas contain many repeated words that occur in slightly different positions. The single lines at the end of each stanza—"changing everything carefully" and "without breaking anything"—stand out by contrast with the stanza blocks. Both the structure of the poem and its look on the page reinforce Cummings's main idea about spring: It is a season of gradual but wondrous change and development.

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