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Eimi
A reissue of E. E. Cummings's long-unavailable, yet pointed and moving story of a journey through Soviet Russia.
Unavailable for more than fifty years, EIMI finally returns. While sometimes termed a "novel," it is better described as a novelistic travelogue, the diary of a trip to Russia in the 1930s during the rise of the Stalinist government. Despite some contempt for what he witnesses, Cummings's narrator has an effective, occasionally hilarious way of evoking feelings of accord and understanding. As Ezra Pound wrote, Cummings's Soviet Union is laid "out there pellucidly on the page in all its Slavic unfinishedness, in all of its Dostoievskian slobberyness....Does any man wish to know about Russia? 'EIMI'!"
A stylistic tour de force, EIMI is a mélange of styles and tones, the prose containing many abbreviations, grammatical and syntactical shifts, typographical devices, compounds, and word coinages. This is Cummings's invigorating and unique voice at its finest, and EIMI is without question one of his most substantial accomplishments.
Unavailable for more than fifty years, EIMI finally returns. While sometimes termed a "novel," it is better described as a novelistic travelogue, the diary of a trip to Russia in the 1930s during the rise of the Stalinist government. Despite some contempt for what he witnesses, Cummings's narrator has an effective, occasionally hilarious way of evoking feelings of accord and understanding. As Ezra Pound wrote, Cummings's Soviet Union is laid "out there pellucidly on the page in all its Slavic unfinishedness, in all of its Dostoievskian slobberyness....Does any man wish to know about Russia? 'EIMI'!"
A stylistic tour de force, EIMI is a mélange of styles and tones, the prose containing many abbreviations, grammatical and syntactical shifts, typographical devices, compounds, and word coinages. This is Cummings's invigorating and unique voice at its finest, and EIMI is without question one of his most substantial accomplishments.
432 pages, Hardcover
First published December 17, 2007
19 people are currently reading
246 people want to read
About the author
E.E. Cummings
370 books3,957 followersEdward 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-...
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-...
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
March 8, 2011
A hilarious romp through Soviet Russia while wearing cubist glasses. I had my doubts as to whether I'd get on with this initially, but it was one of the books that persuaded me that it was time to tackle Finnegans Wake properly. Cummings's fractured prose is a wonder to behold - I'd recommend it without hesitation.
July 21, 2020
e e's travel journal created on his trip to Russia in May and June of 1931. He presents his clear eyed encounter with the joylous experiment in force and fear of the Russian dark shadowy superstate in difficult, yet rewarding, cubist prose.
July 20, 2018
"If only Mr. Cummings would let his readers read him," complains an early critic. Yes.
This book is substantially more difficult, at what seem like important parts, than the lyrics, because the lyrics are over sooner and there's less of a feeling of distressed bewilderment about fourteen lines than there is about 450 pages. But, this is really a fascinating document, if you're interested either in twentieth century poetry or twentieth century world history. Cummings, poet, travels to Russia during the early part of Stalin's reign because he'd heard, like everyone else in liberal circles at the time, that it was the new thing humanity was doing, the beginning of the happy ending, or something like that. His journey was a mess of frustration and fear and bizarre ideologies bouncing menacingly past one another, and here he is telling everyone about it in 1931: the fact that he decided to tell it in a totally unpoliticizable way is part of the point, though of course it is also a large part of what made the book absolutely unknown for the last eighty years.
IF you have patience, and a large willingness to be bewildered, this is a good book for you.
This book is substantially more difficult, at what seem like important parts, than the lyrics, because the lyrics are over sooner and there's less of a feeling of distressed bewilderment about fourteen lines than there is about 450 pages. But, this is really a fascinating document, if you're interested either in twentieth century poetry or twentieth century world history. Cummings, poet, travels to Russia during the early part of Stalin's reign because he'd heard, like everyone else in liberal circles at the time, that it was the new thing humanity was doing, the beginning of the happy ending, or something like that. His journey was a mess of frustration and fear and bizarre ideologies bouncing menacingly past one another, and here he is telling everyone about it in 1931: the fact that he decided to tell it in a totally unpoliticizable way is part of the point, though of course it is also a large part of what made the book absolutely unknown for the last eighty years.
IF you have patience, and a large willingness to be bewildered, this is a good book for you.
Want to read
July 2, 2009I started this book twice, but had to return it to the library before we moved. I hope to find a copy down here and pick up where I left off. It's a bit tough to read--as its prose is much like cummings poetry, with minimal structure and punctuation.
January 8, 2008
hard to read at first but worth it. i think it's better than "the enormous room."
August 4, 2012
Terrifically off putting at first, but builds to a virtuosic crescendo that took my breath away.
July 13, 2022
I read the William Slone Associates, INC 1933 edition, found in a used book store.
Currently reading
December 10, 2009An excellent bookless.
Want to read
January 4, 2011Cumming's journal about his journey through Soviet Union
September 5, 2022
A travel journal in experimental prose, EIMI is the perfect medium for analyzing an experimental state.
October 2, 2014
LOVED. So funny!
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews