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Him: A Play
"Him," (1927) is a play in 3 Acts (20 scenes) about "a creatively blocked artist and his lover, Me, struggling to bridge the impasse in their relationship and in his art."
139 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1927
About the author
E.E. Cummings
373 books3,963 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 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 2, 2013
This website was a great help in providing background for some of the more obscure sections. I think the following quote from Cummings himself about the play is important to keep in mind while reading it:
Relax and give the play a chance to strut its stuff—relax, stop wondering what it is all 'about'—like many strange and familiar things, Life included, this Play isn't 'about,' it simply is. . . . Don't try to enjoy it, let it try to enjoy you. DON'T TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT, LET IT TRY TO UNDERSTAND YOU.
It reads like a dream at times, and I think you're meant to be moved by it as if by a dream, not necessarily understanding the logic of what's happening.
March 14, 2014
him is a beautiful work of art, nothing less. I had the fortune to be stage manager for a early 1970's production of the play at San Francisco State University, directed by Dr. Stuart Chenoweth. Highly respectful of cumming's poetry, with deep understanding of the background to the play in cumming's life, the production was electric and exciting throughout. While the play has the reputation of being unstagable, the truth remains blissfully evident: the play is true theatre. Dr. Chenoweth's production realized almost all of this reality. Every rehearsal discovered more depths in the writing, leading to magical public performances.
October 8, 2018
Welp. I did not like that. I'm sure it has something to say about dreams or consciousness or whatever, but I literally couldn't finish in the last 10 pages because I found the written speech of the Barker too annoying to parse. I am currently trying to learn more about theater and monologues and this didn't help at all. I had no patience for it, but surely someone else can.
July 16, 2007
Totally pretentious and avant-garde in the worst ways, but those are things I'll praise in Cummings and few others. He was interested in what it means to be an artist, and if you have the stomach for it, this play is a good place to start.
April 13, 2012
A most enjoyable offbeat little play (with a large cast, for the "chorus" scenes). If there's one role I've always wanted to perform, it would be the title role in this play. However, I fear that's not likely, since I've never actually heard of the play being produced.
June 16, 2009
I tried. I tried so hard to get through this play. I love Cumming's poetry and I really wanted to love this too. What I did manage to get through was definitely typical of Cumming's work. If you struggle following the plot in a regular play, then don't attempt this, as it will only confuse you.
February 1, 2013
snatches of really pure writing drowning in absolute nonsense.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews