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e. e. cummings: Selected Works
This Norton Critical Edition includes:
• 166 poems spanning the range of Cummings’s career, selections of his prose and dramatic writing, twelve paintings and sketches, and three facsimiles of his drafts—the first ever annotated and cross-genre collection of his work aimed at student readers.
• Annotations, headnotes, and a thorough introduction by Milton A. Cohen, along with an essay by Cohen chronicling the development of Cummings’s idiosyncratic style.
• Four contemporary reviews and six critical essays—by Randall Jarrell, Edmund Wilson, Isabelle Alfandary, and Michael Webster, among others—prefaced by an overview.
• Comparative studies of two poems—featuring five different responses to each—designed to promote classroom discussion.
• A chronology, a selected bibliography, and an index of the poems.
• 166 poems spanning the range of Cummings’s career, selections of his prose and dramatic writing, twelve paintings and sketches, and three facsimiles of his drafts—the first ever annotated and cross-genre collection of his work aimed at student readers.
• Annotations, headnotes, and a thorough introduction by Milton A. Cohen, along with an essay by Cohen chronicling the development of Cummings’s idiosyncratic style.
• Four contemporary reviews and six critical essays—by Randall Jarrell, Edmund Wilson, Isabelle Alfandary, and Michael Webster, among others—prefaced by an overview.
• Comparative studies of two poems—featuring five different responses to each—designed to promote classroom discussion.
• A chronology, a selected bibliography, and an index of the poems.
- GenresPoetry
384 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2019
4 people are currently reading
58 people want to read
About the author
E.E. Cummings
369 books3,943 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 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 30, 2025
An interesting collection - well worth the read.
October 2, 2025
“Returning to New York in early 1919, he took up his twin obsessions in earnest (writing and painting) …though Cummings always profess to despise analytical thinking, he carefully studied the techniques of modernist painters, particularly Paul Cèzanne and Pablo Picasso …
“Cummings’s reading of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud evolved into anesthetics that govern both his painting and poetry in this period…
an example of this unified aesthetics is Cummings’s concept of a wholistic ‘seeing around’ and ‘knowing around’ which aimed to evoke the unseen sides of experience through a juxtaposition of opposite…
“He also juxtaposed opposing attitude such as lust and disgust in his experience with prostitute. He was no longer merely looking (see ‘the dirty colors of her kiss have just’ page 35 and PP 262–68) Though Freud did discuss these contradictory attitudes, Cummings’s own conflicted emotions about sex with prostitutes— desire, lingering puritanical guilt, bourgeois disgust at the encounters sordidness and postcoital detachment – Directly informed these juxtapositions positions.
no such ambivalence complicates his early satires: they are wickedly, playful without being particularly nasty, the self-absorbed Cambridge ladies whose ‘permanent faces coyly bandy / scandal’; the US president (Warren G Harding), who was ‘the only man woman or child who wrote / a single declarative sentence with seven grammatical / errors’; a post-war, money worshiping ‘age of dollars and no sense’ increasingly dominated by advertising…
Closely related to his satires are his anti-war poems about World War I. like much literature about the war written by those who experienced it first hand, Cummings’s poems emphasize the enormous and unbridgeable golf between the participant’s actual experience and the naïve, ignorant and bloodthirsty ‘folks back home’ who ‘Could and what / is more did tell you just / what everybody was fighting for’ but who ‘don’t want // to no’ what it was really like… Cummings’s most famous anti-war poem, however, has nothing playful about it as a memorializes, the torture and death of Olaf, a conscientious objector, ‘whose warmest heart recoiled at war.’…
Unquestionably, however it was Cummings’s typographical and spatial innovations that gained him the most recognition in these years and established his reputation…
A good example of this spatial flexibility, as well as other typographical techniques, is the poem ‘i will be’ (see page 34)
Thematically, this poem is all about movement and anticipation, using the conceit of the street: the speakers anticipated coital movements in his lovers ‘street’; his eagerness for her arrival as she walks down real street; pigeons flying in circles above the street; and the day’s movement from sunlight to twilight to Moonlight. The lines themselves also move or form more stationary shapes. note how the lines gradually lengthen reaching an Apex with ‘sunLight’ , then gradually recede to the left marching, (albeit with several smaller counter movements) ending outside the left margin with an ideogram of a crescent moon. diagonal lines are more dynamic than horizontal or vertical ones, and for Cummings that energy generally increases as the diagonal moves right, then decreases as it returns to the left margin or starting point.
…there’s much more analysis of this poem…especially the shapes made by the words, and use of the Greek technique of tmesis - inserting one word or phrase with another; and ‘SpRiN,k,LiNg’ enacts ‘its meaning through alternating capitals and lowercase, heightened by a sprinkling of commas.’
A very different type of innovation—synaesthetic, sensory impressionism in fragmented form— appears in ‘i was sitting in mcsorley’s. . . McSorley‘s* was—and still is—an ancient ale house in lower Manhattan and Cummings captures the experience of sitting among the noisy drinking patrons. at the beginning of the third section, for example, the speaker’s fragmented sensations while sitting at this crowded bar, interweave sights (dint of ripe silver’, The ‘squirting taps’), ‘splurging smells’ of beer, touch, warmlyish wetflat’), onomatopoeia (‘glush’), site, and sound (‘slush of foam knocked off’) and onomatopoeic sound and motion (‘ploc spittle spiral lands in . . .hopping sawdust’) all of which lead into a remarkable stream of consciousness intercutting of the numerous conversations the speaker hears around him.
In 1988 a series of one hour documentaries appeared on public television that aimed to explore the lives and works of 13 of America’s most famous modern poets. All the major modernness were included in this excellent series—Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Moore, Frost, even Hart Crane—all except one: Cummings. His exclusion was not an oversight: it attests to the poet’s falling reputation in academia since his death… his chief biographer, Richard Kennedy, once judged Cummings, a ‘major minor’ poet…
Unlike Stevens, he did not envision a social role for poetry, unlike Eliot, he did not invite readers to share his spiritual struggles.indeed, the absoluteness in the tone of so many of Cummings poems were simply out a key with the post-World War II era, and for many readers, off-putting.”
Reviews:
Edmund Wilson from Wallace Stevens and EE Cummings:
“Mr. EE Cummings and his volume tulips and chimneys does not show himself, like Mr. Stevens, a master in a peculiar vein. A master is precisely as yet what Mr. Cummings is not. Cummings style is in an eternal adolescent as fresh and often is winning, but is half baked as boyhood…. mr. Cummings eccentric punctuation is also I believe a symptom of his immaturity as an artist
Comparative Studies:
I really liked the inclusion of several detailed essays which analyzed “Buffalo Bill” and “in Just- / spring” - enjoyable to read various interpretations of these two poems.
I found J Allison Rosenblitt “the goat, footed balloonman” particularly interesting in that Rosenblit places the poem as the opener for the other four poems of “Chansons Innocences” and needs to be read in this context and not as a stand alone; he reasons that the Pan figure is a bringer of Spring which is necessary for the development of the poems which follow in this section. And not something more sinister.
Can’t believe that “16 may i feel said he” from No Thanks (1935 Manuscript) wasn’t included here (see it in E.E.Cummings Complete Poems 1904-1962) nor was “i carry your heart” included.
“Cummings’s reading of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud evolved into anesthetics that govern both his painting and poetry in this period…
an example of this unified aesthetics is Cummings’s concept of a wholistic ‘seeing around’ and ‘knowing around’ which aimed to evoke the unseen sides of experience through a juxtaposition of opposite…
“He also juxtaposed opposing attitude such as lust and disgust in his experience with prostitute. He was no longer merely looking (see ‘the dirty colors of her kiss have just’ page 35 and PP 262–68) Though Freud did discuss these contradictory attitudes, Cummings’s own conflicted emotions about sex with prostitutes— desire, lingering puritanical guilt, bourgeois disgust at the encounters sordidness and postcoital detachment – Directly informed these juxtapositions positions.
no such ambivalence complicates his early satires: they are wickedly, playful without being particularly nasty, the self-absorbed Cambridge ladies whose ‘permanent faces coyly bandy / scandal’; the US president (Warren G Harding), who was ‘the only man woman or child who wrote / a single declarative sentence with seven grammatical / errors’; a post-war, money worshiping ‘age of dollars and no sense’ increasingly dominated by advertising…
Closely related to his satires are his anti-war poems about World War I. like much literature about the war written by those who experienced it first hand, Cummings’s poems emphasize the enormous and unbridgeable golf between the participant’s actual experience and the naïve, ignorant and bloodthirsty ‘folks back home’ who ‘Could and what / is more did tell you just / what everybody was fighting for’ but who ‘don’t want // to no’ what it was really like… Cummings’s most famous anti-war poem, however, has nothing playful about it as a memorializes, the torture and death of Olaf, a conscientious objector, ‘whose warmest heart recoiled at war.’…
Unquestionably, however it was Cummings’s typographical and spatial innovations that gained him the most recognition in these years and established his reputation…
A good example of this spatial flexibility, as well as other typographical techniques, is the poem ‘i will be’ (see page 34)
Thematically, this poem is all about movement and anticipation, using the conceit of the street: the speakers anticipated coital movements in his lovers ‘street’; his eagerness for her arrival as she walks down real street; pigeons flying in circles above the street; and the day’s movement from sunlight to twilight to Moonlight. The lines themselves also move or form more stationary shapes. note how the lines gradually lengthen reaching an Apex with ‘sunLight’ , then gradually recede to the left marching, (albeit with several smaller counter movements) ending outside the left margin with an ideogram of a crescent moon. diagonal lines are more dynamic than horizontal or vertical ones, and for Cummings that energy generally increases as the diagonal moves right, then decreases as it returns to the left margin or starting point.
…there’s much more analysis of this poem…especially the shapes made by the words, and use of the Greek technique of tmesis - inserting one word or phrase with another; and ‘SpRiN,k,LiNg’ enacts ‘its meaning through alternating capitals and lowercase, heightened by a sprinkling of commas.’
A very different type of innovation—synaesthetic, sensory impressionism in fragmented form— appears in ‘i was sitting in mcsorley’s. . . McSorley‘s* was—and still is—an ancient ale house in lower Manhattan and Cummings captures the experience of sitting among the noisy drinking patrons. at the beginning of the third section, for example, the speaker’s fragmented sensations while sitting at this crowded bar, interweave sights (dint of ripe silver’, The ‘squirting taps’), ‘splurging smells’ of beer, touch, warmlyish wetflat’), onomatopoeia (‘glush’), site, and sound (‘slush of foam knocked off’) and onomatopoeic sound and motion (‘ploc spittle spiral lands in . . .hopping sawdust’) all of which lead into a remarkable stream of consciousness intercutting of the numerous conversations the speaker hears around him.
In 1988 a series of one hour documentaries appeared on public television that aimed to explore the lives and works of 13 of America’s most famous modern poets. All the major modernness were included in this excellent series—Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Moore, Frost, even Hart Crane—all except one: Cummings. His exclusion was not an oversight: it attests to the poet’s falling reputation in academia since his death… his chief biographer, Richard Kennedy, once judged Cummings, a ‘major minor’ poet…
Unlike Stevens, he did not envision a social role for poetry, unlike Eliot, he did not invite readers to share his spiritual struggles.indeed, the absoluteness in the tone of so many of Cummings poems were simply out a key with the post-World War II era, and for many readers, off-putting.”
Reviews:
Edmund Wilson from Wallace Stevens and EE Cummings:
“Mr. EE Cummings and his volume tulips and chimneys does not show himself, like Mr. Stevens, a master in a peculiar vein. A master is precisely as yet what Mr. Cummings is not. Cummings style is in an eternal adolescent as fresh and often is winning, but is half baked as boyhood…. mr. Cummings eccentric punctuation is also I believe a symptom of his immaturity as an artist
Comparative Studies:
I really liked the inclusion of several detailed essays which analyzed “Buffalo Bill” and “in Just- / spring” - enjoyable to read various interpretations of these two poems.
I found J Allison Rosenblitt “the goat, footed balloonman” particularly interesting in that Rosenblit places the poem as the opener for the other four poems of “Chansons Innocences” and needs to be read in this context and not as a stand alone; he reasons that the Pan figure is a bringer of Spring which is necessary for the development of the poems which follow in this section. And not something more sinister.
Can’t believe that “16 may i feel said he” from No Thanks (1935 Manuscript) wasn’t included here (see it in E.E.Cummings Complete Poems 1904-1962) nor was “i carry your heart” included.
February 14, 2022
My favourite poet.
Pushing past the literacy boundaries.
A futurist.
Pushing past the literacy boundaries.
A futurist.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews