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Poems, 1923-1954
This complete collection includes almost 600 lyric poems from E. E. Cummings' first books
- GenresPoetry20th Century
468 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1954
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91 people want to read
About the author
E.E. Cummings
370 books3,959 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 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 12, 2008
A boy once told me that e.e. cummings was fast food poetry for 14 year old girls in Modest Mouse t-shirts. We stopped dating.
April 20, 2021
Cumming wrote hundreds of poems. For me only about 20 are great or ones I want to return to. He often has wonderful images and lines, but his typographical gymnastics often got in my way. I was also surprised by his racist language and the graphic sexuality. I apparently read this book about 50 years ago, when Gail gave it to me as an early birthday present, but I don't remember reading it at then.
June 22, 2024
look. i like e.e. cummings as much as the next guy but this is a little much. cummings is at times one of our greatest poets of love and sex. in most other times, he’s a pony with six or so tricks, which, to be fair to cummings, is more tricks than most.
June 3, 2021
I only read a few poems because I was in the mood for them. Might read more someday but not anytime soon.
June 27, 2015
Sections as I read them ....
50 Poems – *** ee cummings is a modern troubadour, a singer of love songs. The unusual punctuation and line breaks aside, he is a lyric vocalist – playful, musical, rhythmic. His poems in this set don’t have great depth, but they are diverse and broad and lively -- not something you can say of many poets.
I prefer his more metrical poetry in this set. They seem more daring as they bend the form and play with the reader's expectations. They have charm and a drive missing from his other works. He is certainly a poet in the vein of Carroll and Lear and the other nonsense poets. Dark themes are masked beneath lilting rhythms and rhymes and nonsense words.
Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town is by far the best poem in the set – an amazing poem mixing playful language with somber unplayfulness. It would be the best of just about any set of poems. The rest of the set is uneven. (But what book other than a select poetry collection isn’t uneven?)
50 Poems – *** ee cummings is a modern troubadour, a singer of love songs. The unusual punctuation and line breaks aside, he is a lyric vocalist – playful, musical, rhythmic. His poems in this set don’t have great depth, but they are diverse and broad and lively -- not something you can say of many poets.
I prefer his more metrical poetry in this set. They seem more daring as they bend the form and play with the reader's expectations. They have charm and a drive missing from his other works. He is certainly a poet in the vein of Carroll and Lear and the other nonsense poets. Dark themes are masked beneath lilting rhythms and rhymes and nonsense words.
Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town is by far the best poem in the set – an amazing poem mixing playful language with somber unplayfulness. It would be the best of just about any set of poems. The rest of the set is uneven. (But what book other than a select poetry collection isn’t uneven?)
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews