E. E. Cummings

Edward Estlin Cummings, known as E. E. Cummings (1894-1962), was an American poet, painter, essayist and playwright. Although he is often associated with surrealism, the reference texts place him mainly within the modernist avant-garde. He is best remembered as a poet, but his output also includes many drawings, sketches and paintings, and he is regarded as one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century.

He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, into a well-known and affluent Unitarian family. His father was a Harvard professor who later became a minister in Boston. As a child Cummings wrote poems and drew, and he later studied at Harvard, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts and then a Master of Arts. There he developed an interest in modern poetry that ignored conventional grammar and syntax in favour of a more dynamic use of language.

During the First World War he joined the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, a civilian volunteer organisation. On the boat to France he met William Slater Brown, and the two quickly became close friends. An administrative error left them without an assignment for five weeks, which they spent exploring Paris, a city that captivated Cummings and to which he returned throughout his life. In September 1917 both men were arrested on suspicion of espionage and held at the detention camp at La Ferté-Macé, in Normandy. Cummings was released in December, largely thanks to his father's efforts, which included a letter to President Woodrow Wilson. The experience became the basis for his novel The Enormous Room (1922).

After returning to Paris in 1921, he published Tulips and Chimneys (1923) and, two years later, XLI Poems (1925), which established his reputation as an avant-garde poet. His work breaks with conventional syntax, punctuation and line layout, and some poems seem to make sense only when read aloud. Much of his output is nonetheless traditional, and many of his poems are sonnets. His recurring themes include love, nature, satire and the relationship between the individual and the crowd. He also wrote plays, such as HIM (1927), and the travel book EIMI (1933), about his time in the Soviet Union. In the 1920s he worked as an essayist and portrait artist for Vanity Fair.

In 1926 his father was killed in a car accident after a locomotive struck the vehicle. Cummings later recalled the event in the lectures collected in i: six nonlectures, and he wrote a poem in his father's honour. The loss marked the start of a new phase in which his poetry turned to more essential aspects of life. He received many awards, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship (1933) and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (1957). He died in 1962. Critics such as M. L. Rosenthal and James Dickey praised his ability to renew everyday language, and his work remains a point of reference for anyone studying typographic experiment in modern poetry.