Cummings, E(dward) E(stlin) (1894–1962)
US poet and novelist. His work is marked by idiosyncratic punctuation and typography (often using only lower case letters in his verse, for example), and a subtle, lyric celebration of life. Before his first collection Tulips and Chimneys (1923), Cummings published an avant-garde novel, The Enormous Room (1922), based on his internment in a French concentration camp during World War I.
His typographical experiments were antecedents of the concrete and sound poetry of the 1960s.
| Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Cummings graduated from Harvard University and served in the ambulance corps during World War I. He was imprisoned for a brief period for alleged treasonous statements in his correspondence. Out of this experience came The Enormous Room. Other collections of poetry include XLI (1925), ViVa (1931), and 1 × 1 (1944). Him (1927) was an expressionist drama. Also notable are his paintings, lectures, and the essays ‘Eimi’ (1933), his impressions of the USSR. |
