Biography EssayE. E. Cummings's experimentation with form and language places him among the most innovative of twentieth-century poets. His style eludes specific association with any one modern line. ...
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The American poet Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962) presented romantic attitudes in technically experimental verse. His poems are not only ideas but crafted physical objects which, in their nonlogica...
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Ranked "among the most innovative of twentieth-century poets," according to Jenny Penberthy in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, E. E. Cummings experimented with poetic form and language to create...
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Many of the Americans in Paris in the twenties may have had some occasion to encounter French law, and several even spent a few hours in jail. But few began their lives in France by being arrested and...
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E. E. Cummings's experimentation with form and language places him among the most innovative of twentieth-century poets. His style eludes specific association with any one modern line. He was applaude...
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Critical Essay by John Dos Passos
[Here's] a book that exists because the author was so moved, excited, amused by a certain slice of his existence that things happened freely and cantankerously...
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Critical Essay by Norman Friedman
[The] relationship between Cummings and his speaker is of the [kind which Friedman defines earlier as an author who "may deliberately create a poetic persona a...
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Critical Essay by David Ray
Cummings is one of our society's best haters; functioning as a Juvenalian satirist, he has long attacked our society's worst indulgences in materialism, hypoc...
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Critical Essay by George Wesolek
Cummings' depth and poetic vision is intense enough to excite and revivify. He confronts himself with cosmic dichotomies that take him to the core of man'...
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Critical Essay by Robert E. Wegner
For Cummings, self-discovery was supremely important and the only valid motive for writing a poem; it separated his awareness from stereotyped awarenesses, separated...
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Critical Essay by Marilyn Gaull
E. E. Cummings, particularly in The Enormous Room, assumed the multiple task of demonstrating not only the discrepancy between language and experience but also the corr...
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Critical Essay by Patrick B. Mullen
It is generally overlooked that E. E. Cummings had an avid interest in various forms of American popular culture, especially burlesque, circuses, amusement parks, c...
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Critical Essay by Bethany K. Dumas
Cummings is not significantly a "free verse" poet in the popular sense of that term. From first to last, he was a poet thoroughly in the tradition of E...
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Critical Essay by Mark Van Doren
["X LI Poems"] continues in almost every phase the tradition which Mr. Cummings established for himself two years ago with "Tulips and Chimneys.&#...
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Critical Essay by Richard P. Blackmur
Mr. Cummings is a school of writing in himself: so that it is necessary to state the underlying assumptions of his mind, and of the school which he teaches, befor...
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Critical Essay by Marianne Moore
Style is for Mr. Cummings "translating;" it is a self-demonstrating aptitude for technique, as a seal that has been swimming right-side-up turns over and...
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Critical Essay by John Peale Bishop
[Cummings] appeared as a young and romantic poet. But he was one unmistakably of his time. That he derived from Keats and had been instructed by the poets of the la...
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Critical Essay by S. I. Hayakawa
No modern poet to my knowledge has such a clear, childlike perception as E. E. Cummings—a way of coming smack against things with unaffected delight and wonder....
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Critical Essay by John Finch
The career of E. E. Cummings, from his first appearance at Harvard to his last, has been the consistent statement of an attitude toward authority. His entire work raises t...
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Critical Essay by John Arthos
E. E. Cummings is one of the few modern poets who write about beautiful things simply. Much contemporary poetry is concerned with the analysis of states of mind for the s...
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Critical Essay by Philip Green
This unessay is also about communication which is like flowers and moons only not really whom flowers and moons are only for feel (ing o isn't that nice), but com...
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Critical Essay by Norman Friedman
In the 1920s Cummings was known as a conspicuous member of the avant-garde, an arch-experimentalist, a modernist, and a bohemian. The New Criticism, which was just be...
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Critical Essay by Rushworth M. Kidder
"For more than half a hundred years," wrote E. E. Cummings in 1954, "the oversigned's twin obsessions have been painting and writing.&...
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Critical Essay by Edith A. Everson
At the heart of E. E. Cummings' most characteristic work is a keen sense of the mystery and miracle of life. But this American poet has a great deal to say ab...
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Critical Essay by Rushworth M. Kidder
It is important to recognize … that the spatial arrangements of [Cummings'] poems are the work neither of a whimsical fancy nor a lust for novelty. ...
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In the following essay, Everson analyzes E. E. Cummings's multifaceted view of death in his poetic drama Santa Claus, which emphasizes death's destructive and rejuvenating qualities.
At ...
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In the following essay, originally published in 1971, Mullen examines Cummings’s interest in and writings on American popular culture, particularly the art of burlesque.
It is generally overloo...
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In the following essay, Thompson discusses Cummings’s attempt to compress images and words as tightly and succinctly as possible to affect the strongest intensity of feeling upon the reader.
In...
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In the following essay, Cohen addresses the influence of Freud on Cummings’s early aesthetic and technique.
when I see you I shall expect you to be conversant with two books: The Interpretation...
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In the following essay, originally published in 1983, Friedman reviews E. E. Cummings: The Critical Reception, finding the collection of early reviews of Cummings’s work helpful in gaining insi...
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In the following essay, Pagnini argues that Cummings’s poetry was strongly influenced by Russian futurism.
References to E. E. Cummings's relationship with the early twentieth-century av...
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In the following excerpted essay, Kennedy examines Cummings's writing during a particularly difficult period in the 1920s.
In the midst of his efforts to publish between 1922 and 1925 Cummings ...
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In the following essay, Docherty discusses the paradox of modernism and traditionalism in Cummings’s poetry.
e. e. cummings is at once the most modern of traditionalists and the most traditiona...
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In the following essay, Webster examines the effect of Cummings's typographical experimentation on his Romantic themes.
Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which c...
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Edward Estlin Cummings
E. E. Cummings
E(dward) E(stlin) Cummings
