| Name: |
Edward Estlin Cummings |
| Birth Date: |
|
| Death Date: |
|
| Place of Birth: |
|
| Place of Death: |
|
| Nationality: |
|
| Gender: |
|
| Occupations: |
|
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 applauded by such various poets as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Robert Graves, Laura Riding, Allen Tate, Theodore Roethke, and Louise Bogan, but he remained peripheral to contemporary poetic movements. He was one of the earliest modern poets (Guillaume Apollinaire and Mina Loy preceded him) to introduce typographical eccentricities into writing. His dazzling linguistic risk taking was in fact painstakingly measured to control sound--pacing, syllable stress, juncture--and sight. The intricate spatial patterning led Marianne Moore to describe his poems as "a kind of verbal topiary-work." The strong visual character of Cummings's writing owes much to his parallel development as a painter. Indeed, his dismemberment of syntax derived from the advances in contemporary European visual art, particularly cubism.
However modern the stimulus for and the superficial appearance of his writing may have been, much of it arises from a nineteenth-century romantic reverence for natural order over manmade order, for intuition and imagination over routine-grounded perception.
This is a free page. This page contains 151 words. This
biography contains 9,286 words (approx. 31 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our E(dward) E(stlin) Cummings Access Pass.
