SOURCE: Kennedy, Richard S. “Tulips, Chimneys, &.” In E. E. Cummings Revisited, pp. 53-67. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.

In the following excerpted essay, Kennedy considers the significance to his career of Cummings’s original version of Tulips & Chimneys.

Sometime in 1919 Cummings had assembled a hefty manuscript of poems entitled “Tulips & Chimneys,” which he gave to his friend Stewart Mitchell, the managing editor of the Dial, asking him to help find a publisher. Mitchell tried six publishing houses without success. Cummings then removed some of the poems that an editor might find either unpoetic or obscene, rearranged their order, and tried again in 1922, through John Dos Passos, to find a home for his wayweary volume. This 1922 collection of 152 poems eventually saw publication, but not all at once. Dos Passos managed to persuade Thomas Seltzer to publish a selection of sixty-six of the poems under the title Tulips and Chimneys in...