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Presented here in a bold new edition, E. E. Cummings: C...)
Presented here in a bold new edition, E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904–1962 showcases Cummings’s transcendent body of work, collected in its entirety.
Combining Thoreau’s controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited bohemian, E. E. Cummings, together with Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. Today Cummings is recognized as the author of some of the most sensuous lyric poems in the English language, as well as one of the most inventive American poets of his time. Formally fractured and yet gleefully alive and whole, at once cubistic and figurative, Cummings’s work expanded the boundaries of what language is and can do.
With a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Stephen Dunn, this redesigned, newly corrected, and fully reset edition of Complete Poems collects and presents all the poems published or designated for publication by E. E. Cummings in his lifetime. It includes 36 poems that were first collected in the 1991 edition and 164 unpublished poems issued in 1983 under the title Etcetera. It spans his earliest creations, his vivacious linguistic acrobatics, up through his last valedictory sonnets.
In the words of Randall Jarrell, “No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and special reader.”
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E. E. Cummings’s erotic poems and drawings gathered in ...)
E. E. Cummings’s erotic poems and drawings gathered in a single volume.
Many years ago the prodigious and famously prolific E. E. Cummings sat in his study writing and thinking about sex. His private brooding gave way to poems and drawings of sexual and romantic love that delight and provoke. Here, collected for this first time in a single volume, are those erotic poems and sketches, culled from Cummings’s original manuscripts by the distinguished editor George James Firmage.
from “16”
may i feel said he
(i’ll squeal said she
just once said he)
it’s fun said she
(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she
12 drawings
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Fresh and candid, by turns earthy, tender, defiant, and...)
Fresh and candid, by turns earthy, tender, defiant, and romantic, Cummings's poems celebrate the uniqueness of each individual, the need to protest the dehumanizing force of organizations, and the exuberant power of love.
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A Miscellany, confined to a private edition for decades...)
A Miscellany, confined to a private edition for decades, sheds further light on the prodigious vision and imagination of the most inventive poet of the twentieth century: E.E. Cummings.
Formally fractured and yet gleefully alive and whole, E. E. Cummings’s groundbreaking modernist poetry expanded the boundaries of language. In A Miscellany, originally released in a limited run in 1958, Cummings lent his delightfully original voice to “a cluster of epigrams,” a poem, three speeches from an unfinished play, and forty-nine essays―most of them previously written for or published in magazines, anthologies, or art gallery catalogues. Seven years later, George J. Firmage―editor of much of Cummings’s work, including Complete Poems―broadened the scope of this delightfully eclectic collection, adding seven more poems and essays, and many of Cummings’s unpublished line drawings.
Together, these pieces paint a distinctive portrait of Cummings’s eccentric, yet precise, genius. Like his poetry, Cummings’s prose is lively; often witty, biting, and offbeat, he is an intelligent observer and critic of the modern. His essays explore everything from Cubism to the circus, equally quick to analyze his poetic contemporaries and satirize New York society. As Cummings wrote in his original foreword, A Miscellany contains “a great deal of liveliness and nothing dead.” This remains true today, more than fifty years after its original publication.
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An eye-opening selection of Cumming's more avant-garde ...)
An eye-opening selection of Cumming's more avant-garde poetry and prose.
As a poet, Cummings was a pioneer not only in linguistic and typographic inventions, but also in sound and concrete poetry. But his prose is no less experimental; he wrote memoirs, essays, and fiction that are constantly provocative and often radically experimental. To read the avant-garde Cummings is to read a writer who consistently broke with established norms, "never to rest and never to have: only to grow." To not read the avant-garde Cummings is to not read Cummings.
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Fresh and candid, by turns earthy, tender, defiant, and...)
Fresh and candid, by turns earthy, tender, defiant, and romantic, Cummings's poems celebrate the uniqueness of each individual, the need to protest the dehumanizing force of organizations, and the exuberant power of love.
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A reissue of E. E. Cummings's long-unavailable, yet poi...)
A reissue of E. E. Cummings's long-unavailable, yet pointed and moving story of a journey through Soviet Russia.
Unavailable for more than fifty years, EIMI finally returns. While sometimes termed a "novel," it is better described as a novelistic travelogue, the diary of a trip to Russia in the 1930s during the rise of the Stalinist government. Despite some contempt for what he witnesses, Cummings's narrator has an effective, occasionally hilarious way of evoking feelings of accord and understanding. As Ezra Pound wrote, Cummings's Soviet Union is laid "out there pellucidly on the page in all its Slavic unfinishedness, in all of its Dostoievskian slobberyness....Does any man wish to know about Russia? 'EIMI'!"
A stylistic tour de force, EIMI is a mélange of styles and tones, the prose containing many abbreviations, grammatical and syntactical shifts, typographical devices, compounds, and word coinages. This is Cummings's invigorating and unique voice at its finest, and EIMI is without question one of his most substantial accomplishments.
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The complete collection of E. E. Cummings’s writing for...)
The complete collection of E. E. Cummings’s writing for the stage, from the most inventive poet of the twentieth century.
The Theatre of E. E. Cummings collects in their entirety Cummings’s long out-of-print theatrical works: the plays HIM (1927), Anthropos (1930), and Santa Claus (1946), and the ballet treatment Tom (1935). In HIM, a creatively blocked artist and his lover, Me, struggle to bridge the impasse in their relationship and in his art. In Anthropos, a Platonic parable, three “infrahumans” brainstorm slogans while a man sketches on a cave wall; and in Santa Claus, Death and Saint Nick exchange identities. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is reimagined as dance, transforming the novel into a symbolic attack against Evil itself. Cummings’s prodigious creativity is on display in each of these works, which are ultimately about the place of the artist outside of society. “DON’T TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT, LET IT TRY TO UNDERSTAND YOU,” Cummings famously wrote about his intentions for the stage. Thoughtful and witty, Cummings’s dramas are an integral part of his canon.
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"No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental po...)
"No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to both the general and the special reader."―Randall Jarrell
The one hundred and fifty-six poems here, arranged in twelve sections and introduced by E. E. Cummings's biographer, Richard S. Kennedy, include his most popular poems, spanning his earliest creations, his vivacious linguistic acrobatics, up to his last valedictory sonnets. Also featured are thirteen drawings, oils, and watercolors by Cummings, most of them never before published.
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.
Edward Estlin Cummings was born on October 14, 1894 in Cambridge, Massachussets, United States. He was the son of the Reverend Edward Cummings, a Unitarian minister, and Rebecca Haswell Clarke. His father taught sociology at Harvard and in 1900 became minister of the South Congregational Church in Boston. His idealism had a formative effect on Cummings, who wrote: "My father gave me Plato's metaphor of the cave with my mother's milk. " The family lived in a large and pleasant house in Cambridge. As a child, Cummings read and told stories enthusiastically and wrote poetry. Josiah Royce, a neighbor, introduced him to the sonnet. Following the example of his father, Cummings also drew, and eventually considered himself a painter as well as a poet.
Education
After attending public schools in Cambridge, Cummings entered Harvard in 1911, receiving the B. A. in 1915 and the M. A. in 1916.
Career
In 1917, after working three months for the mail-order bookseller P. F. Collier and Son in New York, Cummings joined the Norton Harjes Ambulance Corps of the American Red Cross in order to avoid the draft. He became close friends with another volunteer, William Slater Brown, with whom he spent a joyful month in Paris before their assignment to the Noyon sector of the front. By September, they were in trouble with French authorities. Unlike the other Americans, they had fraternized with French soldiers, and Brown, who had attended the Columbia School of Journalism, wrote letters home and to his German professor at Columbia in which he freely reported their speculations. French censors imagined they had detected a traitor, and Brown and Cummings were interrogated and then imprisoned in a concentration camp at La Ferté Macé in Orne--Cummings solely because he refused to dissociate himself from his friend. Cummings described this experience in The Enormous Room (1922), a prose work modeled on The Pilgrim's Progress. The book's philosophical center is Cummings' discovery of what John Bunyan called the "Delectable Mountains, " four men "who are so integrated within their own personalities that prison cannot touch them. " Despite this revelation of Emersonian self-reliant individuality, Cummings found himself mentally and physically broken by three months of prison brutality. He did not recover until his return to the United States. His father had worked unceasingly through the Red Cross and the State Department for his son's release. Ironically, Cummings was drafted in 1918, although the armistice prevented his being sent back to France.
During the 1920's Cummings developed rapidly as a poet. He began publishing in The Dial, which had been purchased by Thayer and Watson, and in 1923 his first collection of poems appeared, Tulips and Chimneys. A good example of his poetry of this period is "in Just-, " a transparent lyric that evokes the memory of childhood sexual play. From the beginning Cummings was famous or infamous for his deliberate and experimental use of typography; his poetry has an important visual dimension. In extreme instances the words in his poems become as refracted as images in a Cubist painting, and they cannot be read out loud. He once characterized himself as "an author of pictures, a draughtsman of words. "
Cummings published four volumes of poetry in the 1920's. Although he continued to write poetry for the next forty years, he did not appreciably change his style or his themes. He had found his poetic voice. In 1926 he described his technique as that of a burlesque comedian; and certainly this is true of his many satires on the evils of the contemporary world. A widely anthologized sonnet begins, "next to of course god america i/love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh/say can you see. . " Here Cummings mimics and mocks the tone of the cynical manipulative self-styled patriot conning a generation of young men to join the "heroic happy dead. " Other antiwar satires based on Cummings' World War I experiences include "my sweet old etcetera, " "look at this), " and "i sing of Olaf glad and big. " Following the outbreak of World War II he applied the same satiric techniques in "plato told, " "ygUDuh, " and "why must itself up every of a park. "
In addition to this articulation of his hatred, Cummings is equally well known for his love poetry, which is both deeply rooted in tradition and surprisingly new. The poem that begins, "since feeling is first/ who pays any attention/ to the syntax of things/ will never wholly kiss you, " concludes with the theme of carpe diem (expressed definitively by Catullus, John Donne, and Andrew Marvell): "laugh, leaning back in my arms/ for life's not a paragraph/ And death i think is no parenthesis. " Another poem with the same theme but with a more colloquial tone begins, "(ponder, darling, these busted statues. " Many of Cummings' love poems are addressed to his "lady, " as in the Provençal tradition and in Dante. The last poem in his collection of 1926, a sonnet, contrasts her inexpressible beauty with his poor verses: "if i have made, my lady, intricate/ imperfect various things chiefly which wrong/ your eyes. . " He also wrote frankly erotic love poems, such as "my girl's tall with hard long eyes, " and "i like my body when it is with your. " The common basis of Cummings' poems of hate and love is a unified poetic vision, a philosophy so intensely felt that it must be expressed in the highly charged language of poetry, rather than in the remote and analytic abstractions of philosophy per se. The heart of his vision is a mystical reverence for the wholeness and immediacy of life. He seeks to open the eternal dimension in the present moment--"to see a World in a Grain of Sand and a Heaven in a Wild Flower, " as William Blake said. This would be our natural mode of life except that we are mentally conditioned into accepting an inauthentic reality; instead of a world, we habitually haunt an "unworld, " a "colossal hoax of clocks and calendars. " Cummings' anger at the perpetrators of this unworld is expressed in his satirical poems; and his celebration of love is a way of self-transcendence. His poems also celebrate moments of full awareness, when he feels wholly alive to the world, as in these lines: "the hours rise up putting off stars and it is/ dawn/ into the street of the sky light walks scattering poems. " Since ordinary language belongs to the one-dimensional unworld, Cummings seeks to renew language by the discovery of new meanings and usages for old words. In The Enormous Room (1922) he speaks of a fully alive individual as an "IS"; and a well known early poem begins, "Spring is like a perhaps hand. "
From 1921 to 1923 Cummings lived in Europe, mostly in Paris, painting by day and writing by night. In 1923 he moved to 4 Patchin Place in Greenwich Village, New York City, which remained his home for the rest of his life.
In 1927 he had published a play, Him, which he dedicated to her and had as its subject the problematical identity of the artist. Its production in 1928 at the Provincetown Playhouse included a bewildering blend of burlesque and circus spectacles (to which Cummings was always attracted), surrealistically mixed with the story of two lovers, Him and Me. Him conceives of himself as "an artist, a man, a failure. "
In the spring of 1931 Cummings spent a month in the Soviet Union. He studied that communist society from an emotional, not ideological, standpoint, which he recorded in a travel diary that he smuggled out of the country. Within this text Cummings built up a philosophical conception of the individual that could exist despite the atmosphere of shabbiness, collectivism, tension, and fear. Published in 1933, the journal was called Eimi (I Am). Like The Enormous Room, it analyzed a situation of world-historical importance in a highly personal way. He took the organizing metaphor from Dante: the human soul journeying through hell. The style was experimental and obscure, an attempt to capture experiences impinging directly on the author's sensibility. It clearly grew out of Cummings' famous kaleidoscopic conversational style, which so often became a rapid monologue several hours long. However, the political implications of Eimi drove a wedge between Cummings and the increasingly leftist intelligentsia of the 1930's.
In 1931 Cummings exhibited his paintings for the first time in New York, at the Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Gravers, and published CIOPW, a book of pictures in charcoal, ink, oil, pencil, and watercolor. Although he exhibited through the 1940's, his genius was for poetry.
During the 1930's Cummings pushed typographical experimentation to its limit, as with "r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r, " a poem about the leap of the grasshopper. Norman Friedman claimed that his love poems became "less erotic and more transcendental": for example, "somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond. "
By 1940 his poetic development was complete, and signs of decline began to appear. The neologisms he had created over twenty years seemed fossilized by repetition and became a kind of philosophical shorthand. Even good poems such as "one's not half two. It's two are halves of one" and "all ignorance toboggans into know" began to show the abstract complacency of sermons.
Yet during the 1940's and 1950's Cummings received increasing recognition; in 1952 he was appointed Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard for one year. He delivered lectures about himself--published as I: Six Nonlectures (1953)--which were followed by poetry readings. He interpreted works by himself and others most effectively in a high, clear, incantatory voice. In 1954 his complete poems were published as Poems 1923-1954.
He died in North Conway, New Hampshire, near Joy Farm, the boyhood summer home that he inherited from his mother.
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E. E. Cummings’s erotic poems and drawings gathered in ...)
Connections
Cummings married Elaine Orr, on March 17, 1924, but they were divorced in December of the same year. She had previously been the wife of his friend Scofield Thayer. She and Cummings had one child, Nancy. On May 1, 1929, Cummings married Anne Barton. In 1932 Cummings was divorced and married Marion Morehouse, a well-known fashion model, photographer, and actress. The marriage was a success.