E(dward) E(stlin) Cummings was the son of a sociology professor at Harvard University. His first published poems, which appeared in 1917, already featured experimental verse forms and a lower-casing of the first person singular, "I". The lower case was intended to signify humility and was carried over into his own preferred rendition of his name as e e cummings.During World War I, cummings served with an ambulance corps in France, where he was wrongfully interned in a French military detention camp for 3 months. He related the experience in his first book, The Enormous Room (1922), an autobiographical prose work which immediately earned him an international reputation.
Strongly impressed by modernist art, especially cubism, Cummings practised as a painter as well as a writer in the 1920s and 1930s, living in Paris and New York. However, his verse received greater recognition than his painting. Cummings' first collection of poems, Tulips and Chimneys (1923), was followed by XLI Poems (1925). Despite their typographical innovations and jazz rhythms, these poems possessed a lyrical romanticism that owed much to the earlier Ezra Pound and even to Swinburne. Apart from the content, Cummings always sought in both his early and his later work to find new means of expression by creative arrangement of words on the page and by unusual syntax and punctuation.
Cummings shed his liberal views after a trip to the Soviet Union in 1931, recorded in Eimi (1933), and became something of a social and political reactionary. However, he continued to write prolifically, as well as composing prose pieces, plays and a ballet. In 1958, he received the Bollingen Prize for poetry.
In his verse, Cummings frequently switched from the satirical to the romantic, from the childlike to the erotic. Some critics regard his work as self-indulgent and formulaic and claim that the bizarre distortions of type and syntax distract the reader from the poetry itself. Nevertheless, he remains one of the best known and most popular of modern poets, and his celebrations of love and nature find a response among many who are not usually avid readers of poetry. His Complete Poems was published in 1980.
