E.E. Cummings (1894-1962)


        Cummings has been described by the critic F.O. Mathieson as a 'romantic anarchist'. He published his first poems in the Harvard Monthly in 1912. During the war, he was an ambulance driver in France with the Norton Harjes Ambulance Corps. After the war some of his poems appeared in The Dial. In 1921 he returned to Paris and studied painting. In 1923 he came back to New York and lived at 4 Patchin Place where he was a neighbour of John Cowper. In 1925 he received the Dial Award. &and XLI Poems were published the same year: they show his new style, characterized by a specific way of using punctuation and typography. Cummings strove to represent a visual design, where style and dimension enter into a scheme for new meanings. He became known for his eccentric style and was thus called 'Mr Lowercase Highbrow'.
        Other works include ViVa (1931),No Thanks (1935), 50 Poems (1940), 1 x 1 (1944), and Complete Poems (1913-1962). But he also had exhibitions of his paintings and one book, CIOPW (1931), with reproductions of his drawings and paintings was published.
But there is also a new group of 'super-sophisticates', mostly young men, poets and critics, like E.E. Cummings and Edmund Wilson, who seem to combine the psychic imagination of this vast fluctuating crowd of women with a sharp witty rigorous attempt to turn into a kind of mocking beauty those aspects of modern American life such as radio, jazz, prize-fighting, aeroplanes, circuses, futurist patterns of steel and iron, streams of consciousness, 'calviluxes' of colour, which poise themselves like a phantasmagoric mist of acrobatic shapes, on a high stretched tight-rope, raised aloft above both masculine activity and feminine emotion. (John Cowper Powys, "The American Scene and Character", 1927, in Elusive America)


'Buffalo Bill's'
by E.E. Cummings

Buffalo Bill's
defunct
              who used to
              ride a watersmooth-silver
                                                        stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                                                            Jesus
he was a handsome man
                                          and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death


E.E. Cummings
from Poet's Corner