cummings, e[dward] e[stlin] 1894-1962
One of the most technically innovative poets of his century,
cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard in 1916. He drove an
ambulance in France during World War I and stayed on in Paris
after the armistice. His first published work was a novel, The Enormous Room (1922),
based on his mistaken imprisonment in a French detention centre during the
war. This was followed by collections of verse, Tulips and Chimneys
(1923) and XLI Poems (1925).
& and is
5 (both 1925) presented cummings’s new
style, which was influenced by jazz and
contemporary slang and characterized by an
innovative use of punctuation and typography, as in the use of lower
case letters for his own name. Features of this poetry include the use of capital letters and punctuation
in the middle of single words, phrases split by parentheses, and stanzas
arranged to create a visual design on the page. Formal devices were often used as visual manifestations of theme or tone;
the poem’s typographical dimension itself becomes a new level of meaning.
cummings’s other works include ViVa (1931),
No Thanks (1935), 1/20 (1936), Collected Poems (1938), 50
Poems (1940), 1 x 1 (1944), Poems 1923-1954 (1954), Ninety-Five
Poems (1958), 73 Poems (1963) and Complete Poems 1913-1962 (1972).
He also published two plays, a book of drawings and paintings, a travel book, and i, six
nonlectures (1953).
OUSBY, I. The Wordsworth companion to
literature in English. Ware: Wordsworth, 1992.
Find in the text a synonym for the following words:
- existing or happening now
- groups of verses
- informal language
- inventive
- letters of the alphabet that are not written as capital letters
- organized
- period in prison
- period without war
- separated
