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Imelda Schafer CREDIT SOURCE: All information contained herein was obtained at the Camden County Free Library, Voorhees NJ, USA
In 1917 Cummings moved to New York, was employed very briefly at a mail-order book company, and soon began working full-time on his poetry and art. With World War I raging in Europe, he volunteered for the French-based Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service. He spent time in Paris upon his arrival and was completely charmed by the city's bohemian atmosphere and abundance of art and artists. He was particularly impressed by the sketches of Pablo Picasso, whose cubist techniques later helped shape much of his work. Because of a misunderstanding, Cummings spent four months in an internment camp in Normandy on suspicion of treason, an experience documented in his prose work The Enormous Room (1922). Making use of his contacts in government, Cummings's father was able to secure his son's release. Cummings was drafted shortly after he returned to New York in 1918 and spent about a year at Camp Danvers, Massachusetts. During the 1920s and 1930s he traveled widely in Europe, alternately living in Paris and New York, and de eloped parallel careers as a poet and painter. Politically liberal and with leftist leanings, Cummings visited the Soviet Union in 1931 in order to find out how the system of government subsidy for art functioned there. Eimi (1933), an expanded version of his travel diary, expresses his profound disappointment in its indictment of the regimentation and lack of personal and artistic freedom he encountered. From that time, Cummings abandoned his liberal political views and social circle and became an embittered,
reactionary conservative on social and political issues. He continued to write prolifically and received the Shelley Memorial Award for poetry in 1944, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard for the academic year 1952-53, and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1958. He composed miscellaneous prose pieces, drama, and a ballet. Cummings reached the height of his popularity during the 1940s and 1950s, giving poetry readings to college audiences across the United States until his death in 1962. All of Cummings's poetry attests to the author's never ending search for fresh metaphors and new means of expression through creative placement of words on the page, new word constructions, and unusual punctuation and capitalization. He originally intended to publish his first collection as Tulips & Chimneys, but was forced to publish the poems from the original manuscript as three separate volumes: Tulips and Chimneys (1923), XLI Poems (1925), and & (1925). The "tulips" of the first volume are free-verse lyric poems that present a nostalgic glance at his childhood. The poem "in Just-" celebrates youth in playful, imaginative and creative contractions-- "mud-/luscious" and "puddle-wonderful," for example--while the poem "O sweet spontaneous" revels in nature that can only be appreciated fully through the senses rather than through science, philosophy, or religion. The "chimneys" are a sustained sonnet sequence that identifies the hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness, and stagnation Cummings saw in the society around im. The sequence includes the well-known poem "the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls"--women who, according to Cummings, "are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds." The poems excised from the original manuscript that were later collected in XLI Poems and & are generally more erotic in content. The thematic concerns of Cummings's first three volumes of verse are repeated in is 5 (1926), in which the author also included satiric and anti-war pieces, notably "my sweet old etcetera" and "i sing of Olaf glad and big," a poem about the death of a conscientious objector. W(ViVa) (1931) contains sonnets and other poems attacking conservative and uncreative thinking. Along with his barbs at society, Cummings also composed such lyrical poems as "somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond," in which he extolled love, nature, the mystery of faith, individualism, and imaginative freedom. The collection No Thanks (1935), written in response to his trip to the Soviet Union, treats the
theme of artistic freedom in an especially powerful manner. 50 Poems (1940) contains such popular pieces as "anyone lived in a pretty how town" and an elegy to his father, "my father moved through dooms of love." 1 x 1 (1944) solidified Cummings's reputation as one of America's premier poets. It presents a more optimistic, lif -affirming viewpoint than do the poems written during Cummings's period of personal and political disaffection in the 1930s. Structured in a pattern of darkness moving toward light, 1 x 1 begins with poems that denigrate businessmen and politicians and ends with poems praising nature and love. In his late verse--XAIPE: Seventy-One Poems (1950), 95 Poems (1958), and the posthumously published 73 Poems (1963)--Cummings effects a softer, more elegiac note, recalling his early affinity for New England Transcendentalism and English Romanticism. Critical opinion of Cummings's poems is markedly divided. Beginning with Tulips and Chimneys, reviewers described Cummings's style as eccentric and self-indulgent, designed to call attention to itself rather than to elucidate themes. Some critics also objected to Cummings's explicit treatment of sexuality, while others labeled his depictions of society's hypocrisy and banality elitist. When his Collected Poems were published in 1938, Cummings's sharp satires caused some reviewers to call him a misanthrope. His later, more conservative poetry came under attack for anti-semitism, a charge that is still debated. Critics have noted, too, that Cummings's style did not change or develop much throughout his career. Some commentators speculate that Cummings early found a style that suited him and simply continued on with it; others, however, have faulted the author for insufficient artistic growth. For example, many critics censured 50 Poems, accusing Cummings of relying too much on formulaic writing and habitual st listic mannerisms. A group of scholars posited that Cummings's verbal pyrotechnics and idiosyncratic arrangement of text actually draw readers' attention from the poetry itself. Despite these negative assessments, Cummings remains an extremely popular poet, and his poems are widely anthologized.
Cummings remains one of the best-known and best-loved poets of the twentieth century. He is remembered for his innovative, playful spirit, his celebration of love and nature, his focus on the primacy of the individual and freedom of expression, and for his treatment of the themes, in his own words, of "ecstasy and anguish, being and becoming; the immortality of the creative imagination and the indomitability of the human spirit." CREDIT SOURCE: All information
contained herein was obtained at the Camden County Free Library,
Voorhees NJ, USA
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ummings's
innovative and controversial verse places him among the most
popular and widely anthologized poets of the twentieth century.
While linked early in his career with the Modernist movement, he
wrote poems with themes that more closely resemble the works of
the New England Transcendentalists and English Romantics.
Rejecting what he perceived as the small-mindedness of "mostpeople,"
Cummings's work celebrates the individual, as well as erotic and
familiar love.
extolled
modernism as practiced by Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and
Pablo Picasso. He also began incorporating elements of these styles into
his own poetry and paintings. His first published poems appeared in the
anthology Eight Harvard Poets in 1917. These pieces feature experimental
verse forms and the lower-case personal pronoun "i"--symbolizing
both the humbleness and the uniqueness of the individual--that became
his trademark. The copy editor of the book, however, mistook Cummings's
intentions as typographical errors and made "corrections."
