The Oxford Companion to English Literature | Cummings, E. E.
Cummings, E.
E.
,
Edward
Estlin
Cummings
(
1894
–
1962
), American poet, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard. His first book, The Enormous Room (
1922
), an account of his three-month internment in a French detention camp in
1917
, won him an immediate international reputation for its brilliant prose and its iconoclastic views, with
Dos Passos
,
Robert
Graves
,
T.
E.
Lawrence
, and
V.
Larbaud
among its earliest admirers. In
1923
appeared Tulips and Chimneys, the first of 12 volumes of poetry. Strongly influenced by the English Romantic poets, by
Swinburne
, and by
Pound
, and marked by
Dada
and the jazz age, the early poems attracted attention more for their experimental typography and technical skill than for their considerable lyric power; the frankness of his vocabulary and the sharpness of his satire also created some scandal. In Eimi (
1933
), a...
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