Cummings, E. E. - Brian Docherty (essay date 1995)
Brian Docherty (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: Docherty, Brian. “e. e. cummings.” In American Poetry: The Modernist Ideal, edited by Clive Bloom and Brian Docherty, pp. 120-30. Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1995.
[In the following essay, Docherty discusses the paradox of modernism and traditionalism in Cummings’s poetry.]
e. e. cummings is at once the most modern of traditionalists and the most traditional of Modernists. This ironic paradox runs through both his life and his poetry. Born in 1894 to a family of impeccably New England Puritan stock, his life as a writer was to some extent a negation of his background. Like Ezra Pound, cummings never held a ‘normal’ job, but lived true to his principles, devoted to his art even at the expense of so-called material success. His father was both an academic, who became America's first Professor of Sociology, and a Unitarian minister at Boston's fashionable Back Bay Church. Two...
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