Last Updated on July 29, 2019, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 197

Cummings’s 1922 prose work The Enormous Room details his experience as a prisoner of the French during World War I. Cummings was working for the American Red Cross at the time he was imprisoned for insubordination. The book is considered by many critics to be an American classic.

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Poet and critic Gerald Locklin explores the influence of cummings on contemporary poets such as Richard Kostelanetz, Edward Field, and Ronald Koertge in his 1993 essay “The Influence of Cummings on Selected Contemporary Poets.”

In addition to his biography of cummings, Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings (1980), Richard S. Kennedy also wrote a critical study of cummings’s work, E. E. Cummings Revisited, which reviews much of the more recent critical work on the poet.

Byron Farwell’s study of America’s involvement in World War I, Over There: The United States in the Great War, 1917–1918 (1999), provides an in-depth look at the United States’s role in the Great War. Farwell tells the story of how the United States responded to a war it was not prepared to fight. This study helps to contextualize cummings’s own formative experiences as an ambulance driver for the Allies.