E.E CUMMINGSBy: Arden Jung

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Background• Edward Estlin Cummings• Born: October 14, 1894• Hometown: Cambridge Massachusetts• Father: Edward Cummings, professor of Sociology and Political Science at Harvard, he left Harvard to become a minister of the South Congregational Church.

Background• Died: September 3, 1962North Conway New Hampshire

• American Poet• His Style: E.E wrote verse that presented romantic attitudes in an experimental style. He crafted physical objects that show a fresh way of looking at reality.

Youth and Education

• His Mother: Rebecca Cummings, who loved to spend time with her children.

• Cummings had a sister, Elizabeth.

• It was his mother who introduced him to writing.

Youth and Education• E.E wrote poems and drew as a child, and often played outdoors with many other children who lived in his neighborhood. He grew up with family and friends as the Philosophers, William James and Josiah Rayce.

• He graduated from Harvard University in 1915 and received an advanced degree from Harvard in 1916.

Early Career• After graduating he became an ambulance driver in France just before America entered WWI. He was imprisoned for 3 months on suspicion of holding views critical of the French war effort. He was in jail for 3 months till a friend bailed him out.

Early Career• The Enormous Room (1922) was the first of his literary attacks on authoritarianism. After returning from the First World War he found himself a celebrity for his works..

• In the 10 years following 1925 only two volumes of Cumming’s poems were published.

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• Some awards he got were the Boston Fine Arts Poetry Festival Award and the Bollingen Prize in Poetry

• At the time of his death, he was the 2nd most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost.

The Way He Writes• Cummings wrote some of the finest celebrations of sexual love and the religious experience of awe produced in the 20th century, at the time when it was not at all popular to write such poems.

• The games he plays with language (adverbs functioning as nouns, for instance) and lyric form combine with their deliberately simplistic view of the world. Most of his works had irony in it.

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Late Works• E.E Cummings did not “develop” as a poet either in terms of ideas or of characteristic style. Between the publication of his 1st volume, called 73 poems (1963)shows a deepening awareness and mastery of his special gift as a poet. His finest single volume is often said to be 95 poems (1958). Cumming’s Collected Poems was published in 1960

Cummings always painted with bright colors of Japanese prints.“Mt. Chocorua.”

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Death• He died on September 3, 1962, at the age of 67 in North Conway, New Hampshire of a stroke. His cremated remains were buried in Forest Hills Cemetery and Crematory in Boston. In 1969, his third wife, Marion Morehouse Cummings, died and was buried in an adjoining plot

Marriages• 1. Elaine Orr-met during an affair, had one child, stopped seeing each other 9 months.

• 2. Anne Minnerly Barton-married 3 years, doesn’t say how they met

• 3. Marion Morehouse-marriage was never legal, married till death

Bibliography• http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cummings/cummings_life.htm

• http://www.notablebiographies.com/Co-Da/Cummings-E-E.html

• www.famouspoetsandpoems.com