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E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised
Previously unpublished writings of E. E. Cummings. The book collects almost all of EEC's occasional prose pieces, most of which date from the 20s and 30s.
335 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
About the author
E.E. Cummings
261 books3,883 followersEdward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School.
He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.
After the war, he settled into a life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.
In 1920, The Dial published seven poems by Cummings, including "Buffalo Bill ’s.” Serving as Cummings’ debut to a wider American audience, these “experiments” foreshadowed the synthetic cubist strategy Cummings would explore in the next few years.
In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work toward further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.
The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted that Cummings is “one of the most individual poets who ever lived—and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings’s poems are loved because they are full of sentimentally, of sex, of more or less improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence.”
During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant.
At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.
source: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/e-...
He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.
After the war, he settled into a life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.
In 1920, The Dial published seven poems by Cummings, including "Buffalo Bill ’s.” Serving as Cummings’ debut to a wider American audience, these “experiments” foreshadowed the synthetic cubist strategy Cummings would explore in the next few years.
In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work toward further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.
The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted that Cummings is “one of the most individual poets who ever lived—and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings’s poems are loved because they are full of sentimentally, of sex, of more or less improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence.”
During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant.
At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.
source: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/e-...
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 11, 2023
Thank goodness for the editor, George J. Firmage and his efforts with mrs. e. e. cummings to provide us this book. . . a goofy mish-mash. . .essays, poems, speeches from an unfinished play, forewards, nonlectures, a book without a title, interviews, and the last an address to students. All worth your reading time - some will hit you in the heart, some in the funnybone, and some will fly over your head to nest in the trees beyond your roof.
Excerpts from FAVS:
Helen Whiffletree, American Poetess
"confronted on every hand with hardships and privations, Helen set about at an early age to earn her own living. At the age of nine, she was supporting her indigent mother and seven sisters by selling newspapers, dressed in boy's clothes. . . . [she] wrote verse in which naivete is carried to a pitch of unheard-of poignancy. As an example, I can do no better than quote eight lovely lines which appeared, over the signature "H.W.," in the literary magazine of her alma matter, and which are entitled "Conversation."
"Quoth a busy bee
To a butterfly
'Honey make I
and what maketh thee?'
'Go ask a lily,'
Was the sage reply
Of the silly Butterfly."
Who can resist that????
Also Jottings 1 - 33 - here are a few that are thoroughly satisfying:
#7 don't stand under whispers
#9 ends are beginnings with their hats on
#16 many parents wouldn't exist if their children had been a little more careful
#24 item: our unworld has just heaved a sigh of belief
#26 hatred bounces
#33 sleep is the mother of courage
My last favorite in this collection is
A Poet's Advice to Students
A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.
This may sound easy. It isn't.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel -- but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling -- not knowing or believing or thinking. . .
{MORE GOOD STUFF - FIND A COPY!}
To be nobody-but yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. . .
{MORE GOOD STUFF - FIND A COPY!}
Does this sound dismal? It isn't.
It's the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel."
From the Ottawa Hills Spectator, Oct 26, 1955.
e.e. cummings is a gem amongst poets, possessed of a voice that needs to be heard more often than we are afforded - I was introduced to him in the 60's by an eager English teacher. Reading this through in 2023, when much of it was written many decades ago, a few of my 2023 sensibilities are up-hackled, a little. He is a White Guy Writing in the context of his day waving the freedoms wrestled and won in their times by White Guys Writing - without apology or even, it seems, much awareness for some of it. There's the irony. . .he's often aiming blows with the weapon of offense in some threads and themes, but it's not those threads we are cringing at all these years later. . . .as much. Anyway. I digress. He's a gem. I wish I could read him again 70 years from now to see how things have changed. Alas. You'll need to do it for me, and report back. I'll be long gone, but reading ahead, I assure you.
Excerpts from FAVS:
Helen Whiffletree, American Poetess
"confronted on every hand with hardships and privations, Helen set about at an early age to earn her own living. At the age of nine, she was supporting her indigent mother and seven sisters by selling newspapers, dressed in boy's clothes. . . . [she] wrote verse in which naivete is carried to a pitch of unheard-of poignancy. As an example, I can do no better than quote eight lovely lines which appeared, over the signature "H.W.," in the literary magazine of her alma matter, and which are entitled "Conversation."
"Quoth a busy bee
To a butterfly
'Honey make I
and what maketh thee?'
'Go ask a lily,'
Was the sage reply
Of the silly Butterfly."
Who can resist that????
Also Jottings 1 - 33 - here are a few that are thoroughly satisfying:
#7 don't stand under whispers
#9 ends are beginnings with their hats on
#16 many parents wouldn't exist if their children had been a little more careful
#24 item: our unworld has just heaved a sigh of belief
#26 hatred bounces
#33 sleep is the mother of courage
My last favorite in this collection is
A Poet's Advice to Students
A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.
This may sound easy. It isn't.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel -- but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling -- not knowing or believing or thinking. . .
{MORE GOOD STUFF - FIND A COPY!}
To be nobody-but yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. . .
{MORE GOOD STUFF - FIND A COPY!}
Does this sound dismal? It isn't.
It's the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel."
From the Ottawa Hills Spectator, Oct 26, 1955.
e.e. cummings is a gem amongst poets, possessed of a voice that needs to be heard more often than we are afforded - I was introduced to him in the 60's by an eager English teacher. Reading this through in 2023, when much of it was written many decades ago, a few of my 2023 sensibilities are up-hackled, a little. He is a White Guy Writing in the context of his day waving the freedoms wrestled and won in their times by White Guys Writing - without apology or even, it seems, much awareness for some of it. There's the irony. . .he's often aiming blows with the weapon of offense in some threads and themes, but it's not those threads we are cringing at all these years later. . . .as much. Anyway. I digress. He's a gem. I wish I could read him again 70 years from now to see how things have changed. Alas. You'll need to do it for me, and report back. I'll be long gone, but reading ahead, I assure you.
March 8, 2010
This is George Firmage's effort to compile a bibliography of e.e. cummings' works. Cummings himself provided a foreword: "This book consists of a cluster of epigrams,forty-nine essays on various subjects,a poem dispraising dogmata,and several selections from an unfinished play.
"Taken ensemble,the forty-nine astonish and cheer and enlighten their progenitor. He's astonished that,as nearly as anyone can make out,I wrote them. He's cheered because,while rereading them,I've encountered a great deal of liveliness and nothing dead. Last but not the least; he's enlightened via the realization that,whereas time can merely change,an individual may grow."
"Taken ensemble,the forty-nine astonish and cheer and enlighten their progenitor. He's astonished that,as nearly as anyone can make out,I wrote them. He's cheered because,while rereading them,I've encountered a great deal of liveliness and nothing dead. Last but not the least; he's enlightened via the realization that,whereas time can merely change,an individual may grow."
December 18, 2018
even goofier than, but not nearly as funny as, old PUNCH or MAD.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews