e.e. cummings grew up a Unitarian. His life embodied endless conflict between radical individualism and faith in love.
By Malcolm Cowley, Interpreter of Literature and Society
E.E. Cummings was a poet, painter, and playwright. His desire to have his named written with lowercase letters always made his work stick out in my mind. Some sources now say that he didn’t care that much about the lowercase or the uppercase, so long as people were talking about him.
e.e.cummings body of work encompasses more than 900 poems, several plays and essays, numerous drawings, sketches, and paintings, as well as two novels.
I tend to think of e.e.cummings as the last of the Great American Poets. His poems were often odd and hard to read, which is, of course, the hallmark of all great poems. And he died in 1962, right before the 1960s changed everything forever, but maybe not for better.
My favorite e.e.cummings poems are if I loved You, may i feel he said, and you said is. They are not easy poems like The Raven or Casey at The Bat, but there are little stories here. Reading e.e.cummings always gave me hope that I could be a poet, when I was young and thought it harder to write ‘real’ poems that rhymed. I have given up such illusions now. e.e.cummings poems are as hard to fathom as a Jackson Pollock painting. And yet e.e.cummings makes it look so easy. My favorite e.e.cummings poem. It’s that whole shocking fuzz thing.
For more e.e.cummings poems see e.e.cummings poems. Jeff Duntemann thought he was e.e.cummings, but decided he was wrong.
