Biography of Edward Estlin Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), was born in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. His parents were Edward and Rebecca Haswell Clarke
Cummings. Cummings' father was a professor of sociology and political science at
Harvard. Later, he was ordained as a Unitarian minister. Father and son were close.
Cummings began writing poetry when he was 10, in 1904.
Cummings attended Cambridge Latin High School, and some early stories and poems were
published in the Cambridge Review, the school newspaper. He was proficient in Latin and
Greek, and used them in his poetry.
E.E. Cummings studied at Harvard from 1911 to 1916, graduating with a Master of Arts degree in English
and Classical Studies in 1916. He met and befriended John Dos Passos at Harvard and they worked together
on a Harvard newspaper, and several of Cummings' poems were published in
the Harvard Monthly beginning in 1912. He delivered a controversial
commencement address on the New Art in 1916 and was sharply criticized for
it.
In 1917, Cummings and his friend John Dos Passos volunteered as ambulance
drivers in France in World War I. At one point, he was arrested and detained in
an internment camp, possibly by mistake, or possibly because of pacifist
statements he had made. Subsequently he wrote "The Enormous Room" based
on his experiences. After his release, he was drafted into the U.S. army and
served until November 1918.
E. E. Cummings had an affair and was then married briefly to Elaine Orr Thayer, formerly the wife of his
professor in 1919, with whom he had a child, Nancy, his only offspring. Orr left him after nine months of
marriage and took up with a wealthy Irish banker, taking their daughter with her to Ireland. Cummings did not
see Nancy again until 1946. He returned to France, having fallen in love with Paris, and lived there for several
years in the twenties.
The decade of the '20s was perhaps Cummings' most productive and unorthodox
period. Following The Enormous Room (1922), he published Tulips and Chimneys
(1923), & (1925) (Self-published), XLI Poems (1925), is 5 (1926), HIM (1927) (a
play) and W [ViVa] (1931). In 1925, Cummings was awarded the prestigious Dial
award, and in 1933 he was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. However,
much of his output, which was ahead of its time, was unappreciated by his
publishers, and his conservative politics did not help him among avant-garde
critics. Publishers cut many of his poems from books. These were eventually published in later volumes. His
experimentation with compound words, idiosyncratic spelling and typographical layouts were all derided as
"gimmicks" in a conservative age, and his outspoken stands against materialism and communism won him the
enmity of leftists.
In 1926 he was greatly affected by the death of his father in a train accident,
and his subsequent work shows the influence of this tragedy. In 1929 he
married Anne Barton. The marriage lasted three years. She divorced him in
1932. He met Marianne Moorehouse, a fashion model and photographer, the
same year, and she became his lifelong companion.
Following his visit to the USSR, he published EIMI in 1933, No Thanks in
1935, Collected Poems in 1938 (reprinted 1960) 50 Poems in 1940, 1 ª 1 in
1944, XAIPE: Seventy-One Poems in 1950. Poems, 1923-1954 in 1954, 95
Poems in 1958. 73 Poems (1963) and Fairy Tales (1965) were published after
his death. He also wrote children's stories and an a Foreword to Krazy Kat
comics! However, his most productive period was in the 20's and 30's, and
many later works incorporate unpublished poems written in the earlier period. He died in New Hampshire in
1962, at the age of 67, just when America was becoming ready to appreciate his work.
One of Cummings' major theses, which returns again and again in his poetry and plays, was that life cannot be
understood or lived by science and logic. People and art should just BE, and not be subject to analyses. Of his
play, HIM, he was quoted as saying:
Relax and give the play a chance to strut its stuff--relax, stop wondering what it is all 'about'-like many strange and familiar things, Life included, this play isn't 'about,' it simply is. . . .
Don't try to enjoy it, let it try to enjoy you. DON'T TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT, LET IT
TRY TO UNDERSTAND YOU." (Kennedy, p 295).
Some Cummings' quotes epitomize both his craft with language and his insistence on "being" rather than
"meaning," or feeling rather than science and logic:
My theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words,
by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz. "Would you hit a woman with a child?-- No,
I'd hit her with a brick." Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates
movement. -- from EIMI (1933).
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance. -- from you shall above all things be glad and young Collected Poems
(1938) New Poems, peom 22]
Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is
feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star... --from "being to timelessness as it's to time, Poem 94 in
95 Poems (1958).
After reuniting with his daughter in 1946, Cummings wrote the play Santa Claus, about a family that had lost its
happiness because of the father's devotion to science and lust for knowledge. The
family is reunited after Santa Claus rediscovers faith in love.
Further reading:
Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings, by Richard S.
Kennedy, 1980.