Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge Massachusetts on October 14 1894. He was born to a normal family however with an astounding fate. His father was fond of poetry. She encouraged and started something fantastic in E. E. Cummings at the youthful age of 10 when he started to compose verses.
He built up a style so one of a kind that it was not completely refreshing until after his passing. This style of verse split away from the regular utilization of the English language. His employments of his past encounters and consolidation in his sonnets and books were recognized so as to pass on affection in a word, self-esteem in a letter, and symbolism in a space. He conflicted with all the laws of English to pass on his implications with his dismissal for accentuation and decapitalization.
He was to compose his first book titled ‘The Enormous Room’ from the time he spent in a French jail for having been hostile to war slants. He has likewise shone a lot of lowliness toward his composition, for instance, utilizing the lower case ‘I’ as opposed to underwriting it. Although now his sonnets are adored while he was alive he had issues simply finding a distributor, even to the point of having his mother give the financing to the distributing for two of his books.
While his worth was neglected when he composed his sonnets; after he died on September third 1962 the accompanying counterculture of the 1960’s pre-owned him as an incredible motivation with his special style of composing that will live for eternity.
A Short Biography of E. E. Cummings
E.E Cummings was born on 14 October 1894. His full name is Edward Estlin Cummings. His birthplace in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His parents were Edward Cummings and Rebecca Haswell Clarke. This was a famous couple in the city. His father was a professor at Harvard University. Eventually, his father became a minister of South Congregational Church in Boston. His mother was a housewife. Cummings and his sister were nearer to their mother than their father. Their mother would play various games with these two children and she encouraged the creative gifts of Cummings.
When Cummings was a child, he used to spend time in outdoor activities. He mostly spent his time at Silver Lake. At a young age, Cummings began writing poetry. He made experiments on different forms of poetry. He got admission to Cambridge Latin High School. In this school, he became more focused on Greek and Latin languages. He wanted to be a full-time poet and for this very reason, he started writing poems from the age of 8 to 22 on a daily basis in his diary.
He got his degree of Bachelors in 1915 and a Masters in Arts in 1916. The time he spent in Harvard University drew his attention to modern poetry. Modern poetry did not follow any conventions of grammar and syntax and this made Cummings experiment with his poetry.
He got both degrees from Harvard University. In 1917, Cummings’ first poems were published. These poems were entitled ‘Eight Harvard Poets’. His works had different experiments in it. His word choice made his work more prominent. He coined different compound words in his poetry. When he completed his Graduation, he got the job of a book dealer.
During World War First, Cummings visited France in 1917. The main purpose of this journey was to serve in the ambulance corps and for this reason he had enlisted himself in Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps. During the voyage to France, he became a good friend of William Slater Brown. Both of them spent a very good time in Paris and Cummings developed a strong love for the city of Paris.
Cummings and his friend wrote many letters during their time in France. These letters got the attention of a huge crowd. These letters were written about anti-war and terror. French Military imprisoned him for his anti-war views. He was considered a spy.
His father wrote a letter to the president of France. His father’s influence became the reason for his release after two years of imprisonment. He was released in December 1917. His time in France became the inspiration for his novel, ‘The Enormous Room’. This novel was published in 1922. Cummings came back to the United States in 1918. In 1918, Cummings got drafted in the army. He served in the army till November 1918 in 12th Division at Camp Devens, Massachusetts.
In 1921, Cummings paid another visit to Paris. He spent two years in Paris and then went to New York. After the World War, Cummings met his beloved Elaine Orr. His relationship started with Elaine and they got married in 1924. Before marrying Cummings, Orr was married to one of Cummings’ friends from Harvard. She divorced her husband and married Cummings. Cummings had a daughter from Elaine but their love story did not last long. They got divorced soon. During the 1920s, he also visited the Soviet Union.
Cummings married another girl Anny Minnerly in 1929. This time the couple separated after 3 years. In 1934, Cummings came close to Marion Morehouse. They two got intimidated with one another. She was a model and a photographer. It is not clear whether they formally got married or not but she lived with him in a common-law marriage. This relationship lasted until Cummings` death.
In post-war years, Cummings made his own home first in Paris and then in New York. During this time his new publication appeared which was entitled as ‘Tulips and Chimney.’ In 1925, he published ‘XLI Poems.’ After these poems, Cummings’ position as Poet became more solid. Cummings visited Europe many times. He also travelled to the Soviet Union. He was not just a poet. He also worked as Portrait artist and Essayist.
In 1926, Cummings had to bear the tragic death of his father in a car crash. His mother was also with his father but she survived having been severely injured. The death of his father had greatly impacted his personal life as well as his poetic life. After the tragic death of his father, he started writing about the depths of life in his poetry.
Though Cummings was a shy person, his writings were opposite to his behaviours. He broke the models of the Victorian age, which were confined in expression. He openly talked and mostly discussed the sexual acts in his writings. In his second poems` publication, he openly discussed prostitution. He also experimented with new spelling and syntax. The reason behind these experiments was to create a distinct position. His writing style and subject matter mainly attracted young readers.
When Cumming was alive; he was awarded many honours and awards. His achievements include Two Guggenheim Fellowships, Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in poetry, Ford Foundation Grant and Shelley Memorial Award for Poetry in 1945.
Cummings’ composing was generally welcomed. He was accustomed to getting blended reviews and solid responses from general society just as art critics. Eimi, an exposition assortment dependent on his journey journal in Russia, came in 1933 and got severe reviews. The American Spectator announced it “The Worst Book of the Month”. A considerable lot of the reactions concentrated on the extreme style of composing and dark typography contained in the 432 pages rather than the political suppositions communicated.
In the following decades, Cummings found another plot for his profession as he started talking and perusing his verses at schools around the nation. He was delighted in the consideration and found that open readings gave another outlet to his innovativeness. It is intriguing to take note of that while Cummings was increasingly presented to the general population and his appearances were very much joined in.
It is during these later years in life that he picked up the fame of being a curmudgeon and his perspectives turned out to be more close-disapproved and grumpy. Ordinarily, he worked out his racial and strict feelings, some of the time to the consternation of his editors and companions.
Towards the 1950s, Cummings’ osteoarthritis had begun to negatively affect his capacity to get out and do the readings he was to do. Quite a bit of his verses in his last years managed his perspectives on maturing and demise. Besides his proceeding to take a shot at his verses, Cummings isolated his time between Joy Farm and Patchin Place painting and investing energy with Marion and his family. Cummings tried different things with structure and significance up until the end, delivering two last volumes inside his lifetime: A Miscellany, an assortment of short composition pieces and 95 Poems, a book of new verse from the inventive veteran.
In the last year of life, Cummings was the second most-read poet of the United States. He died on 3rd September 1962. Stroke became the reason for his death. Cummings was buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.
E. E. Cummings’ Writing Style
Regardless of Cummings’ nature with modern styles, a lot of his work is very conventional. A significant number of his sonnets are traditional yet frequently with an advanced curve. He at times utilized the blues structure and acrostics. Cummings’ verses frequently manage topics of adoration and nature, just as the relationship of the person to the majority and to the world. His sonnets are likewise regularly overflowing with satire.
While his graceful structures and subjects share a fondness with the Romantic convention, Cummings’ work shows a specific mannerism of punctuation, or method of masterminding singular words into bigger expressions and sentences. A considerable lot of his most striking sonnets don’t include any typographical or accentuation developments whatsoever, yet simply syntactic ones.
Just as being impacted by remarkable innovators, including Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, Cummings in his initial work drew upon the imagist analyses of Amy Lowell. Afterward, his visits to Paris presented him to Dada and Surrealism, which he then talked about in his work. He started to depend on imagery and moral story, where he once had utilized comparison and allegory.
In his later work, he utilized correlations of necessary items that were not recently referenced in the sonnet, deciding to utilize an image. Because of this, his later verse is every now and again increasingly clear and more significant than his earlier. Cummings preferred to consolidate symbolism of nature and demise into a lot of his verse.
While a portion of his poetic work is free verse, many have a conspicuous structure of 14 lines, with a mind-boggling rhyme. Some of his sonnets include a typographically extravagant style, with words, portions of words, or accentuation images dispersed over the page, frequently having neither rhyme nor reason until reading so anyone might hear. So the importance and feeling of his works become clear. Cummings, who was additionally a painter, comprehended the significance of introduction, and utilized typography to paint an image with a portion of his poems.
Cummings’ work frequently doesn’t continue as per the ordinary combinatorial guidelines that create conventional English sentences. Furthermore, some of Cummings’ sonnets include, to some degree or in entire, deliberate incorrect spellings, and a few join phonetic spellings proposed to show specific tongues. Cummings utilized innovative developments of compound words, as “in Just” which highlights words, for example, mud-delicious, puddle-magnificent, and “eddieandbill.”
This work is a part of a succession of poems titled “Chansons Innocentes.” It has numerous references looking at the “balloonman” to Pan, the legendary animal that is half-goat and half-man. R.P. Blackmur has remarked that this utilization of language is every now and again confused in light of the fact that Cummings ignores the recorded amassing of importance in words for just private and individual associations.
Uncommon Method
At the point when e. E. Cummings composed verses, he had an uncommon method of portraying things. The letter I to the vast majority is only a letter, however to e. E. Cummings it wasn’t. When perusing his poetic works like “somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond” and “I sing of “Loaf glad and big”, Cummings utilizes the first pronoun type of the letter “l” in the titles to minimize his perspective in the sonnets. Cummings frequently utilizes lower case letters where capital letters were linguistically required.
The facts confirm that Cummings composed his own name without accentuation or capitalization like e e Cummings. It has become a basic practice for researchers to standardize the structure when referring to or alluding to him. The peculiarity of this training is symbolic of his style. He rearranged the verbal articulation of his sonnets as one approach to connote the embodiment, instead of the appearance, of his thoughts. Further, his language is purposefully contra-typical, again to communicate something more than basic importance. For instance, when he says
“in Just-spring
when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman”
He is making an inconspicuous point: Spring has a brief however striking start, a surface, a character. Likewise, the course of action of his lines permits the readers to envision the fragile image of spring. Cummings’ style, at that point, is to change the shows of the composed language to uncover its concealed prospects. It’s critical to take note of that these varieties are not self-assertive but rather deliberately picked.
His bigger standard stresses his regard for the subtleties of individual character, his own positive thinking, and his affection for nature. Maybe his best “style” is his self-destroying individual perspective. He once commented that English is the main language that underwrites the principal individual particular nominative pronoun.
Lower and Upper Case Letters
In his work “5/derbies-with-men-in-them” he offers to individuals as lower case letters, for instance: a has gold Teeth b pink Suspenders c Reads Atlantis. Cummings additionally flips this strategy around and utilizes capital letters incorrectly just as including spaces in uncommon spots. In his poem “the pooh/obvious/long owe n” and “stops.” the utilization of capital letters and spaces are there to show ulterior implications. Cummings utilizes letters as devices as well as to make his reader endeavours to attempt to comprehend his basic significance.
Unusual Structure
In “No way,” Cummings scatters letters and adds other accentuation imprints to represent certain wings; he utilizes the Capital “O” to represent the moon (American Writer). E. E Cummings was known for abnormal utilization of letters and spaces in his poetry. He likewise masterminds them in an unusual structure also. The structure of most e. E Cummings poetic works is not quite the same as most artists of his timespan. Cummings utilizes peculiar dividing and goals in a portion of his verse, for example, hi “Crepuscular.”
As per Richard Kennedy, the manner in which Cummings set up the lines in the poems is to make noteworthy ambiguities and complexities. By utilizing this method, his poetry is more earnestly to pursue which makes the readers centre around the message of the work. One such sonnet that is never discharged really expresses his line dividing and word intentions in the first draft. Cummings takes note of that “Lines composed by syllables” in the real content of the work. Alongside the dividing, Cummings utilizes accentuation imprints to control the progression of his verse.
In Cummings` “O sweets spontaneous,” on line 13 he spaces more than multiple times, composes “magnificence’ spaces more than multiple times, puts a period imprint, and afterwards states “how. ” While this is exceptionally eccentric, it gets the consideration of the readers and makes his verse stick out. These are a couple of the one of a kind methods E. Cummings uses to customize his work. While Cummings has abnormal utilizations for letters and bizarre structure, his utilization of imaginative words might be the most extraordinary element of his works. His mix of words in his sonnets mirrors the manner in which individuals talk in regular day to day existence.
For instance, in the “Wild ox Bill’s” Cummings joins the words “one, two, three, four, five” into one entire word as though the reader is really pointing at and excluding the pigeons uproariously. Cummings additionally shows this method on line 6 of “in Just-. ” Cummings joins the names of two young men, Eddie and Bill, to make “dandelions,” this reflects how kids would talk when shouting to companions. Nonetheless, e. E. Cummings doesn’t generally write in such a slang structure. In the early long periods of his vocation, he utilizes persuasive language.
Expression of Love
Cummings was positioned among the best love artists of his time. Love consistently was Cummings’ central subject of intrigue. The conventional verse circumstance, portraying the darling talking about adoration to his woman, has been given an extraordinary flavour and accentuation by Cummings. The lover and his woman are a subject of proceeding with worry to our speaker. In his works love was likened to such different ideas as bliss and development, a relationship which had its source.
In Cummings’ understanding as a youngster; he experienced childhood in an air of love. Love is the moving power behind an extraordinary body of his verse. Friedman noticed that Cummings was prone to relate love, as a subject, with the scene, the seasons, the hours of the day and with time and passing—as artists have consistently done previously.
Use of Satire
Cumming has frequently used satire as a device in his poems. This satirical angle to Cummings’ work drew both commendation and analysis. His assaults on the mass brain, traditional examples of thought, and society’s limitations on free articulation, were conceived of his solid promise to the person. In the “non-lectures” he conveyed at Harvard University Cummings clarified his position.
Most definitely, verse and each other craftsmanship was and perpetually will be carefully and unmistakably an issue of independence. As Penberthy noticed, Cummings’ reliable disposition in his works was denouncing humanity while admiring the person.
Cummings’ deep-rooted conviction was straightforward confidence in the supernatural occurrence of man’s singularity. Quite a bit of his artistic exertion was coordinated against what he considered the essential adversaries of this uniqueness—mass idea, bunch congruity, and corporate greed. For this explanation, Cummings parodied what he called “most people,” that is, the crowd attitude found in present-day society.
On a basic level, the fights of Cummings are protection from the little personalities of each sort, political, logical, philosophical, and scholarly. These are the people who demand to constrain the genuine and the consistent with what they think they know or can react to. As a preventive to this sort of restriction, Cummings is legitimately contradicted by letting us rest in what we accept we know; and this is the way into the expository capacity of his well-known language.