The Life And Works Of E.E. Cummings

E.E. Cummings was arguably one of the best American poets of his time. His many poems have been reviewed and studied by thousands of people for many generations, teaching valuable life lessons and beliefs. Although he was most well known for his poems he was also a painter, author, essayist, and playwright. He was best known for his use of what some considered mistakes in grammar throughout his works and titles. This paper is about E.E. Cummings, his greatest works “maggie and milly and molly and may,” Since feeling is first” and somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond” as well as what critical evaluators had to say about him.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the late 1800s, Edward Estlin Cummings, also known as E.E. Cummings, grew up in a well-known academic and religious family (Edward). His father Edward, who he was named after, was a sociology professor at Harvard who later became a unitarian minister. His mother Rebecca was warm-hearted and loved by everyone and both his parents encouraged him in his poetry and other forms of art from the time he was very young (Bloom). His mother recorded his first rhyme when he was only three years old and Cummings started a diary at age six (Goldfarb). He attended Cambridge Latin High School where he not only studied Latin and Greek, he fully decided to become a poet (Poetry Foundation). As a result of this decision, at the age of fifteen Cummings wrote a poem a day and published them in high school magazines (Goldfarb). Most of his writing was done at the Joy Farm, an idyllic retreat in the White Mountains of New Hampshire near Silver Lake. Where he was surrounded by neighbors who gave him a love for nature, simple things and good humility, all of which became a common theme in many of his poetic works (Bloom). After Cummings graduated from high school in 1911, he moved on to attend Harvard and as a result, he distanced himself from his family never living in Cambridge again after 1918 (Goldfarb).

At Harvard, he focused on Classics and Literature where he earned his Bachelors of English in 1915 then stayed another year to earn his masters. His studies there introduced him to different styles and types of poetry, such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, Avant-garde writers with very different styles than what Cummings was used to (Poets.org). When introduced to these more modern works, his style changed and he began to experiment with punctuation and began his first use of the lowercase personal pronoun i as a trademark (Bloom). He showed off his skills and talents in issues of the Harvard Monthly, and in 1917 he published poems in Harvard Poets which was a huge step in the right direction for his career. However, Cummings left that same year for France as a volunteer ambulance driver for World War I, leaving his first wife, Elaine Orr and his only daughter at home. After only five months of being in France, he and his friend were suspected of espionage and entered into a French prison camp for anti-war convictions. During this time his first wife divorced him. After the war ended, he began to settle into a new life with a new woman, Anne Minnerly Barton. He divided his time between Greenwich Village, Joy Farm, his childhood summer home, and took frequent trips to Paris as well as many other places throughout Europe (Poets.org). He got his first job as a mail-order bookseller clerk, but quit three months later and started working only on his poetry and painting while his family and friends supported him financially so he could spend time with his arts (Goldfarb). Although many of his paintings were published and exhibited, they did not have the same success as his poems did after his death on September 3, 1962, from a brain Hemorrhage (Magill).

The 1920s were a very productive time for Cummings, his first major work published was “Enormous Room,” an account about his time in French Captivity. This account, however, was not negative as most would expect; he kept it positive and said that it was a time of growth. Also in 1920, the Dial published seven of his poems, including “Buffalo Bill’s,” which showed his work to a wider American audience (Poetry Foundation). Many of these poems Cummings called experiments, and they changed the way he would write his future poems (Poets.org). In 1923, Cummings published “Tulips and Chimneys” in which his unusual use of punctuation and grammar are extremely obvious, because of this, the original version was cut by publishers. However, he did not give up. These cut poems were later published in & in 1925 followed by XLI Poems published that same year (Poetry Foundation). Also in 1925, Cummings received the Dial Award yet, he still had trouble finding a publisher and was forced to pay for his works to be published once again. Many of his early works were rejected because he focused on individualism rather than objective truth (Edward). Cummings devoted himself to go against conformity and focused more on celebrating the individual (Goldfarb). In the ten years after 1925, only two volumes were published, 5 in 1926 and W also known as Viva in 1931. Cummings paid for both to be published. Around the same time, he planned for the publication of a play Him and Eimi in 1933; in this play, he named a publisher who had denied Cummings and thanked his mother who financed it. His religious and love poems were some of his greatest achievements, “somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond” being one of his most popular, even though the time in which he was writing about religious experience and love poems it was very uncommon to do so. Finally, after World War II, new poets began to show interest in his works giving him the recognition that he had worked so long and hard for (Edward). The once called “failure” achieved a fellowship for great achievement, the Charles Elliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, two Guggenheim fellowships, the Ford Foundation grant, and the Bollingen Prize in poetry as well as numerous others (Poets.org). Even after yet another unsuccessful marriage, he continued to write and paint often and eventually found long-lasting happiness with his third wife, Marion Morehouse, in their common-law marriage (Magill). Cummings made it known that he was very unhappy with the average American movie product. However, he never took it upon himself to change the film industry (Seidman). His Collected Poems were published in 1960 along with several other plays, a ballet, and fifteen volumes of verses as “somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond,” “maggie and milly and molly and may,” and “Since feeling is first” fit into his top ten most popular (Edward).

Although “somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond” is a love poem, it like many Cummings, poems are experimental, abstract and irregular. The subject of the poem is simply love and intimacy, showing that love is deep and not just on the outer surface, He stated that he does not understand why this woman mentioned in the poem has so much power over him. Cummings uses two different styles in this poem, imagery, and symbolism. A symbol is a physical object, action, or gesture that's true meaning is to represent something else such as an abstract concept. Symbols appear in two ways; local, meaning that it is only relevant in specific works or universal, meaning that it is widely recognized no matter what the context is. In this poem, Cummings mainly uses universal symbols which adds to the meaning. The symbols are taken from nature. An example is the rose commonly represents love and romance, and because it is a blooming rose, it symbolizes sexual love. The imagery in this poem, like with the symbolism, is taken from nature. Although too new readers of Cummings’ poetry may seem confusing at first, it contains distinct images of objects such as roses and eyes. The ways he uses to describe them are complicated but if you really look into what he could possibly mean it makes much more sense. The blooming rose being described in such detail gives the appearance that it is close enough to touch it leading some to believe that it represents their growing love for one another. The theme is love which is clearly shown from the very beginning, speaking of the power of this glance as the power of love to change a person. Although this poem is all about love, the majority of Cummings poems have completely different meanings (“somewhere”).

“maggie and milly and molly and may” is a poem using four girls’ names all beginning with m’s giving the title of the poem a melody almost like a nursery rhyme. The alliteration used gives it a playful style that is common in many of Cummings’ poems. It is also a playful poem because it is about a day at the beach where each girl finds something different. Maggie, a thinker finds a shell, Milly is sensitive and finds a starfish, Molly is innocent and finds “a horrible thing” possibly a crab, and May, the dreamer, finds a smooth round stone. In this poem, each girl finds something unique and each has a unique experience finding something within themselves. This poem suggests that experiences can change a person and that with new experiences one becomes a new person constantly evolving. The style is written like a nursery rhyme but, the use of imagery is not as common in this poem as it is in some of his other poems, yet Cummings does still use a bit of imagery when he is describing what object each girl found. An unusual theme for this poem could be self-identity, the four girls’ names all beginning with the letter “m” could be one clue that each symbolizes an aspect of “me” or one's self. Each girl has a very different personality described earlier showing that different experiences can teach you something different about your own personality (“maggie”).

In “Since feeling is first,” Cummings shows a young man who is trying to convince a beautiful lady to love him. It contains two themes, to feel emotional thoughts more than intellectual ones and to live fully in the moment. It along with having a playful style shows that it is important to be yourself and have individual ideas. There is vivid imagery and metaphors within the poem, he uses free verse to show individualism and that he does not care about what is socially acceptable. This poem uses emotions to keep the reader interested and works to convince people to focus on the small things in life that, many times can bring the most joy. It has a Carpe Diem theme meaning life is too short and you must take advantage of the time before it is too late. The entire poem could be brought back to the cycle of life using spring flowers to help get his point across to the readers. The word spring is obviously important to this poem because it is one of only two words to be capitalized in this work. The use of spring not only shows what season the poem is in but also, that the lover’s rival is a fool during this season which he reveals through clever use of wordplay. Furthermore, he states that in this season he thinks rather than feels (“Since”). Although most of Cummings’ poems had deeper life meanings than what is first seen or most obvious, not everyone was a fan of his work (Seidman).

When discussing how critics viewed “somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond” one must first take into account Cummings’ previous reputation seeing that his unique grammar style and what some call unconventional use of punctuation were unusual and irritating to many critics. People tended to either hate or love his writing style with no middle ground. Ryan D. Poquette just like many other critics focuses on Cummings’ unusual use of grammar rules as a con of his work, however, he does seem to realize that it was the time period in which Cummings published his poems that it was considered unusual. As Robert E. Maurer states “ It is unfortunate that most critical appraisals of Cummings’ poetry were made early, shortly after his first books were published.” Today, Cummings is well-known as one of the great twentieth-century American poets and his poem “somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond” is one of his most famous and a favorite with new readers (“somewhere”).

Nevertheless, the poem “maggie and milly and molly and may '' was more widely accepted than his previous poems, probably because it was published later in Cummings’ life. On one hand, there are those critics who believe he is one of the most intellectual and creative poets yet, on the other hand, there are those who downplay his significance saying that his poems lack intellect and purpose. Cliff Saunders critic to Cummings’ poems points out what John Berryman says about Cummings. “Some of the deepest feelings scarcely emerge.” and Edward M. Hood says “Cummings is so determined to freshen language by flouting its conventions that he ends up destroying the original language.” Although he had some critics many people enjoyed his playfulness and use of alliteration to draw the reader's attention (“maggie”).

At the time of his death in 1962, Cummings was considered one of the most influential poets of the century, in spite of the way people felt about his work in 1926 when he published “Since feeling is first.” As he was once criticized for his use of “innovations in poetic form and style” he is now being praised for changing the way poems are written. Michael Webster praised Cummings for acknowledging human feelings and the importance of nature in his works just as Laura Riding and Robert Graves did, Saying in a survey of modernist poetry, “ Poems like Cummings’ and the attention they demand should make it harder for the standardized article to pass off as poetry.” Randall Jarrell applauded in agreement stating “how wonderfully individual, characteristic, and original” his poetry is. Proving that as time changed so did the people’s views on how poetry should be written (“Since”).

Although E.E. Cummings was born into a family that supported him and he knew from a young age that he wanted to write, he was not widely accepted as the great poet that he was until times changed. He was forced to work for everything that he had which gave him an appreciation for the small things in life, embracing individualism, creativity, and nature. His poems and the many other works he wrote have taught many valuable lessons about his principals and beliefs. Undoubtedly with the main theme being to never give up, which Cummings never did, even though all the hardships he faced made it difficult. They lead him to become the best he could be and a great American poet.