"I would rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach 10,000 stars how not to dance." -- e. e. cummings
E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as ee cummings (in the style of some of his poems), was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. His body of work encompasses approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays and several essays, as well as numerous drawings and paintings. He is remembered as a preeminent voice of 20th century poetry, as well as one of the most popular.
"A politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man.""A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.""Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.""America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.""At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.""Be of love a little more careful than of anything.""Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.""I imagine that yes is the only living thing.""I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more.""I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.""I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.""I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.""If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.""It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.""It takes three to make a child.""Kisses are a better fate than wisdom.""Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.""Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go.""Nothing recedes like progress.""Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.""Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own.""The earth laughs in flowers.""The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.""The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.""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.""To destroy is always the first step in any creation.""To like an individual because he's black is just as insulting as to dislike him because he isn't white.""Unbeing dead isn't being alive.""Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense."
Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894, elder of two children to Edward Cummings and Rebecca Haswell Clarke. His younger sister, Elizabeth, was born in 1901.
He was named after his father but his family called him by his middle name, Estlin. His father was a professor of sociology and political science at Harvard University and later a Unitarian minister. Cummings described his father as a person who could accomplish anything that he wanted to. Edward was well skilled and was always working on repairing things. He and his son were close, and Edward was one of Estlin's most ardent supporters.
His mother never partook in stereotypically "feminine" things, and enjoyed reading poetry to her children. Raised in a well-educated family, Cummings was a precocious boy and his mother encouraged Estlin to write poetry every day. He wrote his first poem when he was only three: "Oh,the pretty birdie,O;/with his little toe,toe,toe!"
His boyhood home, the E. E. Cummings House, is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Cummings enrolled at Harvard University in September 1911, from which he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1915, graduating magna cum laude, and in the next year completed his Master's degree in English and Classical Studies also at Harvard. While at Harvard, he befriended John Dos Passos, at one time rooming in Thayer Hall, named after the family of one of his Harvard acquaintances, Scofield Thayer, and not yet a freshman-only dormitory. Several of Cummings' poems were published in the Harvard Monthly as early as his sophomore year. Cummings himself labored on the school newspaper alongside fellow Harvard Aesthetes John Dos Passos and S. Foster Damon. In 1915, his poems were published in the Harvard Advocate.
In his final year at Harvard, Cummings was influenced by writers such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. He delivered a controversial commencement address to his graduating class entitled "The New Art". This speech gave him his first taste of notoriety, as he managed to give the false impression that the well-liked imagist poet, Amy Lowell, whom he himself admired, was "abnormal". For this, Cummings was chastised in the newspapers. In 1917, Cummings' first published poems appeared in a collection of poetry entitled Eight Harvard Poets.
In 1917 Cummings enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, along with his college friend John Dos Passos. Due to an administrative mix-up, Cummings was not assigned to an ambulance unit for five weeks, during which time he stayed in Paris. He fell in love with the city, to which he would return throughout his life.
During their service in the ambulance corp, they had sent letters home that drew the attention of the military censors and preferred the company of French soldiers over fellow ambulance drivers. The two openly expressed anti-war views; Cummings spoke of his lack of hatred for the Germans. On September 21, 1917, just five months after his belated assignment, he and a friend, William Slater Brown were arrested by the French military on suspicion of espionage and undesirable activities. They were held for 3½ months in a concentration camp at the Dépôt de Triage, in La Ferté-Macé, Orne, Normandy.
They were imprisoned with other detainees in a large room. Cummings' father failed to obtain his son's release through diplomatic channels and in December 1917 finally wrote a letter to President Wilson. Cummings was released on December 19, 1917, and Brown was released two months later. Cummings used his prison experience as the basis for his novel, The Enormous Room about which F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "Of all the work by young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives...The Enormous Room by e e cummings....Those few who cause books to live have not been able to endure the thought of its mortality."
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