100 Selected Poems

e. e. cummings

Sep 2014 · Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

About this ebook

e.e. cummings is without question one of the major poets of this century, and this volume, first published in 1959, is indispensable for every lover of modern lyrical verse. It contains one hundred of cummings’s wittiest and most profound poems, harvested from thirty-five of the most radically creative years in contemporary American poetry. These poems exhibit all the extraordinary lyricism, playfulness, technical ingenuity, and compassion for which cummings is famous. They demonstrate beautifully his extrapolations from traditional poetic structures and his departures from them, as well as the unique synthesis of lavish imagery and acute artistic precision that has won him the adulation and respect of critics and poetry lovers everywhere.

About the author

A Harvard University graduate, e e cummings lived in Greenwich Village and spent his summers on a farm in New Hampshire. He was born on October 14, 1894, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While working for the American Red Cross in France in 1917, cummings was mistakenly imprisoned for several months. This experience resulted in the publication of a novel, The Enormous Room (1922). Although he went on to write other prose, it is for his poetry that he is best known. He also published plays, wrote a ballet, and was a respected painter. He was awarded many honors for his work, including the 1958 Bollingen Prize for poetry and the National Book Award in 1955. Although he used many techniques to stress his meaning, he wrote about the traditional subjects of love, nature, and the corrupting influence of materialism. cummings delivered lectures while at Harvard in 1952; in that same year, he was awarded an honorary seat as a guest professor. He also wrote the delightful commentaries for the 50 photographs in Adventures in Value by his wife, Marion Morehouse, a fine and sensitive photographer cummings died of a stroke on September 3, 1962, at the age of 67 in North Conway, New Hampshire at the Memorial Hospital. His cremated remains were buried in Forest Hills Cemetery and Crematory in Boston.