Ee Cummings Biography

Jessica Hueto
Ms. Dester
AP Lit and Comp/ per.2
6 November 2015
Cummings Biography
Edward Estlin Cummings was born on October 14, 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cummings decided as a child that he wanted to become a poet. He would write a poem every day looking at traditional ways of writing a poem. One reason that cumming slight have wanted to write poetry might have been because he loved me t to the philosophers Williams James and Josiah Royce. He grew up with people who might have influenced his ideals, what he believed in, and what he wrote about. Cumming went to Harvard where he earned both his BA and MA. After graduating, Cummings volunteered in World War 1 as an ambulance driver in France. He was accused of being an espionage so he was in prison for three months. He was accused of espionage because he spoke out about how he doesn't like war. Some of his work has been inspired by the time time he spent in prison.
E.E Cummings would be considered a romantic transcendental. He would also write poems that were satirical, which would received praise or criticism. He mostly talked about how the people were being oppressed and that everyone
could change if they wanted to. Cummings gained popularity because he applied to young people since he mainly talked about war and sex. He experiment with punctuation, form, spelling and syntax in his poems. Since he strayed away from traditional forms of poetry making, he created a new form of poetic expression which helped gain popularity. His poem "Buffalo Bills" was his debut poem which helped become people at in America. He was ranked as best love poet at the time, which was one of his main interests at the time. His poems were meant to shock people since most of the poems were erotic. His most important poem would indeed be their debut poem that made him more noticeable around America. Another of his poems would be "somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond" and a poem he wrote about when his dad death. He also published in Eight Harvard Poets. In 1922, he published his first book called The Enormous Room which talked about the time he was in prison. Tulips and Chimneys was considered his first collection of poems releases in 1923. The poems contained many poems with his eccentric style.
One of his many influences was Robert Frost Cummings was second most read in the United States, after Robert Frost.
At first he was not very popular but later on he became more acknowledged by America. He He won the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, 2 Guggenneim Fellowships, The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, The Bollingen Prize in Poetry, and the Ford Foundation Grant. He was a fan of Pablo Picasso whose work he admired. Cummings also took a trip to the Soviet Union to see if their society was better than the American society. But he ends up being disappointed and writes in his journal about how the dictatorship is dehumanizing its citizens. Although poem keep growing his poems still continue to amuse and provoke. He died September 3, 1962 and is buried in Boston, Massachusetts in Forest Hill
Cemetery.