The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-07.
Cummings, E. E.
(Edward Estlin Cummings), 1894–1962, American poet, b. Cambridge, Mass., grad. Harvard, 1915. His poetry, noted for its eccentricities of typography, language, and punctuation, usually seeks to convey a joyful, living awareness of sex and love. Among his 15 volumes of poetry are Tulips and Chimneys (1923), Is 5 (1926), and 95 Poems (1958). A prose account of his war internment in France, The Enormous Room (1922), is considered one of the finest books ever written about World War I. Cummings was also an accomplished artist whose paintings and drawings were exhibited in several one-man shows.
See his Complete Poems, 1913–1962 (2 vol., 1972); biographies by R. S. Kennedy (1980) and C. Sawyer-Lauçcanno (2004); N. Friedman, Cummings: The Growth of a Writer (1980).
