E E Cummings A Life Author:Susan Cheever From the acclaimed author of My Name Is Bill ("A national treasure"?Kurt Vonnegut) and Home Before Dark ("Moving and brilliantly restrained . . . Intimate, deeply felt, and often harrowing"?The New York Times Book Review)?a major reassessment of the life and work of one of America's preeminent twentieth-century poets. — Cummings's radical experim... more »entation with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax resulted in his creation of a new, idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. And while there was critical disagreement about his work (Edmund Wilson called it "hideous," Malcolm Cowley called him "unsurpassed in his field"), at the time of his death in 1962, at age sixty-eight, he was, after Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in the United States. Now, in this rich, illuminating biography, Susan Cheever traces the development of the poet and his work. She takes us from Cummings's seemingly idyllic childhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, through his years at Harvard (rooming with Dos Passos, befriending Malcolm Cowley and Lincoln Kirstein) when he devoured the poetry of Ezra Pound whose radical verses lured the young writer away from the politeness of the traditional nature poem towards a more adventurous, sexually conscious form . . . We follow Cummings to Paris in 1917, and, finally, to Greenwich Village to be among other modernist poets of the day?Marianne Moore and Hart Crane, among them.
A revelation of the man and the poet, and a brilliant reassessment of the freighted path of his legacy.