E.+E.+Cummings

__Early Life Style and Education__:
 Edward Estlin Cummings had a well-known family living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was born on October 14, 1894. Edward's father also known as Edward, was a professor at Harvard University, then became a known minister of Old South Church in Boston, Massachusetts. Edward's mother, Rebecca, loved to spend time with children, she played games with Cummings and Elizabeth, his sister. Edwards mother was the one who influenced him to have a passion for writing. Cumming made poems and drew as a child, but he often played outdoors with other children who lived in his neighborhood. He graduated Harvard University in 1915 and received a higher degree from Harvard in 1916.

__Early Achievements__:
 After graduating, Edward became an ambulance driver in France just before America joined World War I. He was imprisoned for suspicion of holding plans critical on the French war effort, and this provided the material for his first book, //The Enormous Room// (1922).   Despite growth and movement in contrast to his reputation Cummings actually tended to lack fresh ideas. In the 1930s, when he felt separated from his culture and poets, he repeated himself endlessly, writing many versions of essentially the same poem. Many of Cummings devices, such as the visual "shaping" of poems, often seem like substitutes for original inspiration. However, Cummings most characteristic devices—the unique, personal grammar and the breaking up and putting back together of words into different forms—were more than just another trick when they operated within the context of a poem's meaning.The love poems and religious poems represent Cummings greatest achievements. For example, "somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond" is one of the finest love poems in the English language, and Cummings poem on the death of his beloved father, "my father moved through dooms of love," is a profoundly moving tribute. Cummings wrote some of the finest celebrations of sexual love and the religious experience of awe produced in the twentieth century, precisely at a time when it was not at all popular to write such poems.Early in his career Cummings had divided his time between New York City and Paris, France, where he studied painting. Later in his career he divided his time between New York City and the family home in North Conway, New Hampshire. He was always interested in the visual arts, and his paintings and drawings were exhibited in several one-man shows in the 1940s and 1950s.

**__Early Written Poems__:**
Cummings romantic transcendentalism (which stressed the individual human being and his or her emotional experiences, the worship of nature, and the "spiritual"—or non-material—basis of reality) resulted in the early rejection of his work, for it was not popular at the time. For several decades he had to pay for the publication of his work, and reviewers revealed very little understanding of his aims. His first volume of poems, //Tulips and Chimneys// (1923), was followed by a second volume two years later. Though Cummings received the Dial Award for poetry in 1925, he continued to have difficulty in finding a publisher. In the ten years following 1925 only two volumes of Cummings's poems were published, both of his own works: //is 5// (1926) and //W// ( //ViVa;// 1931). In that decade Cummings also arranged for the publication of an experimental play, //Him// (1927). With his characteristic harsh wit, Cummings named the fourteen publishers who had rejected the manuscript of //No Thanks// (1935) in the book itself and said "Thanks" to his mother, who had paid for its publication.

__Greatest Poems__:
The love poems and religious poems represent Cummings greatest achievements. For example, "somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond" is one of the finest love poems in the English language, and Cummings poem on the death of his beloved father, "my father moved through dooms of love," is a profoundly moving tribute. Cummings wrote some of the finest celebrations of sexual love and the religious experience of awe produced in the twentieth century, precisely at a time when it was not at all popular to write such poems.

This Wiki-space was done by Matthew Mullins done on November 30, 2010 Credit is given to the following sites:  [] []  []  []  []  []