E. Ee Cummings And The Life Of Edward Estlin Cummings

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E.E. Cummings Edward Estlin Cummins was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894 and died on September 3, 1962 in, New Hampshire. He was 67 and was buried at Forest hills Cemetery. He was married twice very briefly, his first wife was Elaine Orr, but their marriage started off as a love affair in 1918 while she was also married to Scofirled Thayer, one of Cummings friend from Harvard. During the course of their marriage Cummings wrote a lot of erotic poetry. During the affair they had a child named Nancy which would end up being Cummings only child. His father was a professor and a minister, and his mother instilled in the youngster, a love of language and play. Two of Cummings inspirations for all of his work were Amy Lowell, and Gertrude. A lot of his inspiration also came from his three month imprisonment because the French military accused him of espionage (the practice of spying or using spies). E.E. Cummings work greatly influenced the transcendentalist movement and changed the way poets approached language and particularly punctuation. E.E. Cummings was a poet that experimented with poetic form and language to create his own personal style. He also revised grammatical and linguistic rules to suit his own purposes, using words such as “if”, “am,” and “because” as nouns, or assigning his own private meaning to words. This is called a transcendentalist poet, a poet that completely ignores the rules of poetry. Up to his death Cummings held a prominent position in the twentieth century poetry. Cummings was such a great poet that Malcolm Cowley said “Cummings has written at least a dozen poems that seem to me matchless. Three are among the great love poems of our time or any time”. Cummings was not the only one... ... middle of paper ... ...ard University, and at the University of Texas at Austin. He gave a lecture called “Charles Eliot Norton Lectures” in 1952 and 1955 that later was collected as “six nonlectures”. During his last decade of his life he spent time at his summer house and traveled, fulfilling speaking engagements. He died on September 3, 1962 at the age of 62 in North Conway, New Hampshire of a stroke at the Memorial Hospital. He was cremated and had his remains buried in lot 748 Althaeas Path, in Section 6, in Forest Hills Cemetery. His third wife died in 1969 and was buried in an adjoining plot. I can now see why. E.E. Cummings work greatly influenced the transcendentalist movement and changed the way poets approached language and particularly punctuation. Many people may not think his work was great at the time but decades later he became one of the best poets of the 20th century.

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