e. e. cummings

e. e. cummings is at once the most modern of traditionalists and the most traditional of Modernists. This ironic paradox runs through both his life and his poetry. Born in 1894 to a family of impeccably New England Puritan stock, his life as a writer was to some extent a negation of his background. Like Ezra Pound, cummings never held a ‘normal’ job, but lived true to his principles, devoted to his art even at the expense of so-called material success. His father was both an academic, who became America’s first Professor of Sociology, and a Unitarian minister at Boston’s fashionable Back Bay Church. Two conspicuous features of cummings’s work are a hatred of rationalising intellectual types and a virtual absence of orthodox Christian faith, Puritan or otherwise. This is not to imply that he was in any way estranged from his family. It was his father who secured his release from a French prison in 1917 (this adventure is related in The Enormous Room), and there are some beautiful poems to his parents, obviously written out of a deep love, notably ‘my father moved through dooms of love’. (Most of cummings’s poems are untitled, so first lines have been taken as titles in this chapter.)