Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 16, 1994 TAG: 9410180147
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD LORANT ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: CAMBRIDGE, MASS. LENGTH: Long
He was Estlin in youthful letters home to his family, E.E. Cummings in business.
``He signed his name with capital letters. We think the lowercase started as a publisher's gimmick,'' said Norman Friedman, author of several books on Cummings' work.
Gimmick or not, ``e e cummings'' is how he often appears in memory, even a century after his birth in Cambridge: the poet of the lowercase, the daring experimenter in form. But what of his thematic content?
``He was very eloquent at best, and a good lyric poet,'' said Daniel Aaron, professor emeritus of American literature at Harvard University. ``I can't think of him as [having] the same stature as Robert Frost, [T.S.] Eliot or Wallace Stevens, poets of that stature. But anybody who gave me so much pleasure when I was starting to read has to retain my loyalty.''
Cummings championed youthful ideals throughout his life. He celebrated the individual over the collective ``mostpeople,'' the natural over the man-made and indulged the pleasures of sex. He savaged armchair jingoism, consumerism and politics.
``Cummings' modernism is more of a romantic kind. He wrote about the wonders of spring, of children, of love, and that was viewed as sentimentality,'' Friedman said.
His public criticism of the Soviet Union, beginning in 1931, and extremely conservative political views, also put him at odds with many of his left-leaning literary contemporaries.
Still, at the time of his death at age 68 in 1962, Cummings was one of the country's most popular poets and his work now appears in virtually every anthology.
Born Oct. 14, 1894, Cummings began writing poetry as a child.
His father, Edward Cummings, a Unitarian minister and one of the first sociology professors at Harvard College, was an imposing man: a pillar of the community and a forward-thinking social activist.
His mother, Rebecca Haswell Clarke Cummings, was the first person to encourage young Estlin's artistic ambitions, and continued to give him financial and moral support for the rest of her life.
``His mother in a way brought him up to be a poet,'' biographer Richard Kennedy said. ``She helped him to write little verses when he was a little boy. ... He was always writing poems.''
So great was his outpouring of work that he produced a poem a day from the time he was 8, in addition to other writings, paintings and sketches. Rebecca Cummings saved most of them in scrapbooks.
He considered himself an artist as much as a poet, and his collected papers at Harvard's Houghton Library include as many drawings and sketches as manuscripts, said Pamela Matz, who put together a centennial exhibit at Widener Library.
Cummings grew up in Cambridge and at a family summer home in New Hampshire. He returned to Joy Farm near Silver Lake most every summer of his life. It inspired most of his nature poems, and was the place where he collapsed from a brain hemorrhage on Sept. 3, 1962.
As a boy, he explored a wide range of poetic styles.
He began experimenting with the rules of English composition while at Harvard. And when the university published some poems in a 1917 anthology, ``Eight Harvard Poets,'' an overzealous copy editor capitalized each lowercase ``i.''
During his senior year, he and college chums such as John Dos Passos began shunning genteel Cambridge for rougher climes in Boston and Somerville, and after graduation, they fled to New York's Greenwich Village.
His service as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I was cut short by several months of imprisonment after French censors claimed his letters were treasonous. He never was charged but the experience formed the basis for a prose account, ``The Enormous Room,'' in which his disdain is displayed for bureaucratic authority.
Cummings fell in love with Elaine Orr Thayer, who had an ``open marriage'' with his friend, classmate and patron, Schofield Thayer. Cummings and Orr had a child, Nancy, and later married.
They led a bohemian life, and his first collection of poems, ``Tulips and Chimneys,'' was published in 1923 to generally positive reviews.
Elaine left him in 1926, taking Nancy, who did not find out until 1948 that Cummings was her father. Cummings married and got divorced again and then lived with Marion Morehouse from 1934 until he died.
Cummings traveled to the Soviet Union. ``Eimi'' - it means ``I am'' in Greek - came out in 1933, condemning the Soviet system for trampling individual rights.
The book was unpopular, cryptic, unsuccessful. But Cummings continued to publish, relying on the support of friends, patrons and family when he was unable to interest large publishers.
He lived modestly.
``He somehow managed to scrape along,'' Kennedy said. ``It was not until the end of his life that there was enough income from Cummings' publications for him to live on.''
But even as his masterful reading of his own work steadily increased his popularity among college students, many critics panned him for what they saw as his failure to develop.
``He was always for the I, the individual against the many,'' said Harvard's Daniel Aaron.
His attitude eventually hurt his reputation among scholars, but it still finds him favor with young people.
``He didn't grow up. He remained boyish,'' said Aaron. ``He didn't develop any new ideas, except hating anything that constrained him.''
THE POETRY OF e.e. cummings
A few lines from the poems of E.E. Cummings, and the volumes in which they appear. The poems are known by their first lines.
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
| - From ``Tulips and Chimneys'' (1923)
`next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth
|- From ``is 5'' (1926)
i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or
|- From ``W (Viva)'' (1931)
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did
|- ``50 Poems'' (1940)
by CNB