e. e. cummings (1894–1962,) properly Edward Estlin Cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. He wrote approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays, and several essays. By the time of his death, he was the second most extensively read poet in America, after Robert Frost.
Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, cummings was educated at Harvard and studied art in Paris. He spent most of his life unhappy and irritable in New York, struggling to pay the bills, shunned by other writers for his unpopular political views, yet he wrote many poems in a naïve style about the beauty of nature and love.
Strongly influenced by the English Romantic poets and by Gertrude Stein, cummings’s early poems attracted attention more for their experimental typography and technical skill than for their considerable lyric power; the frankness of his vocabulary and the sharpness of his satire also created some scandal.
cummings is known for his verse, characterized by unconventional spelling, unusual typography, and eccentric punctuation. His collections of poetry include Tulips and Chimneys (1923,) and his best-known prose work, The Enormous Room (1922,) describes his wartime internment—brought about by an error by French authorities.
cummings also wrote a travel diary, a morality play, Santa Claus (1946,) and a collection of six ‘non-lectures’ delivered at Harvard and entitled i (1953.) A group of his drawings and paintings was published in 1931.
cummings’s other works include essays, and Tom (1935,) a satirical ballet based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His Complete Poems (1904–62) was reissued in 1994.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by e. e. cummings
It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my “poems” are competing.
—e. e. cummings
Topics: Poetry
I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.
—e. e. cummings
Topics: Beauty
Tomorrow is our permanent address.
—e. e. cummings
Topics: Future
Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense.
—e. e. cummings
The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
—e. e. cummings
Topics: Love, Laughter
It takes three to make a child.
—e. e. cummings
Topics: Children
Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own.
—e. e. cummings
when god decided to invent everything he took one reath bigger than a circustent and everything began.
—e. e. cummings
Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.
—e. e. cummings
Topics: Humanity
kisses are a better fate han wisdom.
—e. e. cummings
The hardest challenge is to be yourself in a world where everyone is trying to make you be somebody else.
—e. e. cummings
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.
—e. e. cummings
Topics: Questions
It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.
—e. e. cummings
Topics: Courage, Bravery
may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it.
—e. e. cummings
if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven or
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses
my father will be(deep like a rose
tall like a rose)
standing near my
swaying over her
(silent)
with eyes which are really petals and see
nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my
(suddenly in sunlight
he will bow,
and the whole garden will bow).
—e. e. cummings
Topics: Heaven
though love be a day and life be nothing, it shall not stop kissing.
—e. e. cummings
Topics: Carpe-diem
We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
—e. e. cummings
Love is the whole and more than all.
—e. e. cummings
Topics: Romance
Equality is what does not exist among mortals.
—e. e. cummings
Topics: Equality
Here’s to opening and upward… and to yourself and up with you and up with and up with laughing.
—e. e. cummings
A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I, too, have known autumn too long.
—e. e. cummings
Nothing recedes like progress.
—e. e. cummings
Topics: Progress
The snow doesn’t give a soft white damn whom it touches.
—e. e. cummings
Topics: One liners, Weather
At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.
—e. e. cummings
To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
—e. e. cummings
Topics: Love, Being Ourselves, Humanity, Self-Discovery, Individuality
A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I, too, have known autumn too long.
—e. e. cummings
Topics: Autumn, Nature
I thank you God for this most amazing day; for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes.
—e. e. cummings
Topics: Blessings, Gratitude
A politician is an ass upon which everyone has sat except a man.
—e. e. cummings
Topics: Politicians, Politics
Your slightest look easily will unclose me, though I have closed myself as fingers, you open petal by petal myself a Spring opens her first rose.
—e. e. cummings
Topics: Romance
Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.
—e. e. cummings
Topics: Life
Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.
—e. e. cummings
Topics: Knowledge
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),
It’s always our self we find in the sea.
—e. e. cummings
America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn’t standing still.
—e. e. cummings
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