American poet and painter who first attracted attention for his eccentric punctuation, but the commonly held belief that Cummings had his name legally changed to lowercase letters is erroneous. Despite typographical eccentricities, Cummings's works are in many respects quite traditional. His style reflected his belief in the importance of the individual against government and the masses. As an artist Cummings painted still-life pictures and landscapes to a professional level.

Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father was a Harvard teacher and later a Unitarian minister. Cummings was educated at Cambridge High and Latin School, and from 1911 to 1916 he attended Harvard, where he met John Dos Passos. Cummings became an aesthete; he began to dress unconventionally, and dedicated himself to painting and literature. Cummings graduated magna cuma laude in 1915, with a major in classics.

Humanity I love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink.
(from Humanity I love you, 1925)

With Dos Passos and others he published in 1917 Eight Harvard Poets. During the last years of World War I he drove an ambulance in France. Indiscreet comments in the letters of a friend led to Cummings's arrest and incarceration in a French concentration camp at La Ferté-Macé. Later, he found out he had been accused of treason, but the charges were never proved. This experience gave basis for Cummings's only novel, The Enormous Room (1922), in which he drew acidly funny sketches of the jailers and sympathetic portraits of prisoners. It was followed by collections of verse, Tulips and Chimneys (1923), which contrasted the evils of war to the 'sweet spontaneous earth' and XLI Poems (1925). In the 1920s and1930s Cummings divided his time between Paris, where he studied art, and New York. He supported himself by painting portraits and writing for Vanity Fair. Throughout the 1920s, he contributed to The Dial, perhaps America's greatest literary journal.

& (1925) and is 5 (1925), inspired by Apollinaire, presented Cummings's new style, which was influenced by jazz and contemporary slang and characterized by an innovative use of punctuation and typography. He also used lower letter cases in his own name. By disturbing the spatial relationship of the verse line and stanza he went far towards eliminating the idea of rhythm. The linguistic signs became a visual symbol of the thing signified as in the line "mOOn Over tOwns mOOn" (1935) which showed the movement of the full moon. Cummings believed that modern mass society was a threat to the rich and varied experiences of individuals. Nearly all his works dealt with this overall subject.

In 1927 his play him was produced by the Provincetown Players in New York City. During these years he exhibited his paintings and drawings, but they failed to attract as much critical interest as his writings. In 1931 Cummings travelled in the Soviet Union and recorded later his impressions in Eimi (1933), a version of Dante's descent into Hell, in which he saw the Russians as "undead." When Cummings did not find publisher for No Thanks, a collection of poetry, he published it himself. From 1952 to 1953 Cummings was a professor at Harvard. His series of lectures were published as i: six nonlectures. In 1957 he received a special citation from the National Book Award Committee for Poems, 1923-1954, and in 1957 he won the Bollinger Prize. Cummings was married three times. He died on September 3, 1962, in North Conway.

pity this busy monster, mankind,
not. Progress is a comfortable disease.
(from One Times One, 1944)

For further reading: The Magic-Maker by Charles Norman (1958); E.E. Cummings, the Art of His Poetry by N. Friedman (1960); E.E. Cummings and the Growth of a Writer by N. Friedman (1964); E.E. Cummings by B.A. Marks (1965); E.E. Cummings: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by N. Friedman (1972); E.E. Cummings, a Remembrance of Miracles by B.K. Dumas (1974); Dreams in a Mirror by Richard S. Kennedy (1979); Critical Essays on E.E. Cummings, ed. by G.H. Rotella (1984)

• Eight Harvard Poets, 1917 (with others)
• The Enormous Room, 1922
• Tulips and Chimneys, 1923
• &, 1925
• XLI Poems, 1925
• is 5, 1926
• him, 1927 (play)
• by e e cummings, 1930
• CIOPW, 1931
• W, 1931
• Eimi, 1933
• no thanks, 1935
• Tom, 1935 (a ballet from H.E.B. Stowe's novel Uncle Toms Cabin)
• One Over Twenty, 1937
• Collected Poems, 1938
• New Poems, 1938
• 50 Poems, 1940
• 1 x 1, 1944
• Anthropos: The Future of Art, 1945
• Santa Claus, 1946
• Eimi, 1948
• XAIPE, 1950
• i, six nonlectures, 1953
• Poems 1923-1954, 1954
• 95 Poems, 1958
• A Miscellany, 1958
• Adventures in Value, 1962
• 73 Poems. 1964
• Fairy Tales, 1965
• E.E. Cummings, a Miscellany Revised, 1965
• A Miscellany Revised, 1965
• Complete poems, 1968
• Three Plays and a Ballet, 1968
• Selected Letters of e e cummings, 1969
• Complete Poems: 1913-1962, 1972
• Poems 1905-1962, 1973
• Uncollected Poems (1910-1962), 1981
• 1981; Etcetera: the Unpublished Poems of e e cummings, 1983
• His Whist and Other Poems for Children, 1983
• Complete Poems 1904-1962, 1994