E.E. Cummings Author Study “It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” - E.E. Cummings. E.E Cummings wrote his poems his way and he didn’t let anyone tell him how to write his poems. E.E Cummings wrote many poems throughout his life and many of his poems have been recognized and praised for his different style of writing and writing about ideas that were not acceptable to write back when he was alive. E.E Cummings’ domination of different forms of writing poems, different ideas of society, freedom with rhythms, and vernacular naturalness of his rhetoric, has made him one the greatest American authors. Edward Estlin Cummings was born on October 14, 1894 in Cambridge Massachusetts to Edward and Rebecca Cummings. E.E. Cummings father was a professor at Harvard University he was later known as the minister of Old South Church in Boston, Massachusetts (World Biography, Par 1). That was one of the ways E.E. Cummings was able to attend to Harvard University because they knew his father. Another person who helped was his mother; Cummings’ mother introduced him into writing and writing poems as well (World Biography, Par1). Cummings was introduce into writing at a young age and he learned that he loved to write poems. He grew up with philosophers such as William James and Josiah Royce which they later helped him with writing his poems. (World Biography, Par 1). E.E. Cummings received many awards for his accomplishments in poetry and in the style he wrote the poems in. In 1911 E.E. Cummings is accepted into Harvard University and one year later he publishes his first work in the Harvard Monthly. Then in 1915 after he graduates from Harvard and he receives his M.A. for English and Classical Studies (Wipf). Cummings starts to publish most of his work at Harvard University and notices that the majority of the people enjoyed reading his poems and that encouraged him to write more poems and to become a better writer and he wanted to write poems about society. In 1933 he receives the Guggenheim fellowship and he starts to write the introduction to the collection of the Krazy Kat comic strips and in the same year he receives a fellowship to the American Academy of Poets (Wipf). Cummings is receiving many awards and fellowships because they noticed that Cummings poems are different from everyone else, by the form he writes them and also the subjects he writes about. Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression (World Biography, Par 10). An example of this is Cummings poem called l(a, it has been described as the most delicately beautiful literary construct that Cummings has ever created (Kennedy, Dreams 463). Instead of writing the poem how other poets would have wrote it, he decided to write it vertically and instead of having a whole word in one line there would only be a couple of letters in one line. The poem writes out two phrases, loneliness and a leaf falls, this poem has caused many critics to research why Cummings would write this poem this way. He created his own way of writing his poems, creative and original; he wanted to express his poems in different ways instead of writing them in one single line. One of the major influences of E.E. Cummings for writing his poems is the idea of being you and not trying to be someone else. Cummings mother introduced him into writing and poems because his mother loved to show him new things and he was willing to learn (World Biography, Par 1). His mother loved him and tried to show him new things and experience different things and she would always tell him to be yourself and not become someone you are not. In one of his essays he wrote “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”. This just shows that an E.E. Cummings major influence was the idea of being you and he writes many more poems with the same concept. E.E. Cummings says, “Nothing is so difficult as to be alive! Which is the only thing which you can’t learn ever, from everyone, everywhere: It must come out of you” (Harvard Magazine, Par 19). That you can’t learn how to live, that it should come out of you that no one can teach you how live your life. Nobody else can live for you; and you can’t live for anybody else (Harvard Magazine, Par 3). This shows that E.E. Cummings strongly believed that we should live our life to the fullest and to not let others stand in our way and to not let them tell us how to live our life. Another influence for E.E. Cummings was the concept of love. Throughout his life he has been married twice but has also been involved with affairs. Even though his marriages didn’t work out for him, the majority of his poems talk about love and how we should cherish that person with our lives. In his poem [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in] he writes “i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet)”, that shows that the people in the poem are one and they don’t fear each other because they are as one. The reason love is an important topic in most of his poems is because he wasn’t successful in keeping his marriage stable enough to last and that’s why he writes about it. He wants others to experience love even though he never had the chance to himself. His poems talk about not taking the person you love for granted because they might be there one second and the next thing you know they are gone forever. Love was an important topic for Cummings because he could never relate to the emotions he wrote about, that was the only way he could express himself by writing it in words. E.E. Cummings poems received both appreciation and criticism for his different forms of writing poetry. Wipf says, “Cummings was intensely creative, a fine artist, playwright and novelist, his life and art were tightly interwoven, known for typographic innovation, and he controlled both the look and the content of his poems”. E.E. Cummings was not afraid to write poems his own way and wasn’t afraid to write whatever he wanted, he didn’t care about the moral values people would criticize him about. “He was the first to control the exact spacing and shape of every line, makes the poems visual appearance as important as its musical rhythms, a picture in print, this playful tinkering with language is the most obvious sign of Cummings’s originality” says Kirsch from the Harvard Magazine. He was the first poet to experiment with the poetic form of a poem, everyone else had a typewriter but none of them had the curiosity to change the look of the poem. He wanted to create a visual within the letters of the poem, so the reader could picture it. In his poem r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r, he mixed up all the letters together so you couldn’t tell what the words said but if you look closely at the letters they spell out grasshopper. He did this because instead of writing out the word grasshopper he mixed them up to show that a grasshopper is always moving around, never standing still. He did this with most of his poems, mixing the words up, leaving space between each letter, he didn’t want to be like everyone else and he wanted to be different. Kirsh from the Harvard Magazine says, “Readers who seldom read poetry recognize the distinctive shape that a Cummings poem makes, the blizzard of punctuations, words running together or suddenly breaking apart, a type of spilling liquid from one line to the next”. He created different ways of writing his poems that no one else would have thought of, he created different styles of writing that went along with the topic of his poems. His poems were controversial involving the subjects he wrote about, such as sex, social and religious issues that were not accepted back then when he was writing these poems. Wipf writes “Cummings wrote some of the finest celebrations of sexual love and the religious experience of awe produced in the 20th century, when it wasn’t popular to write those types of poems”. He was the first to write about these topics because no one else would because they thought it was morally wrong to write about these topics, that God wouldn’t approve of them writing about sex. Cummings’s rebellion against social and sexual convention brought him exactly in sync with the national mood. With all the criticism Cummings was getting for writing about social and sexual issues in his poems but there was groups of people that actually related to his poems, the majority of them being teenagers that could understand what Cummings was writing about. They could relate to poems he was writing about love and society, in one of his poem he writes, “I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerve more. I like your body. I like what it does, I like its how’s….” Teenagers could relate to this because this was a point in time were it was thought it was morally wrong to have sexual attractions towards each other without being married to one another. E.E. Cummings understood that teenagers would have feelings towards each other and he sees that teenagers were not listening to their parents and they were going to do whatever they wanted to do, not listening to society if it was morally right or wrong. Teenagers could relate to Cummings’ poems and he noticed that and he took advantage of that and wrote poems that were morally wrong to write about and made him a risky writer back then. From the praise of his poem also came criticism for writing these controversial topics especially when people frowned upon these topics, mostly sex and religion. Chinitz states that “Cummings poetry lacks the profound ideas that one finds in other modernists”. E.E. Cummings was a modernist; he wrote about topics that people wouldn’t consider it as “acceptable” but he wrote about because he saw people’s mind set being change and how people were beginning to have an open mind to different things and no longer saw the world in black and white. Times were changing and people began to see that there isn’t just one way of thinking, Cummings showed that to his readers. They saw him writing about sex and religion which made them think more about how there are more things than conformity. Others criticized him because they didn’t believe the way he wrote his poems was original. Cummings was the person to experiment the way how poems look; he wanted to create an image along with his poem so the readers could imagine it while they were reading it. He didn’t want to be like all the other poets because he thought they were the ones who were lacking originality. He believed that to be original you not only have to write about different topics but also changing up the way a poem looks. That it doesn’t matter if you talk about different things in your poems you have to take risks because you don’t want to be like everyone else. E.E. Cummings enjoyed taking risks with how his poem looked like; he wanted to create different ways in which the readers can experience his poem in different ways. “Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”- E.E. Cummings. E.E. Cummings has contributed many things to society with his different forms of poetic writing, and the social and sexual issues he wrote in his poems have shown that he wasn’t afraid to take risks in his writing and he didn’t care what other people thought of him. He didn’t care if people criticized him; all he knew was that if some people read his poems he would continue writing. That’s what makes E.E. Cummings one of the greatest American authors.