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Edward Estlin Cummings Essay

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Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1894. The son of a sociology professor at Harvard, Cummings began writing poetry as early as the age of ten. He attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School as a teenager. In 1926, his father was killed in a car accident. The death of his father had an enormous impact on Cummings works, as he started to focus more on the aspects of life within his works(New World Encyclopedia).
Cummings was first married to Elaine Thayer. This relationship began as an affair with the wife of his friend. In 1919, Elaine gave birth to a daughter, Nancy. They were not married however until 1924, this marriage however was doomed to fail in a divorce in 1925(Poetry Foundation). Cummings then married Anne …show more content…
Cummings is best known for a unique free verse as well as “the unique, personal grammer and the breaking up and putting back together of words into different forms”(Encyclopedia of World Biography). This is believed to be attributed to his belief that much of modern society killed individual creativity and freedom(Biography). He also wrote easily recognizable sonnets. Many of his works do not include punctuation.
Many critics of Cummings have noted his below average amount of artistic growth, mostly due to his mostly static writing techniques. Due to many of his works containing inappropriate jokes and lines referring to sex, critics such as Randall Jarrell has referred to his works as “elementary lyric insistence”(poets.org).
Along with being a poet, Cummings was also a painter and playwright. He received recognition as an artist in a 1920s edition of The Dial. Throughout his life, Cummings published a total of four plays: him, Anthropos: or , the Future of Art, Tom: A Ballet, and Santa Claus: A Morality(New World Encyclopedia).
Towards the end of his life, Cummings was awarded the position of being a guest professor at Harvard University. He spent the majority of the last few decades of his life travelling or staying at his summer home(New World Encyclopedia). Cummings died of a brain hemorrhage on September 3,

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