Poetry As well as being influenced by notable
modernists, including
Gertrude Stein and
Ezra Pound, Cummings was particularly drawn to early
imagist experiments; later, his visits to Paris exposed him to
Dada and
Surrealism, which was reflected in his writing style. Cummings critic and biographer Norman Friedman remarks that in Cummings's later work the "shift from simile to symbol" created poetry that is "frequently more lucid, more moving, and more profound than his earlier". Despite Cummings's familiarity with avant-garde styles (likely affected by the
calligrams of French poet
Apollinaire, according to a contemporary observation), much of his work draws inspiration from traditional forms. For example, many of his poems are
sonnets, albeit described by Richard D. Cureton as "revisionary... with scrambled rhymes and rearranged, disproportioned structures; awkwardly unpredictable metrical variation; clashing, mawkish diction; complex, wandering syntax; etc." He occasionally drew from the
blues form and used
acrostics. Many of Cummings's poems are satirical and address social issues but have an equal or even stronger bias toward
Romanticism: time and again his poems celebrate love, sex, and the season of rebirth. While his poetic forms and themes share an affinity with the Romantic tradition, critic Emily Essert asserts that Cummings's work is particularly modernist and frequently employs what linguist Irene Fairley calls "
syntactic deviance". Some poems do not involve any typographical or punctuation innovations at all, but purely syntactic ones; many of the poems he is best known for, however, do possess a stylistic typography he made his own, particularly in his insistent use of the lower case 'i'. While some of his poetry is
free verse (and not beheld to
rhyme or
meter), Cureton has remarked that many of his sonnets follow an intricate rhyme scheme, and often employ
pararhyme. Cummings, also a painter, created his texts not just as literature, but as "visual objects" on the page, and used typography to "paint a picture". The seeds of Cummings's unconventional style appear well established even in his earliest work. At age six, he wrote to his father: Following his autobiographical novel,
The Enormous Room, Cummings's first published work was a collection of poems titled
Tulips and Chimneys (1923). This early work already displayed Cummings's characteristically eccentric use of grammar and punctuation, although a fair number of the poems are written in conventional language. Cummings also employs what Fairley describes as "
morphological innovation", wherein he frequently creates what critic Ian Landles calls: "unusual
compounds suggestive of 'a child's language'" like "'mud-luscious' and 'puddle-wonderful'". Literary critic
R. P. Blackmur has commented that this use of language is "frequently unintelligible because [Cummings] disregards the historical accumulation of meaning in words in favor of merely private and personal associations". Fellow poet
Edna St. Vincent Millay, in her equivocal letter recommending Cummings for the
Guggenheim Fellowship he was awarded in 1934, expressed her frustration at his opaque symbolism. "[I]f he prints and offers for sale poetry which he is quite content should be, after hours of sweating concentration, inexplicable from any point of view to a person as intelligent as myself, then he does so with a motive which is frivolous from the point of view of art, and should not be helped or encouraged by any serious person or group of persons... there is fine writing and powerful writing (as well as some of the most pompous nonsense I ever let slip to the floor with a wide yawn)... What I propose, then, is this: that you give Mr. Cummings enough rope. He may hang himself; or he may lasso a unicorn." Cummings also wrote children's books and novels. A notable example of his versatility is an introduction he wrote for a collection of the comic strip
Krazy Kat. Cummings included ethnic slurs in his writing, which proved controversial. In his 1950 collection
Xaipe: Seventy-One Poems, Cummings published two poems containing words that caused outrage in some quarters. Friedman considered these two poems to be "condensed" and "cryptic" parables, "sparsely told", in which setting the use of such "inflammatory material" was likely to meet with reader misapprehension. Poet
William Carlos Williams spoke out in his defense. Cummings biographer Catherine Reef notes of the controversy:
Santa Claus: A Morality was probably Cummings's most successful play. It is an allegorical Christmas fantasy presented in one act of five scenes. The play was inspired by his daughter Nancy, with whom he was reunited in 1946. It was first published in the Harvard College magazine,
Wake. The play's main characters are Santa Claus, his family (Woman and Child), Death, and Mob. At the outset of the play, Santa Claus's family has disintegrated due to their lust for knowledge (Science). After a series of events, however, Santa Claus's faith in love and his rejection of the materialism and disappointment he associates with Science are reaffirmed, and he is reunited with Woman and Child.
Art Cummings was an avid painter, referring to writing and painting as his twin obsessions and to himself as a poetandpainter. He painted continuously, relentlessly, from childhood until his death, and left in his estate more than 1600 oils and watercolors (a figure that does not include the works he sold during his career) and over 9,000 drawings. Cummings had more than 30 exhibits of his paintings in his lifetime.
Name and capitalization Cummings's publishers and others have often echoed the unconventional
orthography in his poetry by writing his name in lower case. The use of lower case for his initials was popularized in part by the title of some books, particularly in the 1960s, printing his name in lower case on the cover and spine. In the preface to
E. E. Cummings: The Growth of a Writer by Norman Friedman, critic Harry T. Moore notes Cummings "had his name put legally into lower case, and in his later books the titles and his name were always in lower case". One Cummings scholar believes that on the rare occasions that Cummings signed his name in all lower case, he may have intended it as a gesture of humility, not as an indication that it was the preferred orthography for others to use. ==Adaptations==