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E. E. Cummings |
E. E. Cummings’ mother made him write a poem a day, and in his career he published three thousand. In 1920 his first poems appeared in Dial, and in 1923 his novel about being imprisoned in World War I made him a celebrity. His father told him “I am sure now that you are a great writer.” And he was.
Over the next decade his second marriage failed, his father was killed in a train crash, and Cummings had to publish his poetry books himself. But in 1932 he found the woman he would live with to the end. He fell into a pattern of painting in the morning and writing in the afternoon, and the joy of their life together exploded into his poems. He traveled the speaker circuit, the second most popular poet in the country after Frost.
His crazy word breaks and punctuation were judged an affectation by the critics. Maybe. But in the midst of his extraordinary productivity there were, he said, fifteen or so poems that would last for a long time. He knew, and his readers knew, that beneath the quirky, Cubist veneer of his language lay a sentimentality, a whimsy, and a delight in life that was indistinguishable from happiness.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |