Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to liberal, indulgent parents who from early on encouraged him to develop his creative gifts. While at Harvard, where his father had taught before becoming a Unitarian minister, he delivered a daring commencement address on modernist artistic innovations, thus announcing the direction his own work would take. In 1917, after working briefly for a mail-order publishing company, the only regular employment in his career, Cummings volunteered to serve in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance group in France. Here he and a friend were imprisoned (on false grounds) for three months in a French detention camp. The Enormous Room (1922), his witty and absorbing account of the experience, was also the first of his literary attacks on authoritarianism. Eimi (1933), a later travel journal, focused with much less successful results on the collectivized Soviet Union.
At the end of the First World War Cummings went to Paris to study art. On his return to New York in 1924 he found himself a celebrity, both for The Enormous Room and for Tulips and Chimneys (1923), his first collection of poetry (for which his old classmate John Dos Passos had finally found a publisher). Clearly influenced by Gertrude Stein's syntactical and Amy Lowell's imagistic experiments, Cummings's early poems had nevertheless discovered an original way of describing the chaotic immediacy of sensuous experience. The games they play with language (adverbs functioning as nouns, for instance) and lyric form combine with their deliberately simplistic view of the world (the individual and spontaneity versus collectivism and rational thought) to give them the gleeful and precocious tone which became, a hallmark of his work. Love poems, satirical squibs, and descriptive nature poems would always be his favoured forms.
A roving assignment from Vanity Fair in 1926 allowed Cummings to travel again and to establish his lifelong routine: painting in the afternoons and writing at night. In 1931 he published a collection of drawings and paintings, CIOPW (its title an acronym for the materials used: charcoal, ink, oil, pencil, watercolour), and over the next three decades had many individual shows in New York. He enjoyed a long and happy third marriage to the photographer Marion Morehouse, with whom he collaborated on Adventures in Value (1962), and in later life divided his time between their apartment in New York and his family's farm in New Hampshire. His many later books of poetry, from VV (1931) and No Thanks (1935) to Xaipe (1950) and 95 Poems (1958), took his formal experiments and his war on the scientific attitude to new extremes, but showed little substantial development.
Cummings's critical reputation has never matched his popularity. The left-wing critics of the 1930s were only the first to dismiss his work as sentimental and politically naïve. His supporters, however, find value not only in its verbal and visual inventiveness but also in its mystical and anarchistic beliefs. The two-volume Complete Poems, ed. George James Firmage (New York and London, 1981) is the standard edition of his poetry, and Dreams in a Mirror, by Richard S. Kennedy (New York, 1980) the standard biography. e. e. cummings: The Art of His Poetry, by Norman Friedman (Baltimore and London, 1960) is still among the best critical studies of his poetic techniques.
Edward Estlin Cummings (1894～1962)
美国诗人。生于马萨诸塞州的剑桥，父亲是哈佛大
学教授，唯一神教牧师。肯明斯自幼喜爱绘画和文学。
1915年毕业于哈佛大学,毕业演说以《新艺术》为题,对
现代艺术，主要是立体主义、未来主义的绘画，作了大
胆的肯定。
第一次世界大战期间，曾参加救护车队在法国战地
工作，进过集中营，后用超现实主义手法把这段经历写
进《巨大的房间》(1922)一书。
战后在巴黎和纽约学习绘画，并开始写诗。第一部
诗集《郁金香与烟囱》(1923)收有短歌和咏爱情的十四
行诗。以后陆续发表《诗四十一首》(1925)、《1922至
1954年诗选》(1954)等12部诗集。1957年获得博林根诗
歌奖和波士顿艺术节诗歌奖。
肯明斯有些诗集的题名离奇古怪,诗行参差不齐,在
语法和用词上也是别出心裁。词语任意分裂，标点符号
异乎寻常，除了强调一般不用大写，连I（我）和自己
的名字也是小写。他认为在科学技术发达的时代，人们
用眼睛吸收外界的事物比用耳朵多。他在解释为什么要
使用文字做特技表演时说：“我的诗是以玫瑰花和火车
头作为竞争对象的。”
在奇特的形式外壳之下，肯明斯显示了卓越的抒情
才能和艺术敏感。他的小诗，如《正是春天》、《这是
花园，色彩多变》，勾画出儿童的天真形象，散发着春
天的清新气息；他的爱情诗，如《梦后的片刻》、《我
从没去过的地方》，在温柔中含有凄怨；他怀念父母的
诗《如果有天堂，母亲（独自）就在那一方》也真挚感
人。
同时，他也善于用辛辣的讥讽表达他对现实生活中
丑恶面的蔑视和挑战。他把现代资本主义社会中野蛮的
争夺、感情上的冷漠、行为中的伪善称为“非人类”或
“非世界”，以漫画式的笔调加以嘲弄和鞭挞。
肯明斯后期采用街头巷尾的俚语方言，诗的社会性
也有所增强。但题材仍不够广阔，始终缺乏思想深度。
历来对他的诗毁誉参半。有人称他为“打字机键盘上的
小丑”,指责他的诗是肢解了诗歌语言的“假实验”;但
某些文学批评家却认为他是“最有成就的城市诗人之一”。
Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), popularly known as E. E. Cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, and playwright. His body of work encompasses more than 900 poems, several plays and essays, numerous drawings, sketches, and paintings, as well as two novels. He is remembered as a preeminent voice of 20th century poetry, as well as one of the most popular.
Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno
编辑评论
Product Description
The Long-Awaited, Intimate Portrait of an Extraordinary Life
Throughout the forty-five years of his professional writing life, Edward Estlin Cummings consistently celebrated the ordinary, reviled pretentiousness, scourged conformity, experimented boldly with words and syntax and punctuation, and wrote some of the most erotic and tender love poetry in the English language. Yet Cummings could also be difficult, truculent, opinionated, wrong-headed, emotional, bigoted and egotistical. Dubbed by Ezra Pound as "Whitman’s one living descendant," Cummings sang of himself and of America in a unique voice, as resonant now as it was a half-century ago.
Charismatic and famous among the famous, Cummings always seemed to be in the right place at the right time, and was a major presence wherever he resided, whether in Cambridge, Europe or New York. He counted some of the most important artists of his time as friends: Pound, Hemingway, Dylan Thomas and many more.
For nearly half a century, the personal papers, journals and diaries of Edward Estlin Cummings were kept from public view. These documents reveal far more about the inner life of the famous poet and painter than has ever been known. Now, noted biographer Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno presents the first, definitive, revelatory life story of E.E. Cummings (1894–1962), an American original.
For E.E. Cummings: A Biography, the author had unprecedented access to all of Cummings’s papers—anguished diary entries, reflections on consultations with two psychoanalysts, an autobiographical novel, and a carefully prepared manuscript containing more than one hundred blatantly erotic poems.
In the words of William Corbett, author of Boston Vermont and Don’t Think Look, "E.E. Cummings, Yankee individualist and, rare for an American poet, satirist is here in full. This means warts and all, but Sawyer-Lauçanno has not come to judge. In this readable and absorbing life he has paid Cummings the honor of clear-eyed candor." Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno paints a full and memorable portrait of this extraordinary American poet.
A Man Of Means
Cummings is a wonderful poet and three cheers for C. Sawyer-Laucanno for attempting to give us a full-scale new reading of the complete works, while trying to clear a space so we can understand his complicated life a bit better.
I wound up seeing the life clearly, and noticing for the first time the extreme high reaches of class privilege that made Cummings' poetry possible. I suppose I had been reading this through the screen of Cummings' novel, THE ENORMOUS ROOM, with its bleak descriptions of prison poverty and deprivation, so without really thinking about it I just assumed that EE Cummings was sort of our American Genet, born of poverty, a hero of the underclass, an outsider artist who just scraped by, like Darger. Far from it, Sawyer-Laucanno reveals. Everything he did seems to have been paid for by generous friends or family, and even in the French jail he was able to buy cartons of cigarettes, razors, books, and fruit from the concierge, because he had a huge trust fund.
Later, during the 1920s when he was writing all his masterpieces, the discerning Scofield Thayer became his patron. Thayer was a complicated case; as editor of THE DIAL his taste helped usher in a new American modernism. He married a beautiful and refined heiress, Elaine, and when Cummings fathered her daughter through an adulterous union, he assumed paternity of little "Mopsy" in a an act of upper-class generosity. A few years later, he granted Elaine a divorce and she married Cummings, although only for two months. Thayer began a descent into madness that lasted until his death in 1982. He had apparently been gay the entire time and nurtured a secret passion for underage boys which got him in hot water from time to time, and perhaps he was in love with Cummings himself. Why not, everyone else was. Cummings must have had something, erotically speaking, for many women were drawn to him and not a few men. In any case we can see, bleakly, how spoiled and privileged Cummings was. No matter what harm he did to others, or to himself, someone would come along with a large checkbook and clean up after him. It's appalling the selfishness, and yet if great poems come in the wake of such self-love, what real harm and what real benefit? It's a stumper.
Sawyer-Laucanno argues that Cummings' play, HIM, is a major ignored work of the American theater. Such is his conviction that it fairly sweeps the reader into feeling the same way, or at any rate wanting to see a first rate production. My idea is that HIM might make a really good movie--by Lars Von Trier perhaps. I can see it on the screen of my imagination, thanks to Sawyer-Laucanno's persuasive, always elegant argumentation.
As for the reviewer in the Washington Post Book World, I honestly don't know what to make of someone whose idea of the three great American poets is Whitman, Frost and Cummings. What kind of mind comes up with that combo? It's like the boys who formed the "Troika" in the later episodes of BUFFY.
Blissful biography of much-loved poet
Before reading this great slab of a book, I had little idea of who E.E. Cummings was, besides knowing he had an unconventional attitude towards punctuation. Thankfully, Sawyer-Laucanno manages to shed much light on the poet and his work in a way which is both accessible to newcomers and meaningful to more seasoned Cummings enthusiasts.
In particular, I liked the way in which the author juggles so many competing demands. He had access to a wealth of archive material and Cummings had a long and eventful life. Yet S-L manages to give play to all aspects of Cummings' activities whilst maintaining the pace and flow of his narrative.
I especially appreciated the almost equal weight given to critiquing Cummings' work as opposed to describing his life. An analysis of how "Buffalo Bill's defunct" came into being, based on early drafts of the poem, gives a particularly rare and precious glimpse of how a fully-formed poem is grown from a few choice phrases.
Another dilemma which L-S addresses, is the fact that Cummings was an enthusiastic and successful painter. It would have been easy to overlook or underplay this aspect but here the paintings are seen as an integral part of Cummings' artistic achievement.
I spotted one or two faults. I don't think Dylan Thomas would relish being called an English poet - he was a Welsh one - and there is a misplaced bracket (horror!) on p.533.
I think E.E. Cummings would have appreciated the way this biography manages to find space for a number of small anecdotes aside from the great sweep of the life story. I loved the description of the humming birds bobbing goodbye before migrating south from Joy Farm. This was both heart-warming and highlighted Cummings' love of natural history.
Overall, I found "E.E. Cummings: A biography" to be absolutely compelling. At first daunted by its length I soon found myself regretting it was so soon coming to an end. Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno more than meets the challenge of enlightening us about Cummings' life. He is no mean story-teller and this work is a masterful achievement.
Bad Stuff
Accusing someone of plagiarism in public is always a difficult issues. In other words, you'd better be pretty damn sure before you say anything. That's why I was so surprised to see the recent review in Harpers claiming that this book was, for all practical purposes, ripped off from a previous Cummings biography (by Kennedy) which is still in print. I won't recap the entire thing here, just issues this review as a warning and suggest you read the May 2005 issue of Harpers. Sawyer-Laucanno, while he wouldn't exactly admit that he stole material from the oprevious book, he did admit that he couldn't explain how the similarities occured... and Sourcebooks also refused to take any responsibility. It's an interesting read, but my advice would be to just go with the original biography by Kennedy since he's the one who seesm to have done all the original research for both volumes.
Solid Biography
This new biography is the first based on complete access to Cummings's papers and also quotes extensively from his poetry in exploring links between his life and work. It is quite readable and makes a good case for the significance of Cummings's poetry without claiming too much.
Mostly words, but spacing and punctuation are unusual
I read poems by E. E. Cummings before I went to Harvard, and might consider him my favorite American poet if Richard Brautigan had not written so many great little novels that seen far more comic to me than any mere poem. Cummings has the breadth, though, to require some small print for the index of poems by first line on pages 602-606 of this book, which must be a couple hundred poems at 53 lines per page. The items in the usual index on pages 591-601 have 54 lines per page, but with many more capital letters and the two columns of text covering an extra quarter inch of the page, items in the index do not seem so tiny. 31 of the 32 photographs are printed by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, and the photo on the cover, taken by Manuel Komroff, was by permission of Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The pictures in black and white include a major abstract oil painting by Cummings in 1925 and numerous sketches.
The index does not attempt to capture every mention of each name in the book. The entries for Ernest Hemingway do not include page 389, on which two poems in NO THANKS are called "really nothing more than a swipe at Hemingway" playfully "provoked in part by Cumming's reading of Hemingway's celebration of bullfighting, DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON:
what does little Ernest croon
in his death at afternoon?
(kow dow r 2 bul retoinis
wus de woids uf lil Oinis ".
Author Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno also calls this "a parody of Longfellow's line in A Psalm of Life, `Dust thout art, to dust returnest.' " Modern versions of Genesis 3:19 have "you are dust, and to dust you shall return" for the familiar curse on Adam, but the King James version might have used a poetical thou, not thout. No doubt there are a few mistakes somewhere. I tried to find the verse with that line on the internet, and what Longfellow wrote was:
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
"Dust thou art, to dust returnest,"
Was not spoken of the soul.
There are 12 lines for Harvard entities in the index, between Harry Wadsworth Clubs and Anthony Haswell, of HASWELL'S MASSACHUSETTS SPY OR AMERICAN ORACLE OF LIBERTY fame. The Preface reveals that the author shares the anti-war feeling found in many of Cummings's most famous poems, and reports that "At one of the early [fall of 1969] California Moratoriums against the war I whipped up a crowd with `my old sweet etcetera,' `plato told / him,' and `the bigness of cannon / is skillful.' When I got to `i sing of Olaf glad and big' a number of young men at the gathering set their draft cards on fire." (p. xiv). People who have some copies of poems already will want to have them nearby while reading this book to remind themselves of all that the original said, especially about his aunt and Olaf. Cummings was forty-seven when World War Two took the United States by surprise and Cummings wrote in his notes, among his definitions of War, "when the angry Jehovah gets back His Own." (p. 441). This book offers translations into English of the phonetic poems written in "a parody of bigoted (probably drunken) speech" on pages 442-443 before putting the entire `plato told' poem on pages 443-444.
E. E. Cummings developed some unique spacing and punctuation techniques that are constantly quoted throughout the book. It is inspiring to read about so many people who admired what he did and supported his work, but he could also be highly critical of such friends. The English philosopher A. J. Ayer is only listed in the index under Morehouse, Marion, affair with A. J. (Freddie) Ayer, 414, 423-424. Back in June, 1937, things like that were starting to happen a lot in Europe, and modern readers shouldn't be as surprised as someone like E. E. Cummings's father, who had been an Instructor in Political Economy offering Harvard's first course in sociology, (p. 3), but then became an assistant minister at South Congregational Church when Cummings was about six, but lost his position in a church merger in 1925, and then became a director of the World Peace Foundation. (p. 284). People who are suspicious of pointy headed intellectuals who try to believe more than they read in the newspapers might not like this book, and people who watch TV all the time will find nothing in this book that is familiar, not to mention fair and balanced, but anyone who believes that an intellectual life can be the bedrock supporting future generations might find this book educational as well as enjoyable.
E. E. Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings was born at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School. He received his B.A. in 1915 and his M.A. in 1916, both from Harvard. His studies there introduced him to avant garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.
After the war, he settled into a life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.
In 1920, The Dial published seven poems by Cummings, including "Buffalo Bill's." Serving as Cummings' debut to a wider American audience, these "experiments" foreshadowed the synthetic cubist strategy Cummings would explore in the next few years.
In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work towards further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.
During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant.
At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.
A Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Tulips and Chimneys (1923)& (1925)XLI Poems (1925)ViVa (1931)No Thanks (1935)Tom (1935)1/20 (1936)Fifty Poems (1941)1 x 1 (1944)Xaipe: Seventy-One Poems (1950)Ninety-five Poems (1958)73 Poems (1962)Complete Poems (1991)
Prose
The Enormous Room (1922)Eimi (1933)
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