"Cummings’s memoir-cum-novel is valuable for its outlook, as the author, who would publish his first poetry collection a year later, uses his wry voice to counteract the cruelties of war." —Benjamin Shull, Los Angeles Review of Books
"The canonical works of the First World War are most frequently concerned with the squandered lives of young men, yet Cummings’s report invaluably expands the reader’s grasp of the catastrophe. . . . The Enormous Room was originally published before Cummings’s debut collection of poems. . . and exhibits much of the fragmentary style and lively spirit for which his poetry would become known. Yet beneath these flourishes lies a sincere and biting critique of those responsible for the conflict, which rings as true now, in the book’s centenary year, as it did then." —Kathleen Rooney, The TLS
“The Enormous Room is a good book, an unusual book, an exciting book.” —Robert Graves
“I went through The Enormous Room again . . . and from it knew, more keenly than from my own senses, the tang of herded men, and their smell. The reading is as sharp as being in prison, for all but that crazed drumming against the door which comes of solitary confinement.” —T. E. Lawrence
“The Enormous Room lives on, because those few who cause books to live have not been able to endure the thought of its mortality.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald
Admit it—when you think “poet,” you’re picturing someone doing a 1950s-era beatnik impersonation, snapping their fingers while jazz plays in the background, over-enunciating and speaking in William Shatner-esque rhythms. In reality, poets have an incredible effect on the language we all speak—think of the scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Miranda Priestly explains how […]