100 Selected Poems

by E. E. Cummings

Overview

E.E. Cummings is without question one of the major poets of this century, and this volume, first published in 1959, is indispensable for every lover of modern lyrical verse. It contains one hundred of Cummings’s wittiest and most profound poems, harvested from thirty-five of the most radically creative years in contemporary American poetry. These poems exhibit all the extraordinary lyricism, playfulness, technical ingenuity, and compassion for which Cummings is famous. They demonstrate beautifully his extrapolations from traditional poetic structures and his departures from them, as well as the unique synthesis of lavish imagery and acute artistic precision that has won him the adulation and respect of critics and poetry lovers everywhere.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802130723
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	01/10/1994
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	184,394
Product dimensions:	5.26(w) x 8.26(h) x 0.37(d)
Age Range:	16 Years

About the Author

E. E. Cummings (1894–1962) was among the most influential, widely read, and revered modernist poets. He was also a playwright, a painter, and a writer of prose. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he studied at Harvard University and, during World War I, served with an ambulance corps in France. He spent three months in a French detention camp and subsequently wrote The Enormous Room, a highly acclaimed criticism of World War I. After the war, Cummings returned to the States and published his first collection of poetry, Tulips & Chimneys, which was characterized by his innovative style: pushing the boundaries of language and form while discussing love, nature, and war with sensuousness and glee. He spent the rest of his life painting, writing poetry, and enjoying widespread popularity and success.

Editorial Reviews

“E.E. Cummings is a concentrate of titanic significance.”—Marianne Moore

“To my way of thinking Cummings is, within his field of personal emotion, the lyrical field, one of the inventors of our time. He puts his inventions down with an unexpected refurbishing of phrase and a filigree delicacy of hairbreadth exact statement that is a continual challenge.”—John Dos Passos

“No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive both to the general and the special reader; since the early twenties, Cummings has been more widely imitated and easily appreciated than any other modernist poet.”—Randall Jarrell

“He has more control over language than any poet since Joyce. . . . Everybody delights in reading him.”—Karl Shapiro

“E.E. Cummings is a concentrate of titanic significance, ‘a positive character’; and only ingenuousness could attempt to suggest in a word the ‘heroic’ aspect of his painting, his poems, and his resistances. He does not make aesthetic mistakes.”—Marianne Moore

From the Publisher