Edward Estlin Cummings, 1894 – 1962
Born: 14 October 1894, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Died: 3 September 1962, North Conway, New Hampshire
Growing up in a literate and liberal home, Cummings was writing poetry by age ten. He attended Cambridge Latin High School and received both BA (1915) and MA (1916) from Harvard -his poetry appeared in publications of both schools. He volunteered as an ambulance driver in World War I, but orders were misplaced and he spent several weeks enjoying Paris before being put to work. His pacifist convictions led to his arrest on charges of espionage, and he spent the rest of his tour in a detention camp. On his return to the US he was drafted, although he did not see combat. He is mostly known for his poetry, specifically that he took an unusual approach to capitalization, punctuation, and spacing of the text on the page, although he rarely took the capital letters out of his name and certainly never legally changed his name to the all-lower-case form. He was also a novelist, essayist, playwright, and painter.
E. E. Cummings quotes:
A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.
E. E. Cummings
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.
E. E. Cummings
America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn’t standing still.
E. E. Cummings
At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.
E. E. Cummings
Be of love a little more careful than of anything.
E. E. Cummings
for whatever we lose (like a you or a me) it’s always ourselves we find in the sea
E. E. Cummings
he sang his didn’t he danced his did
E. E. Cummings
Humanity I love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink.
E. E. Cummings
I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more.
E. E. Cummings
I thank you God for most this amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.
E. E. Cummings
I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing
than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.
E. E. Cummings
I’m living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.
E. E. Cummings
It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my ”poems” are competing.
E. E. Cummings
It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.
E. E. Cummings
Kisses are a better fate than wisdom.
E. E. Cummings
