E. E. Cummings: A Life Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00I2QEQ36 | Format: EPUB
E. E. Cummings: A Life Description
From the acclaimed author of My Name Is Bill and Home Before Dark comes a major reassessment of the life and work of one of America's preeminent 20th-century poets.
E. E. Cummings' radical experimentation with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax resulted in his creation of a new, idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. And while there was critical disagreement about his work (Edmund Wilson called it "hideous", while Malcolm Cowley called him "unsurpassed in his field"), at the time of his death in 1962, at age 67, he was, after Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in the United States.
Now, in this new biography, Susan Cheever traces the development of the poet and his work. She takes us from Cummings' seemingly idyllic childhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, through his years at Harvard(rooming with Dos Passos, befriending Malcolm Cowley and Lincoln Kirstein) where the radical verse of Ezra Pound lured the young writer away from the politeness of the traditional nature poem and toward a more adventurous, sexually conscious form. We follow Cummings to Paris in 1917 and, finally, to Greenwich Village to be among other modernist poets of the day, including Marianne Moore and Hart Crane.
Rich and illuminating, E. E. Cummings: A Life is a revelation of the man and the poet, and a brilliant reassessment of the freighted path of his legacy.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 7 hours and 53 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
- Audible.com Release Date: February 11, 2014
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00I2QEQ36
Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - 15:12
REVIEWED BY DAVID M. KINCHEN
The case could be made that Susan Cheever was fated to write about poet, artist, novelist and playwright E. E. Cummings (1894-1962), if only because of her meeting Cummings when she was 17 and unhappy in the private school she was attending.
She writes about meeting the older friend of her novelist father John Cheever in 1960 in "E.E. Cummings: A Life" (Pantheon, 240 pages, 18 pages of black and white images, notes, bibliography, index, $26.95).
In a relatively short book that should be read by everyone interested in not only poetry but the arts scene in the first half of the 20th Century, she writes that Edward Estlin Cummings had been relegated to make "a modest living on the high-school lecture circuit. In the winter of 1960 his schedule brought him to read his adventurous poems at an uptight girls’ school in Westchester where I was a miserable seventeen-year-old junior with failing grades.
"I vaguely knew that Cummings had been a friend of my father’s; my father loved to tell stories about Cummings’s gallantry, and Cummings’s ability to live elegantly on almost no money—an ability my father himself struggled to cultivate. When my father was a young writer in New York City, in the golden days before marriage and children pressured him to move to the suburbs, the older Cummings had been his beloved friend and adviser.
"On that cold night in 1960, Cummings was near the end of his brilliant and controversial forty-year career as this country’s only true modernist poet. Primarily remembered these days for its funky punctuation, Cummings’s work was in fact a wildly ambitious attempt at creating a new way of seeing the world through language.
The cover photo on Susan Cheever's new biography of E.E.Cummings shows an incredibly handsome man, sitting in a chair, seemingly at complete ease with himself and his world. That picture of that man - Edward Estlin Cummings - was at odds with the real life of the real man. He was a complicated man who lived a complicated life. And his poetry is the result of that life.
Cummings - who went by the name Estlin to separate him from his father who was named Edward - was born into a long line of Boston Brahmins on both branches of his family tree. His father, a Unitarian minister, was a Harvard alum, as were most male members of his family. He was born and grew up in a large house just blocks from the Harvard campus. Estlin followed the family line to Harvard but was usually at odds with his WASP background as he aged. He began writing poetry as a teenager, but was also a painter. He seemed to disregard his upbringing but - at the same time - cling to the very beliefs that he was born with. He was married unsuccessfully twice, but he had a relationship with a woman - a companion - for the last thirty years or so of this life. He fathered a daughter with his first wife, but had no relationship with the child after he and his wife divorced. It was only in the last 20 years or so of his life that Estlin reunited with his daughter and they had a fitful relationship ever after. He was, also, maybe, bi-sexual but seemed more bi-confused than actively bi-sexual.
But what of his poetry? He was skilled and inventive at catching the nuances of the times and most of his work is quite enchanting. But some of it is also venal and anti-Semitic. His work came and went and came again into fashion during his life.
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