Edward Estlin Cummings
Born: 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' first published poems appeared 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 his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new 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. However, this is quite false. For example, he abandons quire early the Poundian archaisms which give a poem like "Puella Mea" its flavor. Others criticise his style as "baby talk" and are resistant to what they call the fracturing of hte word. 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.

Interesting Facts: Cummings did not own a TV and would not use the telephons- although it was the Cummings home in Cambridge that sported the first telephone in that city. This is a kind of paradox that one comes on again and again looking at the man and his work.