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95 Poems
e. e. cummings
Signed 1st Edition
E. E. Cummings. American poet. 1894-1963.
Harvard University. 1st edition (after a limited edition) signed fine copy
of his 95 Poems. Harcourt Brace and Co. 1958. Stated 1st edition. In a good
un price clipped dust jacket. Signed in full fountain ink on the title page
EE C's his usual gay signature, note chips on the dust jacket. but a nice
rare presentation copy of one of EE's last books of poetry. Contains many
famous poems. such as in the Time of Daffodils and many others. Any signed
and inscribed Cummings is quite rare, lists from 400 to 750 on line. Please
feel free, bid and enjoy the poetry is within.
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Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962),
popularly known as e. e. cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist,
and playwright. His body of work encompasses more than 900 poems, several
plays and essays, numerous drawings, sketches, and paintings, as well as two
novels. He is remembered as a preeminent voice of 20th century poetry, as
well as one of the most popular.
Despite Cummings' consanguinity with avant-garde styles, much of his work
is traditional. Many of his poems are sonnets, and he occasionally made use
of the blues form and acrostics. Cummings' poetry often deals with themes of
love and nature, as well as the relationship of the individual to the masses
and to the world. His poems are also often rife with satire.
While his poetic forms and themes share an affinity with the romantic
tradition, Cummings' work universally shows a particular idiosyncrasy of
syntax, or way of arranging individual words into larger phrases and
sentences. Many of his most striking poems do not involve any typographical
or punctuation innovations at all, but purely syntactic ones.
As well as being influenced by notable modernists including Gertrude
Stein and Ezra Pound, Cummings' early work drew upon the imagist experiments
of Amy Lowell. Later, his visits to Paris exposed him to Dada and
surrealism, which in turn permeated his work. Cummings also liked to
incorporate imagery of nature and death into much of his poetry.
While some of his poetry is free verse (with no concern for rhyme or
meter), many have a recognizable sonnet structure of 14 lines, with an
intricate rhyme scheme. A number of his poems feature a typographically
exuberant style, with words, parts of words, or punctuation symbols
scattered across the page, often making little sense until read aloud, at
which point the meaning and emotion become clear. Cummings, who was also a
painter, understood the importance of presentation, and used typography to
"paint a picture" with some of his poems.
Following his novel The Enormous Room, Cummings' first published work was
a collection of poems entitled Tulips and Chimneys (1923). This work was the
public's first encounter with his characteristic eccentric use of grammar
and punctuation.
Some of Cummings' most famous poems do not involve much, if any, odd
typography or punctuation, but still carry his unmistakable style.
Readers sometimes experience a jarring, incomprehensible effect with
Cummings' work, as the poems do not act in accordance with the conventional
combinatorial rules that generate typical English sentences. (For example
"Why must itself..." or "they sowed their isn't [...]"). His readings of
Stein in the early part of the century probably served as a springboard to
this aspect of his artistic development (in the same way that Robert
Walser's work acted as a springboard for Franz Kafka). In some respects,
Cummings' work is more stylistically continuous with Stein's than with any
other poet or writer.
In addition, a number of Cummings' poems feature, in part or in whole,
intentional misspellings, and several incorporate phonetic spellings
intended to represent particular dialects. Cummings also made use of
inventive formations of compound words, as in "in Just-", which features
words such as "mud-luscious", "puddle-wonderful", and "eddieandbill." This
poem is part of a sequence of poems entitled Chansons Innocentes. It has
many references comparing the "balloonman" to Pan, the mythical creature
that is half-goat and half-man.
Many of Cummings' poems are satirical and address social issues (see "why
must itself up every of a park", above), but have an equal or even stronger
bias toward romanticism: time and again his poems celebrate love, sex and
the season of rebirth (see "anyone lived in a pretty how town" in its
entirety).
Cummings' talent extended to children's books, novels, and painting. A
notable example of his versatility is an introduction he wrote for a
collection of the comic strip Krazy Kat.
Examples of Cummings' unorthodox typographical style can be seen in his
poem "the sky was candy luminous...".
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