Poetry for Students

Volume 19 265

Author Biography

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894, cum-

mings spent his childhood in that city, where his

father Edward Cummings was a sociology profes-

sor at Harvard and a Unitarian clergyman. From an

early age, cummings showed a strong interest in

poetry and art, which was encouraged by his

mother Rebecca. Cummings attended Harvard Uni-

versity from 1911 to 1915 and joined the editorial

board of the Harvard Monthly, a college literary

magazine. While in college, he became fascinated

by avant-garde art, modernism, and cubism, and he

began incorporating elements of these styles into

his own poetry and paintings. He received a bach-

elor’s degree in 1915 and a master’s the following

year. His first published poems appeared in the an-

thologyEight Harvard Poetsin 1917. These eight

pieces feature the experimental verse forms and the

lower-case personal pronoun “i” that were to be-

come his trademark. The copyeditor of the book,

however, mistook cummings’s intentions as typo-

graphical errors and made “corrections.” During

World War I, cummings volunteered for the

French-based Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service.

As a result of his disregard of regulations and his

attempts to outwit the wartime censors in his let-

ters home, cummings spent four months in an in-

ternment camp in Normandy on suspicion of

treason. Although he found his detention amusing

and even enjoyable, his father made use of his con-

tacts in government to secure his son’s release.

Cummings returned to New York and pursued

painting but was drafted in 1918. He spent about a

year at Camp Danvers, Massachusetts, during

which time he wrote prolifically. Beginning around

this time, cummings, with the knowledge and ap-

proval of his friend Schofield Thayer, had an affair

with Schofield’s wife Elaine. Cummings’s daugh-

ter Nancy was born in 1919, but she was given

Thayer’s name. Cummings and Elaine Thayer mar-

ried in 1924, at which time cummings legally

adopted Nancy. During the 1920s and 1930s, he

traveled widely in Europe, alternately living in

Paris and New York and developing parallel ca-

reers as a poet and a painter. He published his first

poetry collection, Tulips and Chimneys, in 1923.

Politically liberal with leftist leanings, cummings

visited the Soviet Union in 1931 to learn about that

government’s system of art subsidies. He was very

disillusioned, however, by the regimentation and

lack of personal and artistic freedom he encoun-

tered there. As a result, he abandoned his liberal

views and became deeply conservative on social

and political issues. Cummings continued to write

steadily throughout the 1940s and 1950s, reaching

his greatest popularity during this period and win-

ning a number of honors, including the Shelley

Memorial Award for poetry in 1944, the Charles

Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard for the aca-

demic year 1952–1953, and the Bollingen Prize for

Poetry in 1958. Despite such successes, however,

he never achieved a steady income. Cummings con-

tinued to give poetry readings to college audiences

across the United States until his death in 1962.

Poem Text

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose

me,

or which I cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me^5

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring

opens

(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and

my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly, 10

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

e. e. cummings

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