E.e. Cummings

While at Harvard, he befriended John Dos Passos, at one time rooming in Thayer Hall, named after the family of one of his Harvard acquaintances, Scofield Thayer, and not yet a freshman-only dormitory. Several of Cummings' poems were published in the Harvard Monthly as early as 1912. Cummings himself labored on the school newspaper alongside fellow Harvard Aesthetes Dos Passos and S.

His affinity for each manifests in his later works, such as XAIPE (Greek: "Rejoice!"; a 1950 collection of poetry), Anthropos (Greek: "mankind"; the title of one of his plays), and "Puella Mea" (Latin: "My Girl"; the title of his longest poem).
In his final year at Harvard, Cummings was influenced by writers such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. He graduated magna cum laude in 1916, delivering a controversial commencement address entitled "The New Art".

Ostracized as a result of his intellect, he turned to poetry. In 1920, Cummings' first published poems appeared in a collection of poetry entitled Eight Harvard Poets.
Career
In 1917 Cummings enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, along with his college friend John Dos Passos. Due to an administrative mix-up, Cummings was not assigned to an ambulance unit for five weeks, during which time he stayed in Paris.

He became enamored of the city, to which he would return throughout his life.
On September 21, 1917, just five months after his belated assignment, he and a friend, William Slater Brown, were arrested on suspicion of espionage. Cummings' experiences in the camp were later related in his novel, The Enormous Room about which F.

Scott Fitzgerald opined, "Of all the work by young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives- The Enormous Room by e e cummings....Those few who cause books to live have not been able to endure the thought of its mortality."
He was released from the detention camp on December 19, 1917, after much intervention from his politically connected father. He served in the 73rd Infantry Division at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, until November 1918.
Cummings returned to Paris in 1921 and remained there for two years before returning to New York.In 1931 Cummings traveled to the Soviet Union and recounted his experiences in Eimi, published two years later. When this had been done (and only then) she let them lead her away.
His father's death had a profound impact on Cummings and his work, who entered a new period in his artistic life.

Cummings began to focus on more important aspects of life in his poetry. He began this new period by paying homage to his father's memory in the poem "my father moved through dooms of love".
Born into a Unitarian family, Cummings exhibited transcendental leanings his entire life.

Cummings "also prayed for strength to be his essential self ('may I be I is the only prayer--not may I be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong'), and for relief of spirit in times of depression ('almighty God! I thank thee for my soul; & may I never die spiritually into a mere mind through disease of loneliness')."
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

Marriages
Cummings was married three times, including a long common-law marriage.
Elaine Orr: Cummings' first marriage, to Elaine Orr, began as a love affair in 1918 while she was married to Scofield Thayer, one of Cummings' friends from Harvard. However, the marriage ended in divorce less than nine months later, when Elaine left Cummings for a wealthy Irish banker, moved to Ireland and took Nancy with her.

That same year, Anne obtained a Mexican divorce that was not officially recognized in the United States until August 1934.
Marion Morehouse (March 9, 1906 in South Bend, Indiana – May 18, 1969 in Greenwich Village, New York City): In 1932, the same year Cummings and Anne separated, he met Marion Morehouse, a fashion model and photographer. Although it is not clear whether the two were ever legally married, Morehouse lived with Cummings until his death in 1962.

Morehouse died May 18, 1969, while living at 4 Patchin Place, Greenwich Village, New York City, where Cummings had resided since September 8, 1924.

Poetry
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.

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. 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. The play's main characters are "Him", a playwright, and "Me", his girlfriend.

Cummings said of the unorthodox play:

Relax and give the play a chance to strut its stuff—relax, stop wondering what it is all 'about'—like many strange and familiar things, Life included, this play isn't 'about,' it simply is. More information about the play as well as an illustration can be found at this webpage from the E.The play was inspired by his daughter Nancy, with whom he was reunited in 1946. At the outset of the play, Santa Claus's family has disintegrated due to their lust for knowledge (Science).