Great Writers

E.E. Cummings

An avant-garde poet who experimented with language in daring new ways.

E.E. Cummings – Edward Estlin Cummings – was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Oct. 14, 1894, and published his first poems in 1917 after graduating with an MA from Harvard University.

Cummings had decided to become a poet when he was a child, and between the ages of 8 and 22, he wrote a poem a day. He was influenced by avante-garde writers such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, but his poetry was uniquely his own. He experimented with form, punctuation, and spelling, creating a new means of poetic expression that was simpler and more playful.

In 1922 he published his first book, "The Enormous Room," a fictionalized account of his time in French captivity while serving during World War I with the ambulance service in France. But it was Cummings' poetry that captured people's hearts. He received many honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship and two Guggenheim Fellowships, and at the time of his death, Sept. 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the U.S., after Robert Frost.

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

By E. E. Cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

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E.E. Cummings

E.E. Cummings

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