Synopses & Reviews
With a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn, this redesigned and fully reset edition of collects and presents all the poems published or designated for publication by E. E. Cummings in his lifetime. It spans his earliest creations, his vivacious linguistic acrobatics, and through his last valedictory sonnets. Combining Thoreau's controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited Bohemian, Cummings, together with Pound, Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. Today Cummings is recognized as the author of some of the most sensuous lyric poems in the English language as well as one of the most inventive American poets of his time--in the words of Richard Kostelanetz, "the major American poet of the middle-twentieth century." Formally fractured and yet gleefully alive and whole, at once cubistic and figurative, Cummings's work expanded the boundaries of what language is and can do.
Synopsis
Combining Thoreau s controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited bohemian, E. E. Cummings, together with Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. Today Cummings is recognized as the author of some of the most sensuous lyric poems in the English language, as well as one of the most inventive American poets of his time. Formally fractured and yet gleefully alive and whole, at once cubistic and figurative, Cummings s work expanded the boundaries of what language is and can do.
With a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Stephen Dunn, this redesigned, newly corrected, and fully reset edition of Complete Poems collects and presents all the poems published or designated for publication by E. E. Cummings in his lifetime. It includes 36 poems that were first collected in the 1991 edition and 164 unpublished poems issued in 1983 under the title Etcetera. It spans his earliest creations, his vivacious linguistic acrobatics, up through his last valedictory sonnets.
In the words of Randall Jarrell, No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and special reader.
"
Synopsis
This complete edition--newly typeset with an introduction by Stephen Dunn--presents the entirety of E. E. Cummings's transcendent body of work.
About the Author
E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) was among the most influential, widely read, and revered modernist poets. His many awards included an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Bollingen Prize. Among his many volumes are The Enormous Room and Tulips & Chimneys.Stephen Dunn is the author of seventeen poetry collections, including What Goes On: New and Selected Poems 1995-2009 and, most recently, Here and Now. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his collection Different Hours. He has also been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Richard Stockton College, he lives in Frostburg, Maryland, with his wife, the writer Barbara Hurd.