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E.E. Cummings Facts & Worksheets

E.E. Cummings, often styled as ee cummings in his works, was an American poet, novelist, playwright and painter. He is one of the leading poets in America.

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E.E. Cummings, often styled as ee cummings in his works, was an American poet, novelist, playwright and painter. He is one of the leading poets in America. He is known for his radical experimentation of form, punctuation, spelling and syntax. He was also described as one of the most individual poets who ever lived.

See the fact file below for more information on the E.E. Cummings or alternatively, you can download our 23-page E.E. Cummings worksheet pack to utilise within the classroom or home environment.

Key Facts & Information

  • Edward Estlin (E.E.) Cummings was born on October 14, 1894, at Cambridge, Massachusetts.
  • His parents were Edward Cummings, a Harvard University Professor and Rebecca Haswell Clark. They were a well-known Unitarian couple in Boston.
  • His parents supported his creative gifts. At an early age, he liked to write poems and draw. He also spent his childhood outdoors with companies such as the philosophers William James and Josiah Royce.
  • He studied Latin and Greek at Cambridge Latin High school and received his B.A. and M.A. at Harvard University in 1915 and 1916.
  • At Harvard, he was influenced by avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. He published his first early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets in 1917.

WORLD WAR I YEARS

  • In April 1917, during World War I, he left for France to be a volunteer ambulance driver. Being an ambulance driver was the popular choice for pacifists like him.
  • On September 1917, Cummings was accused of treason because of his veiled and provocative comments about the war in his letters. He and a fellow American William Slater Brown, who had become his close friends during their war service, also befriended soldiers in the nearby unit, which also aroused suspicions.
  • The French authorities sent them to an internment camp in Normandy and housed them in a large holding area with the other foreign detainees. This experience inspired him to write his novel in 1922, The Enormous Room, which he also used to voice his anti-war convictions.
  • His father wrote a letter to President Woodrow Wilson after several attempts to diplomatic channels to help secure his freedom. The French authorities freed him in December 1917. Brown, however, was not released until April of the following year.
  • Cummings was drafted into the army and served in the 12th Division at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, in July 1918.

CUNNING’S LITERARY CAREER

  • In 1920, a Transcendentalist magazine, The Dial, published seven of Cummings’ poems, including Buffalo Bill’s. It served as his debut to a wider American audience.
  • Cummings published his first collection of poems titled Tulips and Chimneys in 1923. It was the public’s first exposure to his eccentric use of grammar and punctuation.
  • It was followed by XLI Poems and & in 1925. In the same year, he received the Dial Award for distinguished service to American letters.
  • Cummings’ linguistic experiments varied from having invented compound words to inverted syntax. He changed text alignments and spaced lines irregularly.
  • His poems were usually in lowercase, using capital letters only to highlight particular words and phrases. His unique typography resembles the tone of the subject. The mood of his poems alternated from satirical and tough to tender and whimsical.
  • His works were most often open to interpretation. He used nature to vividly infuse the childlike candor and freshness of his erotic poetry and love lyrics.
  • In 1927, he wrote a play titled “him” that was produced by the Provincetown players in New York. “Him” was narrated by a female character, “Me,” who thinks of her lover “Him.” It consisted of skits drawing from burlesque, the circus, and the Avant-garde. It jumped quickly from tragedy to grotesque comedy.
  • Santa Claus: A Morality written in 1946, was a play inspired when he was reunited with his daughter Nancy. It was published in the Harvard College magazine the Harvard Wake and is considered one of the most successful plays he had written.
  • He also wrote the plays Anthropos: The Future of Art in 1944 and Tom, A Ballet, based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1935.
  • Another novel of Cummings, Eimi, was published in 1933. His 35-day trip to the Soviet Union in 1931 inspired the book. In it, he bitterly attacked the communist regime for its dehumanizing policies. He made frequent allusions to Dante’s Inferno, comparing it to the life he observed while he is in the said country.
  • After its publication, Cummings had difficulty publishing his works as the extreme left-wing publishers refused to accept his work.
  • Overall, E.E. Cummings wrote approximately 2,900 poems, four plays, two autobiographical novels, and several essays.
  • Cummings was also a noted visual artist. He created his most famous collection of artworks, which he named CIOPW, an acronym made from the initial letters of the five media he used, charcoal, oil, pencil and watercolors. CIOPW was a collection of 27 drawings and 72 paintings.

PERSONAL LIFE

  • Cummings was married twice and had one longtime partnership before he died. In 1918, he had a love affair with a married woman named Elaine Orr. It was at this time that Cummings had written most of his erotic poems.
  • In 1919, the couple had a daughter, named Nancy, while she was married to Cummings’ Harvard friend, Scofield Thayer. His daughter will eventually be married to the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt. After her divorce with Thayer, Elaine and Cumming immediately got married on March 19, 1924, but divorced after nine months.
  • In 1927, Cummings’ parents were involved in a fatal car accident, which took his father’s life and severely injured his mother. This incident shifted Cumming’s work to a deeper aspect of life. He wrote the poem “my father moved through dooms of love” as a homage to his father.
  • Cummings got married for the second time on May 1, 1929, to Anne Minnerly Barton, but separated after three years.
  • He met his longtime partner, a model and photographer, Marion Morehouse, in 1934. It is not clear if they got formally married, but they lived together in a common-law marriage until Cummings’ death.
  • Harvard University had awarded Cummings an honorary seat as a guest professor in 1952. He spent the last years of his life traveling and attending numerous speaking engagements. The Charles Eliot Norton lectures he gave were later collected as i: six nonlectures.
  • He mostly stayed in his summer home at Silver Lake, New Hampshire. He died of a stroke on September 3, 1962. Cummings was the second most-read poet in the United States after Robert Frost.

E.E. Cummings Worksheets

This is a fantastic bundle which includes everything you need to know about the E.E. Cummings across 23 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use E.E. Cummings worksheets that are perfect for teaching students about E.E. Cummings, often styled as ee cummings in his works, who was an American poet, novelist, playwright and painter. He is one of the leading poets in America. He is known for his radical experimentation of form, punctuation, spelling and syntax. He was also described as one of the most individual poets who ever lived.

Complete List Of Included Worksheets

  • E.E. Cummings Facts
  • The Poet’s Bio
  • A Poet’s Life
  • The Cummings’ Inquiry
  • Words To Ponder
  • Cumming’s Style
  • His Popular Poems
  • People in His Life
  • How to be a Poet?
  • Two Masterpieces
  • Being a Poet

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