E. E. Cummings

“An absorbing rehearsal of a vibrant life. . . . Cheever revives Cummings as a gregarious, quirky iconoclast through her evocative prose.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A smart and readable portrait.” —NPR

“[Cheever] is an astute observer of the inner life of writers and how they work. . . . This biography succeeds where other works have failed, by making this tricky poet understandable.” —The Economist
 
“A delight.” —The New York Times

“Effectively situates Cummings within a larger literary and cultural movement. . . . Cummings’s life is inherently interesting, dramatic, and sad, and Cheever highlights its colorful and tragic aspects.” —*The Boston Globe

• “Deeply personal. . . . A textured inspection of some of the more intriguing faces of the multifaceted Cummings.” —*The Plain Dealer
• “Cheever’s biography stands as a welcomed introductory attempt to understand Cummings’s impact. . . . One of the best efforts to situate a Modernist inside the larger historical context. . . . Filled in with entertaining research and deep thinking about the lives of artists.” —*Daily Beast
• “[Cummings’s] individualism makes him just about as American as apple pie; and as vital to the tradition of American poetry as Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost. I can only express gratitude to biographers like Cheever for keeping him alive today.” —J. P. Poole, *Bookslut
• “Affecting. . . . Deeply satisfying. . . . Ms. Cheever is the kind of biographer who can maintain both an intimacy and dispassionate relationship with her subject.” —*New York Journal of Books

• “Cheever’s reconsideration of Cummings and his work charms, rattles, and enlightens in emulation of Cummings’ radically disarming, tender, sexy, plangent, and furious poems.” —Booklist (starred review)

  “This sympathetic life may win Cummings a new generation of readers.” —Kirkus Reviews 

Auteur

Susan Cheever was born in New York City and graduated from Brown University. A Guggenheim fellow and a director of the board of the Yaddo Corporation, Cheever currently teaches in the MFA programs at Bennington College and The New School. She lives in New York City.

www.susancheever.com

Texte du rabat

One of the Best Books of the Year: The Economist, San Francisco Chronicle Cummings, in his radical experimentation with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, created a new kind of poetic expression. Because of his powerful work, he became a generation's beloved heretic-at the time of his death he was one of the most widely read poets in the United States. Now, in this rich, illuminating biography, Susan Cheever traces the development of the poet and his work. She takes us from Cummings's seemingly idyllic childhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, through his years at Harvard (rooming with Dos Passos, befriending Malcolm Cowley and Lincoln Kirstein). There, he devoured the poetry of Ezra Pound, whose radical verses lured the young writer away from the politeness of the traditional nature poem towards a more adventurous, sexually conscious form. We follow Cummings to Paris in 1917, and, finally, to Greenwich Village to be among other modernist poets of the day-Marianne Moore and Hart Crane, among them. E. E. Cummings is a revelation of the man and the poet, and a brilliant reassessment of the freighted path of his legacy.

Résumé

One of the Best Books of the Year: The Economist, San Francisco Chronicle

Cummings, in his radical experimentation with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, created a new kind of poetic expression. Because of his powerful work, he became a generation’s beloved heretic—at the time of his death he was one of the most widely read poets in the United States. 
         Now, in this rich, illuminating biography, Susan Cheever traces the development of the poet and his work. She takes us from Cummings’s seemingly idyllic childhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, through his years at Harvard (rooming with Dos Passos, befriending Malcolm Cowley and Lincoln Kirstein). There, he devoured the poetry of Ezra Pound, whose radical verses lured the young writer away from the politeness of the traditional nature poem towards a more adventurous, sexually conscious form. We follow Cummings to Paris in 1917, and, finally, to Greenwich Village to be among other modernist poets of the day—Marianne Moore and Hart Crane, among them. E. E. Cummings is a revelation of the man and the poet, and a brilliant reassessment of the freighted path of his legacy.

Échantillon de lecture

Preface
 
A Visit to the Masters School
 
During the last years of his life E. E. Cummings made a modest living on the high-school lecture circuit. In the winter of 1960 his schedule brought him to read his adventurous poems at an uptight girls’ school in Westchester where I was a miserable seventeen-year-old junior with failing grades.
 
I vaguely knew that Cummings had been a friend of my father’s; my father loved to tell stories about Cummings’s gallantry, and Cummings’s ability to live elegantly on almost no money—an ability my father himself struggled to cultivate. When my father was a young writer in New York City, in the golden days before marriage and children pressured him to move to the suburbs, the older Cummings had been his beloved friend and adviser.
 
On that cold night in 1960, Cummings was near the end of his brilliant and controversial forty-year career as this country’s only true modernist poet. Primarily remembered these days for its funky punctuation, Cummings’s work was in fact a wildly ambitious attempt at creating a new way of seeing the world through language. Part of a powerful group of writers and artists, many of whom were Cummings’s friends—James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse—he struggled to reshape the triangle between the reader, the writer, and the subject of the poem, novel, or painting. As early as his 1915 Harvard College graduation valedictorian speech, Cummings told his audience that “the New Art, maligned though it may be by fakirs and fanatics, will appear in its essential spirit . . . as a courageous and genuine exploration of untrodden ways.”
 
Modernism as Cummings and his mid-twentieth-century colleagues embraced it had three parts. The first was the exploration of using sounds instead of meanings to connect words to the reader’s feelings. The second was the idea of stripping away all unnecessary things to bring attention to form and structure: the formerly hidden skeleton of a work would now be exuberantly visible. The third facet of modernism was an embrace of adversity. In a world seduced by easy understanding, the modernists believed that difficulty enhanced the pleasures of reading. In a Cummings poem the reader must often pick his way toward comprehension, which comes, when it does, in a burst of delight and recognition. Like many of his fellow modernists (there were those who walked out of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and viewers were scandalized by Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase), Cummings was sometimes reviled by the fakirs and fanatics of the critical establishment. Princeton poet Richard P. Blackmur said Cummings’s poems were “baby talk,” and poetry arbiter Helen Vendler called them repellent and foolish: “What is wrong with a man who writes this?” she asked.
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