Edward Estlin Cummings is buried in
Forest Hills Cemetery, Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. (Anne
Sexton
is also buried here.)
Grave of e.e.cummings
(buried next to his wife's family grave)
Photograph by Legerdemaine During the First World War, Cummings worked as a volunteer
ambulance driver in France and was interned for three months in a prison camp. His
experiences were related in his novel The Enormous Room.
Influenced by the likes of Amy Lowell and Gertrude Stein,
Cummings experimented with the visual appearance his poetry (see
concrete
poetry). In particular, he abandoned the use of capital letters at the start
of lines and split lines in a playful, idiosyncratic manner. He also joined words
together to create neologisms - see Buffalo Bill's below.
The first of his twelve collections of poetry, Tulips and
Chimneys, appeared in 1923.
Cummings' work was very popular with the
general public. At the time of his death he was the second most widely read poet
in the United States - after Robert Frost. However,
the left wing critics of the 1930s dismissed his work and later in his career he
was criticised for concentrating on form rather than content.
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