Complete poems, 1904-1962
(Book)

"Centennial edition"--Title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

This centennial edition of E.E. Cummings's Complete Poems, published in celebration of his birth on October 14, 1894, contains all of the poems published or designated for publication by the poet in his lifetime, including thirty-six poems that were first collected in the 1991 edition and 164 unpublished poems issued in 1983 under the title Etcetera. At the time of his death in 1962 E.E. Cummings was, next to Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in America. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he lived most of his life in Greenwich Village and in Madison, New Hampshire, where he died in 1962. His imprisonment in a French detention center during World War I, which inspired his novel The Enormous Room, and his visit to Stalinist Russia in 1931, described in his EIMI, punctuated a career devoted entirely to his two passions of poetry and painting. 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. He is recognized on the one hand as the author of some of the most beautiful lyric poems written in the English language, and on the other 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."