Born Edward Estlin Cummings, E. E. Cummings is one of the most widely read twentieth-century American poets. Cummings was an advocate of poetic experimentalism—he identified himself as a “small eye poet,” sometimes wrote his own name in full lowercase (“e e cummings”), and often resisted the conventional norms of syntax and capitalization in his poems. He is commonly associated with the literary movements of modernism, free-form poetry, and imagism.
Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Edward Cummings and Rebecca Haswell Clarke. His parents were supportive of his creative activities, which included the routine of writing a poem a day. Cummings’s passion for poetry continued...
