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Title: E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962 by Cummings. E. E., George J. Firmage, E. E. Cummings ISBN: 0-87140-152-5 Publisher: Liveright Pub. Date: May, 1994 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $50.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.77 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Canonical Cummings Compendium
Comment: I have a few E.E. Cummings books of poetry, but quickly despaired of every finding them all. This collection is a terrific resource for someone who simply wishes to have all the poems collected in one volume.
Typography was preserved very well (with Cummings this is critical), and I find the order of appearance by date helpful in charting his growth as a poet; the first few poems are radically different from the later ones.
Of course, acquiring his individual issues has its own appeal, but if you simply want to have his work easily at hand, this is your only choice (the indexing at the back is extrememly good at helping you remember a poem by its first lines).
Rating: 5
Summary: An off-the-beaten-path poet
Comment: Along with being a poet, cummings was a visual artist-chiefly a painter and sometimes an engraver. With his poetry, he made the attempt to arrange the words of his poems in something of an image. He also achieved this end with the words themselves: if he was to say a leaf falls, he might say: a l e (fa l l s) a f His poetry is not straight forward-if you want something easy to read, look elsewhere. But if you want to be exposed to a new and innovative style, and some exquisite writing and subject matter cummings is for you.
Rating: 5
Summary: not just anybody...
Comment: 'anybody lived in a pretty how town
with up so floating many bells down'
The poetry of ee cummings is something that most Americans gain exposure to during secondary school (and very rarely in the education of those outside America) -- he is often seen as an acceptable example of one who broke the rules -- rules, the teacher will often hasten to add, which must be mastered before they can be acceptably broken.
Yet this is not what ee cummings would hope had come of his legacy. In reading his poetry in this edition, his prose, his theatrical writings, and his unpublished manuscripts (some of which have been published under the title Etc.), a new vision begins to emerge of a real maverick--not someone who wanted to break the rules, but someone who eschewed the idea of rules so completely that breaking them was beyond the question, for that would have to recognise the value of the rules.
And yet, some rules creep in:
'the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church's protestant blessings
daughters, unscented shapeless spirited)'
This is a classic example of a cummings sonnet--adhering to rhyme and meter, yet very original.
Or, perhaps not that original. Unfortunately, ee cummings has become a conventional unconventionality. He was a success at being different--at one point only cummings and Frost, New Englanders both, with very different vines growing on the respective sides of their fence, were able to make a living solely from their writing while concentrating on poetry.
This text contains the entirety of the 12 published volumes of poetry cummings produced in his lifetime. In this we find his faith, his politics, his social criticism and his social prejudices, and his ideas of love and desire.
Some of his poetry is best meant to be read aloud, as all good poetry ultimately finds its best expression not on the lifeless page but in the spirited, feeling telling. There is an incredible sense (try reading it aloud, slowly).
Some of the cummings poetry, however, is simplicity and verges on the concrete. These sometimes resort to cleverness that might have been genius of observation at the time but unfortunately due to overexposure now just seem an elementary type of cleverness. Of course, simplicity is so often overlooked, that when it is seen, we often react not as we should.
Arrangement on the page is so critical to cummings perception of how things must be that the lastest editions of his poetry are put in typewriter typeset (the way he composed and envisioned his poetry). The medium is part of the message, he would have said.
Try to read cummings with a new eye, and look for that which would have been shocking to the more standard and rule-bound Cambridge soul.
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Title: Fairy Tales by E. E. Cummings, John Eaton ISBN: 0156298953 Publisher: Voyager Books Pub. Date: September, 1987 List Price(USD): $7.00 |
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Title: Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E.E. Cummings (A Liveright Book) by Richard S. Kennedy ISBN: 087140155X Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: October, 1994 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: 100 Selected Poems by E. E. Cummings by E. E. Cummings ISBN: 0802130720 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: April, 1989 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson ISBN: 0316184136 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 30 January, 1976 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Enormous Room by Cummings E. E., Samuel Hynes, E. E. Cummings, Samual Hynes ISBN: 0141181249 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: May, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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