Mary Oliver was born to Edward William and Helen M. V. Oliver on September 10, 1935, in Maple Heights, Ohio, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland. She briefly attended both OhioStateUniversity and VassarCollege in the mid-1950s, but did not receive a degree at either college.
She was influenced by the poet Edna St.Vincent Millay, , and as a teenager, lived for a brief while in her home, where she helped Millay's sister Norma organize the papers the deceased Millay left behind. It is rumored that during this time she had a questionable relationship with Sarah Whittier. During the early 1980s, Oliver taught at CaseWestern ReserveUniversity,. In 1984, her collection of poetry, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
In 1986, she moved to BucknellUniversity where she was honored with the title "Poet In Residence." In 1991, she served as the Margaret Banister Writer in Residence at SweetBriarCollege in Virginia. She then moved to Bennington, Vermont, , where she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington until 2001. Oliver's partner, Molly Malone Cook, , served as her literary agent until Cook's death in 2005. Oliver currently lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Oliver’s poetry is grounded in memories of Ohio and her adopted home of New England. Influenced by both Walt Whitman and Thoreau, she is known for her clear and poignant observances of the natural world. Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts: shore birds, water snakes, the phases of the moon and humpback whales.
Maxine Kumin calls Oliver "a patroller of wetlands in the same way that Thoreau was an inspector of snowstorms" and "an indefatigable guide to the natural world." Oliver has also been compared to Emily Dickinson, with whom she shares an affinity for solitude and interior monologues. Her poetry combines dark introspection with joyous release.
Although she has been criticized for writing poetry that assumes a dangerously close relationship of women with nature, she finds the self is only strengthened through an immersion with nature. As her creativity is stirred by nature, Oliver is an avid walker, pursuing inspiration on foot. For Oliver, walking is part of the poetic process. Oliver is also known for her unadorned language and accessible themes.
The author of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose, Oliver’s first collection of poems, Voyage, and Other Poems, was published in 1963. She has since published numerous books, including Thirst (Beacon Press, 2006); Why I Wake Early (2004); Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays (2003); Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999); West Wind (1997); White Pine (1994). In 1992, her volume, New and Selected Poems (1992), won the National Book award. She won the Christopher Award and the L.L.Winship /PEN New England Award for her piece House of Light (1990). Her volume American Primitive (1983) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. The first and second parts of her The Leaf and the Cloud were selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 1999 and The Best American Poetry 2000, respectively.
Honors Oliver has received include Lannan Literary Award for poetry (1992) the National Book Award for Poetry(1992) for her collection New and Selected Poems, for her collection American Primitive, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1980) , and the Shelley Memorial Award (1969/70) of the Poetry Society of America.
Critical Reviews
Poet Mary Oliver is an "indefatigable guide to the natural world," wrote Maxine Kumin in Women's Review of Books, "particularly to its lesser-known aspects."Reviewing Dream Work for the Nation, critic Alicia Ostriker numbered Oliver among America's finest poets, as "visionary as [Ralph Waldo] Emerson…[she is] among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey."
American Primitive, according to New York Times Book Review's Bruce Bennet, "insists on the primacy of the physical.
"Holly Prado of Los Angeles Times Book Review applauded Oliver's original voice when she wrote that American Primitive "touches a vitality in the familiar that invests it with a fresh intensity.
"Colin Lowndes of the Toronto Globe & Mail considered Oliver "a poet of worked-for reconciliations" whose volume deals with thresholds, or the "points at which opposing forces meet."
In her article “The Language of nature in the Poetry of Mary Oliver,” Diane S. Bond said that “few feminists have wholeheartedly appreciated Oliver’s work, and though some critics have read her poems as revolutionary reconstructions of the female subject, others remain skeptical "that identification with nature can empower women.”
In The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Sue Russell stated that “Mary Oliver will never be a balladeer of contemporary lesbian life in the vein of Marilyn Hacker, or an important political thinker like Adrienne Rich; but the fact that she chooses not to write from a similar political or narrative stance makes her all the more valuable to our collective culture.”
Bibliography
No Voyage, and Other Poems
The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems
The Night Traveler Twelve Moons)
Sleeping in the Forest, (poetry chapbook)
American Primitive
Dream Work
Provincetown (limited edition with woodcuts by Barnard Taylor)House of Light)
New and Selected Poems)
A Poetry Handbook
White Pine: (Poems and Prose Poems)
Blue Pastures West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems)
Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse
Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
The Leaf and the Cloud
What Do We Know
Owls and Other Fantasies: poems and essays
Why I Wake Early: New Poems
Blue Iris: Poems and Essays
Long Life: Essays and Other Writings New and Selected Poems, volume two
At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver Reads Mary Oliver (2006, audio cd)
Thirst: Poems Our World - with photographs by Molly Malone Cook
Red Bird
Evidence
Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California to journalist, William Prescott Frost, Jr. and Isabelle Moodie.His mother, was of Scottish descent, and his father, a descendant of colonist Nicholas Frost from Tiverton, Devon, England who had sailed to New Hampshire in 1634 on the Wolfrana
Frost's father was a teacher and later an editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin (later merged into the San Francisco Examiner), and an unsuccessful candidate for the city tax collector. After his father's death in May 5, 1885, in due time the family moved across-country to Lawrence, Massachusetts under the patronage of (Robert's grandfather) William Frost, Sr., who was an overseer at a New England mill. Frost graduated from Lawrence High School in 1892. Frost's mother joined the Swedenborgian church and had him baptized in it, but he left it as an adult.
Despite his later association with rural life, Frost grew up in the city, and published his first poem in his high school's magazine. He attended Dartmouth College long eough to be accepted into the Theta Delta Chi fraternity. Frost returned home to teach and to work at various jobs including delivering newspapers and factory labor. He did not enjoy these jobs at all, feeling his true calling as a poet.
In 1894 he sold his first poem, "My Butterfly: An Elegy" (published in the November 8, 1894 edition of the New York Independent) for fifteen dollars. Proud of this accomplishment he proposed marriage to Elinor Miriam White, but she demurred, wanting to finish college (at St.Lawrence University) before they married.
Frost then went on an excursion to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia, and asked Elinor again upon his return. Having graduated she agreed, and they were married at Harvard University], where he attended liberal arts studies for two years.
He did well at Harvard, but left to support his growing family. Grandfather Frost had, shortly before his death, purchased a farm for the young couple in Derry, New Hampshire,; and Robert worked the farm for nine years, while writing early in the mornings and producing many of the poems that would later become famous. Ultimately his farming proved unsuccessful and he returned to education as an English teacher, at Pinkerton Academy from 1906 to 1911, then at the New Hampshire Normal School (now Plymouth State University) in Plymouth , New Hampshire.
In 1912 Frost sailed with his family to Great Britain, living first in Glasgow before settling in Beaconsfield outside London. His first book of poetry, A Boy's Will, was published the next year. In England he made some important acquaintances, including Edward Thomas (a member of the group known as the Dymock Poets), T.E.Hulme and Ezra Pound. Pound would become the first American to write a (favorable) review of Frost's work. Surrounded by his peers, Frost wrote some of his best work while in England.
As World War I began, Frost returned to America in 1915. He bought a farm in, Franconia, New Hampshire , where he launched a career of writing, teaching, and lecturing. This family homestead served as the Frosts' summer home until 1938, and is maintained today as 'The Frost Place', a museum and poetry conference site at Franconia. During the years 1916–20, 1923–24, and 1927–1938, Frost taught English at Amherst College, Massachusetts, notably encouraging his students to account for the sounds of the human voice in their writing.
For forty-two years, from 1921 to 1963, Frost spent almost every summer and fall teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English of Middlebury College, , at the mountain campus at Ripton, Vermont.. He is credited as a major influence upon the development of the school and its writing programs; the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference gained renown during Frost's tenure there.
The college now owns and maintains his former Ripton farmstead as a national historic site near the Bread Loaf campus. In 1921 Frost accepted a fellowship teaching post at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he resided until 1927; while there he was awarded a lifetime appointment at the University as a Fellow in Letters.
The Robert Frost Ann Arbor home is now situated at The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Frost returned to Amherst in 1927. In 1940 he bought a 5-acre (2.0 ha) plot in South Miami, Florida, naming it Pencil Pines; he spent his winters there for the rest of his life.
Harvard's 1965 alumni directory indicates Frost received an honorary degree there. He also received honorary degrees from Bates College and from Oxford and Cambridge universities; and he was the first person to receive two honorary degrees from Dartmouth College
During his lifetime the Robert Frost Middle School in Fairfax, Virginia, and the main library of Amherst College were named after him.
Frost was 86 when he spoke and performed a reading of his poetry at the inauguration of President John F.Kennedy on January 20, 1961.. Some two years later, on January 29, 1963, he died, in Boston, of complications from prostate surgery. He was buried at the Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont. His epitaph reads, "I had a lover's quarrel with the world."
Robert Frost's personal life was plagued with grief and loss. His father died of tuberculosis in 1885, when Frost was 11, leaving the family with just $8. Frost's mother died of cancer in 1900. In 1920, Frost had to commit his younger sister, Jeanie, to a mental hospital, where she died nine years later. Mental illness apparently ran in Frost's family, as both he and his mother suffered from depression, , and his daughter Irma was committed to a mental hospital in 1947. Frost's wife, Elinor, also experienced bouts of depression.
Elinor and Robert Frost had six children: son Elliot (1896–1904, died of cholera}, daughter Lesley Frost Ballantine (1899–1983), son Carol (1902–1940, committed suicide), daughter Irma (1903–1967), daughter Marjorie (1905–1934, died as a result of puerperal fever after childbirth), and daughter Elinor Bettina (died three days after birth in 1907). Only Lesley and Irma outlived their father. Frost's wife, who had heart problems throughout her life, developed breast cancer in 1937, and died of heart failure in 1939
Elizabeth Jenningswas born on July 20, 1926, died on October 2001,was an English poet noted for her clarity of style and simplicity of literary approach. Her Roman Catholicism coloured much of her work.
Jennings was born in Lincolnshire, but her family moved to Florida when she was six; There she later attended St.Anne's college. After graduation, she became a librarian.
She is not generally regarded as an innovator. Her work displays a simplicity of metre and rhyme shared with Phlip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Thom Gunn, all members ofEnglish poets known as The Movement.
She always made it clear that, whilst her life, which included a spell of severe mental illness, contributed to the themes contained within her work, she did not write explicitly autobiographical poetry.
Only one thing must be cast out," wrote the poet Elizabeth Jennings, who has died aged 75, "and that is the vague. Only true clarity reaches to the heights and the depths of human, and more than human, understanding." The words are from her study of 20th-century authors, Seven Men Of Vision (1976), which included reflections on Yeats, DH Lawrence, Pasternak and St-Exupéry; but they sum up perfectly the aspirations and achievements of her own poetry.
Elizabeth's father, Henry Cecil Jennings, was chief medical officer for her birthplace of Boston, Lincolnshire, whose environs - "a flat land of sugarbeet and tulips" - were to be vividly recreated in some of her later poems. When she was six, the family moved to Oxford, where she attended Oxford high school and discovered poetry. Delighted, at first, by the rhythms of Chesterton's Battle Of Lepanto, she soon moved on to Keats and Coleridge, and began to write her own poems.
When she was 13, the second world war broke out; at about the same time, she began to find religion - she was born a Catholic - "a real and important part of my life, and because it was important, it tended to give me a lot of worries". Spiritual concerns and a sense of vulnerability, often issuing in a profound sensitivity to the suffering of others, would become important elements in her output.
After reading English at St Anne's College, Oxford, Jennings became a librarian at Oxford city library. Poetry was, by now, her overriding interest, and her first collection, Poems (1953), published by the Fantasy Press, drew the attention of Robert Conquest, who included her work with that of Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, John Wain and others in his 1956 New Lines anthology, launching what became known as "The Movement".
Jennings was the sole female contributor, and the short, first poem in her section of the book, Delay (which remained the opener of all her subsequent collected and selected volumes) had the unmistakable note of a classic.
From its opening scientific proposition, "The radiance of that star that leans on me/ Was shining years ago", to its sad and muted conclusion that "love arrived may find us somewhere else", the eight-line poem epitomized the path her work would take: the path of flawless traditional verse-technique, sharp imagery, logical thought and emotional sensitivity.
"The Movement", if it was one, faded from prominence as poets went their separate ways, but Jennings continued, with remarkable tenacity, to work in her own deceptively simple style, developing a uniquely personal voice.
She left librarianship to become a publisher's reader for Chatto and Windus from 1958 to 1960, and thereafter wrote regular poetry reviews for the Daily Telegraph. Meanwhile, poems were written steadily and prolifically - "I write fast and revise very little," she confessed - with a new volume appearing every two or three years, an oeuvre which amounted at last to nearly 30 books.
Jennings' work, though consistent in tone, was not repetitious. There was a steady growth in emotional intensity, and in her willingness to tackle uncomfortable subjects, and each volume contained at least a few poems of startling power, as in One Flesh (published in The Mind Has Mountains, 1966), where the sadly and lovingly described elderly couple "Lying apart now, each in a separate bed" are identified at last as the poet's parents, "Whose fire from which I came, has now grown cold."
A breakdown in the early 1960s resulted in some ill-judged experimental poems, later suppressed, in jagged typographical forms, but also in the superb Sequence In Hospital, published in Recoveries (1964), which explores the experience of hospitalization with unsparing clarity: "What to say first? I learnt I was afraid/ Fear became absolute and I became/ Subject to it; it beckoned, I obeyed." Travel in Italy led to a lasting engagement with Italian culture and a translation of The Sonnets Of Michelangelo (1961), which is still the standard version and remains unsurpassed.
Becoming, almost without noticing it, one of Britain's most popular poets, Jennings was also, from the 1960s, an important mentor to generations of student poets, who would be invited for tea and sympathetic criticism at her modest north Oxford lodgings, whose every horizontal surface was crowded with a fantastic array of china knick-knacks, glass animals, doll's house furniture and musical boxes - the "collections" she gave as her hobby in Who's Who.
She never married, though there was an early engagement, and Oxford remained the centre of her world. But, within modest geographical limits, she lived a life rich in culture and friendship. She found poetry readings an ordeal, and avoided most literary gatherings. None the less, she was a much-loved part of the Oxford scene until the mid-90s. A familiar figure on the bus to Stratford-upon-Avon, she rarely missed a new production of Shakespeare; a connoisseur of ice-cream, she was a regular at the Häagen-Daz's ice-cream parlour. So avid was her film going that her local cinema, in Walton Street, was rumoured to have given her a free pass for life.
Her later work showed increased breadth and vigour. From the aptly named Extending The Territory (1985) onwards, she often wrote poems in flowing, free-verse lines, recollecting childhood and celebrating nature with a thoughtful nostalgia reminiscent of Rilke: "I watched as a child the slow/ Leaves turning and taking the sun, and the autumn bonfires,/ The whips of wind blowing a landscape away./ Always it was the half-seen, the just-heard which enthralled."
She received the WH Smith literary award in 1987 for her second Collected Poems (the first had appeared in 1967, and so ruthless was her self-criticism that the later volume was actually shorter), and, in 1992, the CBE. Despite a gradual decline in health, she continued to write with undiminished vigour and sharpness.
Delayby Elizabeth Jennings
The radiance of the star that leans on me
Was shining years ago. The light that now
Glitters up there my eyes may never see,
And so the time lag teases me with how
Love that loves now may not reach me until
Its first desire is spent. The star's impulse
Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful
And love arrived may find us somewhere else
Absence by Elizabeth Jennings
I visited the place where we last met.
Nothing was changed, the gardens were well-tended,
The fountains sprayed their usual steady jet;
There was no sign that anything had ended
And nothing to instruct me to forget.
The thoughtless birds that shook out of the trees,
Singing an ecstasy I could not share,
Played cunning in my thoughts. Surely in these
Pleasures there could not be a pain to bear
Or any discord shake the level breeze.
It was because the place was just the same
That made your absence seem a savage force,
For under all the gentleness there came
An earthquake tremor: Fountain, birds and grass
Were shaken by my thinking of your name
Her last volume, Timely Issues, published earlier this year, characteristically contains not only tributes to Hopkins, Traherne and Robert Graves but a poem of shrewd advice "To Any Newish Poet".
Cummings described his father as a hero and a person who could accomplish anything that he wanted to. He was well skilled and was always working or repairing things. He and his son were close, and Edward was one of Cummings' most ardent supporters.
His mother, Rebecca, never partook in stereotypically "womanly" things, though she loved poetry and reading to her children. Raised in a well-educated family, Cummings was a very smart boy and his mother encouraged Estlin to write more and more poetry every day. His first poem came when he was only three: "Oh little birdie oh oh oh, With your toe toe toe." His sister, Elizabeth, was born when he was six years old.
In his youth, Estlin Cummings attended Cambridge Latin High School. Early stories and poems were published in the Cambridge Review, the school newspaper.
From 1911 to 1916, Cummings attended Harvard University, from which he received a B.A.Master's degree for English and Classical Studies in 1916. While at Harvard, he befriended John Dos Passos, at one time rooming in Thayer Hall, named after the family of one of his Harvard acquaintances, Scofield Thayer, and not yet a freshman-only dormitory. degree in 1915 and a
Several of Cummings's poems were published in the Harvard Monthly as early as 1912. Cummings himself labored on the school newspaper alongside fellow Harvard Aesthetes Dos Passos and S. Foster Damon. In 1915, his poems were published in the Harvard Advocate.
From an early age, Cummings studied Greek and Latin. His affinity for each manifests in his later works, such as XAIPE (Greek: "Rejoice!"; a 1950 collection of poetry), Anthropos (Greek: "mankind"; the title of one of his plays), and "Puella Mea" (Latin: "My Girl"; the title of his longest poem).
In his final year at Harvard, Cummings was influenced by writers such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. He graduated magna cum laude in 1916, delivering a controversial commencement address entitled "The New Art". This speech gave him his first taste of notoriety, as he managed to give the false impression that the well-liked imagist poet, Amy Lowell, whom he himself admired, was "abnormal". For this, Cummings was chastised in the newspapers. Ostracized as a result of his intellect, he turned to poetry. In 1920, Cummings's first published poems appeared in a collection of poetry entitled Eight Harvard Poets.
In 1917 Cummings enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, along with his college friend John Dos Passos. Due to an administrative mix-up, Cummings was not assigned to an ambulance unit for five weeks, during which time he stayed in Paris. He became enamored of the city, to which he would return throughout his life.
On September 21, 1917, just five months after his belated assignment, he and a friend, William Slater Brown, were arrested on suspicion of espionage. The two openly expressed anti-war views; Cummings spoke of his lack of hatred for the Germans.
They were sent to a military detention camp, the Dépôt de Triage, in La Ferté-Macé, Orne, Normandy, where they languished for 3½ months. Cummings's experiences in the camp were later related in his novel, The Enormous Room about which F. Scott Fitzgerald opined, "Of all the work by young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives- The Enormous Room by e e cummings....Those few who cause books to live have not been able to endure the thought of its mortality."
He was released from the detention camp on December 19, 1917, after much intervention from his politically connected father. Cummings returned to the United States on New Year's Day 1918. Later in 1918 he was drafted into the army. He served in the 73rd Infantry Division at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, until November 1918.
Cummings returned to Paris in 1921 and remained there for two years before returning to New York. During the rest of the 1920s and 1930s he returned to Paris a number of times, and traveled throughout Europe, meeting, among others, Pablo Picasso. In 1931 Cummings traveled to the Soviet Union and recounted his experiences in Eimi, published two years later.
In 1926, Cummings's father was killed in a car accident. Though severely injured, Cummings's mother survived. Cummings detailed the accident in the following passage from his i: six nonlectures series given at Harvard in 1952–1953:
... a locomotive cut the car in half, killing my father instantly. When two brakemen jumped from the halted train, they saw a woman standing – dazed but erect – beside a mangled machine; with blood spouting (as the older said to me) out of her head. One of her hands (the younger added) kept feeling her dress, as if trying to discover why it was wet. These men took my sixty-six year old mother by the arms and tried to lead her toward a nearby farmhouse; but she threw them off, strode straight to my father's body, and directed a group of scared spectators to cover him. When this had been done (and only then) she let them lead her away.
His father's death had a profound impact on Cummings and his work, who entered a new period in his artistic life. Cummings began to focus on more important aspects of life in his poetry. He began this new period by paying homage to his father's memory in the poem "my father moved through dooms of love".
Born into a Unitarian family, Cummings exhibited transcendental leanings his entire life. As he grew in maturity and age, Cummings moved more towards an "I, Thou" relationship with his God. His journals are replete with references to “le bon Dieu” as well as prayers for inspiration in his poetry and artwork (such as “Bon Dieu! may I some day do something truly great. amen.”). Cummings "also prayed for strength to be his essential self ('may I be I is the only prayer--not may I be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong'), and for relief of spirit in times of depression ('almighty God! I thank thee for my soul; & may I never die spiritually into a mere mind through disease of loneliness')."
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
Elaine Orr: Cummings's first marriage, to Elaine Orr, began as a love affair in 1918 while she was married to Scofield Thayer, one of Cummings's friends from Harvard. The affair produced a daughter, Nancy, born on December 20, 1919. Nancy was Cummings's only child. After obtaining a divorce from Thayer, Elaine married Cummings on March 19, 1924. However, the marriage ended in divorce less than nine months later, when Elaine left Cummings for a wealthy Irish banker, moved to Ireland and took Nancy with her. Under the terms of the divorce Cummings was granted custody of Nancy for three months each year, but Elaine refused to abide by the agreement. Cummings did not see his daughter again until 1946.
Anne Minnerly Barton: Cummings married his second wife Anne Minnerly Barton on May 1, 1929. They separated three years later in 1932. That same year, Anne obtained a Mexican divorceUnited States until August 1934. that was not officially recognized in the
Marion Morehouse (March 9, 1906 in South Bend, Indiana – May 18, 1969 in Greenwich Village, New York City): In 1932, the same year Cummings and Anne separated, he met Marion Morehouse, a fashion model and photographer. Although it is not clear whether the two were ever legally married, Morehouse lived with Cummings until his death in 1962. Morehouse died May 18, 1969,[9] while living at 4 Patchin Place, Greenwich Village, New York City, where Cummings had resided since September 8, 1924.[10]
Despite Cummings's consanguinity with avant-garde styles, much of his work is traditional. Many of his poems are sonnets, and he occasionally made use of the blues form and acrostics. Cummings's poetry often deals with themes of love and nature, as well as the relationship of the individual to the masses and to the world. His poems are also often rife with satire.
While his poetic forms and themes share an affinity with the romantic tradition, Cummings's work universally shows a particular idiosyncrasy of syntax, or way of arranging individual words into larger phrases and sentences. Many of his most striking poems do not involve any typographical or punctuation innovations at all, but purely syntactic ones.
As well as being influenced by notable modernists including Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, Cummings's early work drew upon the imagist experiments of Amy Lowell. Later, his visits to Paris exposed him to Dada and surrealism, which in turn permeated his work. Cummings also liked to incorporate imagery of nature and death into much of his poetry.
While some of his poetry is free verse (with no concern for rhyme or meter), many have a recognizable sonnet structure of 14 lines, with an intricate rhyme scheme. A number of his poems feature a typographically exuberant style, with words, parts of words, or punctuation symbols scattered across the page, often making little sense until read aloud, at which point the meaning and emotion become clear. Cummings, who was also a painter, understood the importance of presentation, and used typography to "paint a picture" with some of his poems.
The seeds of Cummings's unconventional style appear well established even in his earliest work. At age six, he wrote to his father:
FATHER DEAR. BE, YOUR FATHER-GOOD AND GOOD,
HE IS GOOD NOW, IT IS NOT GOOD TO SEE IT RAIN,
FATHER DEAR IS, IT, DEAR, NO FATHER DEAR,
LOVE, YOU DEAR,
ESTLIN.
Following his novel The Enormous Room, Cummings's first published work was a collection of poems entitled Tulips and Chimneys (1923). This work was the public's first encounter with his characteristic eccentric use of grammar and punctuation.
Some of Cummings's most famous poems do not involve much, if any, odd typography or punctuation, but still carry his unmistakable style. For example, the aptly titled "anyone lived in a pretty how town" begins:
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did
Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain
"why must itself up every of a park" begins as follows:
why must itself up every of a park
anus stick some quote statue unquote to
prove that a hero equals any jerk
who was afraid to dare to answer "no"?
Cummings's unusual style can be seen in his poem "Buffalo Bill's/ defunct" from the January 1920 issue of The Dial.
Readers sometimes experience a jarring, incomprehensible effect with Cummings's work, as the poems do not act in accordance with the conventional combinatorial rules that generate typical English sentences. (For example, "why must itself..." or "they sowed their isn't...").
His readings of Stein in the early part of the century probably served as a springboard to this aspect of his artistic development (in the same way that Robert Walser's work acted as a springboard for Franz Kafka). In some respects, Cummings's work is more stylistically continuous with Stein's than with any other poet or writer.
In addition, a number of Cummings's poems feature, in part or in whole, intentional misspellings, and several incorporate phonetic spellings intended to represent particular dialects. Cummings also made use of inventive formations of compound words, as in "in Just-", which features words such as "mud-luscious", "puddle-wonderful", and "eddieandbill." This poem is part of a sequence of poems entitled Chansons Innocentes; it has many references comparing the "balloonman" to Pan, the mythical creature that is half-goat and half-man.
Many of Cummings's poems are satirical and address social issues (see "why must itself up every of a park", above), but have an equal or even stronger bias toward romanticism: time and again his poems celebrate love, sex, and the season of rebirth (see "anyone lived in a pretty how town" in its entirety).
Cummings's talent extended to children's books, novels, and painting. A notable example of his versatility is an introduction he wrote for a collection of the comic stripKrazy Kat.Examples of Cummings's unorthodox typographical style can be seen in his poem "the sky was candy luminous...".
During his lifetime, Cummings published four plays: HIM (1927), Anthropos: or, the Future of ArtTom: A Ballet (1935), and Santa Claus: A Morality (1946). (1930),
HIM, a three-act play, was first produced in 1928 by the Provincetown Players in New York City. The production was directed by James Light. The play's main characters are "Him", a playwright, and "Me", his girlfriend. Cummings said of the unorthodox play:
Relax and give the play a chance to strut its stuff—relax, stop wondering what it is all 'about'—like many strange and familiar things, Life included, this play isn't 'about,' it simply is. . . . Don't try to enjoy it, let it try to enjoy you. DON'T TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT, LET IT TRY TO UNDERSTAND YOU."
Anthropos, or the Future of Art is a short, one-act play that Cummings contributed to the anthology Whither, Whither or After Sex, What? A Symposium to End Symposiums. The play consists of dialogue between Man, the main character, and three "infrahumans", or inferior beings. The word anthropos is the Greek word for "man", in the sense of "mankind".
Tom, A Ballet is a ballet based on Uncle Tom's Cabin. The ballet is detailed in a "synopsis" as well as descriptions of four "episodes", which were published by Cummings in 1935. It has never been performed. More information about the play as well as an illustration can be found at this webpage from the E. E. Cummings Society.
Santa Claus: A Morality was probably Cummings's most successful play. It is an allegorical Christmas fantasy presented in one act of five scenes. The play was inspired by his daughter Nancy, with whom he was reunited in 1946. It was first published in the HarvardCollegeWake. The play's main characters are Santa Claus, his family (Woman and Child), Death, and Mob. At the outset of the play, Santa Claus's family has disintegrated due to their lust for knowledge (Science). After a series of events, however, Santa Claus's faith in love and his rejection of the materialism and disappointment he associates with Science are reaffirmed, and he is reunited with Woman and Child. magazine the
In 1952, his alma mater, Harvard, awarded Cummings an honorary seat as a guest professor. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he gave in 1952 and 1955 were later collected as i: six nonlectures.
Cummings spent the last decade of his life traveling, fulfilling speaking engagements, and spending time at his summer home, Joy Farm, in Silver Lake, New Hampshire.
He died on September 3, 1962, at the age of 67 in North Conway, New Hampshire of a stroke. Forest Hills CemeteryBoston. In 1969, his third wife, Marion Morehouse Cummings, died and was buried in an adjoining plot: Lot 748, Althaea Path, Section 6. His cremated remains were buried in Lot 748 Althaea Path, in Section 6, and Crematory in
During his lifetime, Cummings received numerous awards in recognition of his work, including:
William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963), also known as WCW, was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. Williams "worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician," wrote biographer Linda Wagner-Martin. During his long lifetime, Williams excelled both as a poet and a physician.
Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, a community near the city of Paterson. His father was an English immigrant, and his mother was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He attended a public school in Rutherford until 1896, then was sent to study at Château de Lancy near Geneva, Switzerland, the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, France, for two years and Horace Mann School in New York City. in 1902, he entered the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. During his time at Penn, Williams became friends with Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (best known as H.D.) and the painter Charles Demuth.
These friendships influenced his growth and passion for poetry. He received his M.D. in 1906 and spent the next four years in internships in New York City and in travel and postgraduate studies abroad (e.g., at the University of Leipzig where he studied pediatrics). His famous poem, "Between Walls" was published then: the back wings of the hospital where nothing will grow lie cinders In which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle
He returned to Rutherford in 1910 and began his medical practice, which lasted until 1951. Most of his patients knew little if anything of his writings; instead they viewed him as a doctor who helped deliver their children into the world. It was estimated that Williams delivered 2,000 babies in the Rutherford area between 1910 and 1952. Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career.
His work consists of short stories, poems, plays, novels, critical essays, an autobiography, translations and correspondence. He wrote at night and spent weekends in New York City with friends - writers and artists like the avant-garde painters Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia and the poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. He became involved in the Imagist movement but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from those of his poetic peers, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Later in his life, Williams toured the United States giving poetry readings and lectures.
During the First World War, when a number of European artists established themselves in New York City, Williams became friends with members of the avant-garde such as Man Ray, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp. In 1915 Williams began to be associated with a group of New York artists and writers known as "The Others." Founded by the poet Alfred Kreymborg and by Man Ray, this group included Walter Conrad Arensberg, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore and Duchamp.
Through these involvements Williams got to know the Dadaist movement, which may explain the influence on his earlier poems of Dadaist and Surrealist principles. His involvement with The Others made Williams a key member of the early modernist movement in America. Williams disliked Ezra Pound's and especially T. S. Eliot's frequent use of allusions to foreign languages and Classical sources, as in Eliot's The Waste Land.
Williams preferred to draw his themes from what he called "the local." In his modernist epic collage of place, Paterson (published between 1946 and 1958), an account of the history, people, and essence of Paterson, New Jersey, he examined the role of the poet in American society. Williams most famously summarized his poetic method in the phrase "No ideas but in things" (found in his 1927 poem "Patterson," the forerunner to the book-length work). He advocated that poets leave aside traditional poetic forms and unnecessary literary allusions, and try to see the world as it is.
Marianne Moore, another skeptic of traditional poetic forms, wrote Williams had used "plain American which cats and dogs can read," with distinctly American idioms. One of his most notable contributions to American literature was his willingness to be a mentor for younger poets. Though Pound and Eliot may have been more lauded in their time, a number of important poets in the generations that followed were either personally tutored by Williams or pointed to Williams as a major influence.
He had an especially significant influence on many of the American literary movements of the 1950s: poets of the Beat Generation, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Mountain school, and the New York School. He personally mentored Charles Olson, who was instrumental in developing the poetry of the Black Mountain College and subsequently influenced many other poets. Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov, two other poets associated with Black Mountain, studied under Williams.
Williams was friends with Kenneth Rexroth, the founder of the San Francisco Renaissance. A lecture Williams gave at Reed College was formative in inspiring three other important members of that Renaissance: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. One of Williams's most dynamic relationships as a mentor was with fellow New Jerseyite Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg claimed that Williams essentially freed his poetic voice.
Williams included several of Ginsberg's letters in Paterson, stating that one of them helped inspire the fifth section of that work. Williams also wrote introductions to two of Ginsberg's books, including Howl. Williams sponsored unknown poets such as H.H. Lewis, a radical Missouri Communist poet, who he believed wrote in the voice of the people.
Though Williams consistently loved the poetry of those he mentored, he did not always like the results of his influence on other poets (the perceived formlessness, for example, of other Beat Generation poets). Williams believed more in the interplay of form and expression.Williams' most anthologized poem is "The Red Wheelbarrow", considered an example of the Imagist movement's style and principles
However, Williams, like his associate Ezra Pound, had long ago rejected the imagist movement by the time this poem was published as part of Spring and All in 1923. Williams is more strongly associated with the American Modernist movement in literature, and saw his poetic project as a distinctly American one; he sought to renew language through the fresh, raw idiom that grew out of America's cultural and social heterogeneity, at the same time freeing it from what he saw as the worn-out language of British and European culture.
Williams tried to invent an entirely fresh form, an American form of poetry whose subject matter was centered on everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people. He then came up with the concept of the variable foot evolved from years of visual and auditory sampling of his world from the first person perspective as a part of the day in the life as a physician. The variable foot is rooted within the multi-faceted American Idiom.
This discovery was a part of his keen observation of how radio and newspaper influenced how people communicated and represents the "machine made out of words" (as he described a poem in the introduction to his book, The Wedge) just as the mechanistic motions of a city can become a consciousness. Williams didn’t use traditional meter in most of his poems.
His correspondence with Hilda Doolittle also exposed him to the relationship of sapphic rhythms to the inner voice of poetic truth: "The stars about the beautiful moon again hide their radiant shapes, when she is full and shines at her brightest on all the earth"—Sappho. This is to be contrasted with a poem from Journey To Love titled "Shadows": "Shadows cast by the street light under the stars, the head is tilted back, the long shadow of the legs presumes a world taken for granted on which the cricket trills"
The breaks in the poem search out a natural pause spoken in the American idiom that is also reflective of rhythms found within jazz sounds that also touch upon Sapphic harmony. Williams experimented with different types of lines and eventually found the "stepped triadic line", a long line which is divided into three segments.
This line is used in Paterson and in poems like "To Elsie" and "The Ivy Crown." Here again one of Williams' aims is to show the truly American (i.e., opposed to European traditions) rhythm which is unnoticed but present in everyday American language. Stylistically, Williams worked with variations on free-form styles, notably developing and utilising the triadic line as in his lengthy love-poem Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.
Modern liberals portray Williams as aligned with liberal democratic issues; however, as his publications in more politically radical journals like Blast and New Masses suggest, his political commitments were further to the left than the term "liberal" indicates. He considered himself a socialist and opponent of capitalism, and in 1935 published "The Yachts", a poem which indicts the rich elite as parasites and the masses as striving for revolution.
The poem features an image of the ocean as the "watery bodies" of the poor masses beating at their hulls "in agony, in despair", attempting to sink the yachts and end "the horror of the race". Furthermore, in the introduction to his 1944 book of poems "The Wedge", he writes of socialism as an inevitable future development and as a necessity for true art to develop. In 1949, he published a booklet/bar "The Pink Church" that was about the human body but was understood, in the context of McCarthyism, as being dangerously pro-communist.
The anti-communist movement led to his losing a consultantship with the Library of Congress in 1952/3, an event that contributed to his being treated for clinical depression. As is demonstrated in an unpublished article for Blast, Williams believed artists should resist producing propaganda and be "devoted to writing (first and last)." However, in the same article Williams claims that art can also be "in the service of the proletariat".
Williams married Florence Herman (1891-1976) in 1912. They moved into a house in Rutherford which was their home for many years. Shortly afterwards, his first book of serious poems, The Tempers, was published. On a trip to Europe in 1924, Williams spent time with writers Ezra Pound and James Joyce. Flossie and Williams's sons stayed behind in Europe to experience living abroad for a year as Williams and his brother had in their youth.
After Williams suffered a heart attack in 1948, his health began to decline, and after 1949 a series of strokes followed. He also underwent treatment for clinical depression in a psychiatric hospital during 1953. Williams died on March 4, 1963 at the age of seventy-nine at his home in Rutherford, New Jersey.
Two days later, a British publisher finally announced that he was going to print his poems – one of fate’s ironies, since Williams had always protested against the English influence on American poetry. During his lifetime, he had not received as much recognition from Britain as he had from the United States.
He was buried in Hillside Cemetery in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. In May 1963 he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) and the Gold Medal for Poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His major works are Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), Paterson (1963, repr. 1992), and Imaginations (1970).
The Poetry Society of America continues to honor William Carlos Williams by presenting an annual award in his name for the best book of poetry published by a small, non-profit or university press. Williams' house in Rutherford is now on the National Register of Historic Places. He was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009.
