AnOther E. E. Cummings

I bought this book as a reference book for a research paper on E.E.Cummings. It is not a biography yet has a lot of great information on his life and poetry. It is organized in sections for different types of his poetry. I would recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in E.E. Cummings!

This collection gives an indispensible insight into E. E. Cummings' overall projects as a poet, helping a reader to understand his 'standard poetry' more fully. It is a smart collection of Cummings' most experimental and innovative works. A must-have for any reader of his poetry.

E. E. Cummings is perhaps the most misunderstood poet of his generation. His verse has been decried and described as simplistic, sentimental, fatalistic, misanthropic, myopic, and just plain unapproachable, despite the fact that it has had such wide popular appeal.No poet who has enjoyed such popularity as Cummings has been so largely ignored by the scholarly establishment. Professors scarcely mention his name, and many anthologies of 20th Century American verse simply choose not to include him, as though he were only a minor figure. In fact, there could be no statement more off the mark than one that dismisses this artist as a minor figure. If there is proof of this, Richard Kostelanetz has given it to us in this excellent compilation. For anyone who is only vaguely familiar with E. E. Cummings, this book is a good place to begin to delve further into the mind, life, and work of a consummate artist and one-of-a-kind individual. To be truthful, the only knock against the book is that it doesn't give us enough of Cummings. But, to Kostelanetz' credit, we must acknowledge the wide and varied cross-section of work available to us here. Here we find for the first time selections that would have been previously unavailable or largely unattainable for most readers. There is everything from poems to biography to theatre. Included are some of Cummings' letters, some of his criticisms, a ballet scenario, a film scenario, a bit from the non-lectures delivered when he was the Norton Professor at Harvard, an untitled novel, poems set to music, and much more. Hardly any aspect of Cummings' literary career goes untouched. In addition, Kostelanetz includes small essays at the beginning of each section that are both cutting and insightful despite their brevity. In these essays, Kostelanetz comments on everything, from the fact that Cummings was an accomplished painter to the fact that Cummings was perhaps the most prolific sonnet writer of the past 100 years. Each little piece offered adds something to one's appreciation of the genius that is E. E. Cummings, even the miniscule note that betrays the convention of spelling the author's name with lower-case letters as something assigned to him by outside forces.For those who are tired of the same old anthologies, tired of those books that won't take chances on publishing anything too far outside the mainstream, AnOther E. E. Cummings is a must have. This collection, by no means complete in itself, is nonetheless the last, necessary piece to anyone's Cummings puzzle. Indeed, no collection should be considered complete without it.

I was briefly introduced to e.e. Cummings in college and I loved his poems. I randomly picked this book up in a bookstore because it seemed fairly complete and interesting. It is. It has some background info. on cumming's and some hints on how to read him. The poems in this book are amazing! I would recomand this book to anyone who is fascinated with e.e. cummings.