The Beauty of Living: E. E. Cummings in the Great War
368The Beauty of Living: E. E. Cummings in the Great War
368Paperback
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Overview
E. E. Cummings is one of our most popular and enduring poets, one whose name extends beyond the boundaries of the literary world. Renowned for his formally fractured, gleefully alive poetry, Cummings is not often thought of as a war poet. But his experience in France and as a prisoner during World War I (the basis for his first work of prose, The Enormous Room) escalated his earliest breaks with conventional form the innovation with which his name would soon become synonymous.
Intimate and richly detailed, The Beauty of Living begins with Cummings’s Cambridge upbringing and his relationship with his socially progressive but domestically domineering father. It follows Cummings through his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he fell into a circle of aspiring writers including John Dos Passos, who became a lifelong friend. Steeped in classical paganism and literary Decadence, Cummings and his friends rode the explosion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, and other “modern” movements in the arts. As the United States prepared to enter World War I, Cummings volunteered as an ambulance driver, shipped out to Paris, and met his first love, Marie Louise Lallemand, who was working in Paris as a prostitute. Soon after reaching the front, however, he was unjustly imprisoned in a brutal French detention center at La Ferté-Macé. Through this confrontation with arbitrary and sadistic authority, he found the courage to listen to his own voice.
Probing an underexamined yet formative time in the poet’s life, this deeply researched account illuminates his ideas about love, justice, humanity, and brutality. J. Alison Rosenblitt weaves together letters, journal entries, and sketches with astute analyses of poems that span Cummings’s career, revealing the origins of one of the twentieth century’s most famous poets.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780393868319 |
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Publisher: | Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. |
Publication date: | 11/30/2021 |
Pages: | 368 |
Sales rank: | 631,972 |
Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Prologue: "Only my door closing" 1
I Cambridge: 1894-1911
1 Beyond the River 7
2 The Reverend 16
3 The Last Summer of Childhood 23
II Harvard: 1911-1916
4 Temptations 33
5 A World of Aesthetes 42
6 Rebellion Stirs 51
7 Pagan Harvard 58
8 Doris and Elaine 68
9 Harvard in New York 76
III Montmartre: May 8, 1917-June 15, 1917
10 Across 87
11 Marie Louise Lallemand 95
12 "a twilight smelling of Vergil" 107
13 Sin 117
IV The Front: June 15, 1917-September 21, 1917
14 Called for Service 127
15 At the Front 132
16 Driving Cars and Cleaning Mud 141
17 Mr. Anderson Tells Some Lies 154
V La Ferté-Macé: September 21, 1917-December 19, 1917
18 At Noyon Once More 165
19 Life Under les Plantons 174
20 Time Stands Still 185
21 Tyranny 196
VI Freedom
22 Berthe 207
23 The Good Offices of Mr. Wiley 214
24 Camp Devens (July 23, 1918-January 17, 1919) 224
25 Elaine 234
26 The Porcupine Hunt (July 1956) 251
Author's Afterword 259
Acknowledgments 261
A Note on Previous Biographies of Cummings 263
Glossary of Minor Characters 269
Recommendations for Further Reading 273
Notes on the Text 275
Bibliography 317
Credits 325
Index of Poems Cited 329
General Index 331