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E.E. Cummings art and design art painting poetry lit history and literature

“Why do you paint?
For exactly the same reason I breathe.”

The little-known visual art of E.E. Cummings.

E.E. Cummings poetry letters lit history and literature

War and chaos have plagued the world for quite a long time, but each epoch creates its own special pulse-beat for the artists to interpret.

When E.E. Cummings got hate mail, kindred spirits (including a man named Alex Jackinson, whose words appear above) stood up for him in beautiful letters of solidarity, which stand as a timeless defense not only of Cummings, not only of poetry, but of all art and of the artist’s right and even responsibility to continually break with tradition and find new frontiers of creative expression.

E.E. Cummings poetry letters media and communication Academy of American Poets

…that arch-poseur and pretender, that disintegrator of language and mumbler of indecent nonsense who commonly signs himself ‘e e cummings.’

When E.E. Cummings got hate mail

best books of 2015 lit history and litearture Oliver Sacks Patti Smith Elizabeth Gilbert Brene Brown Ada Lovelace Daniel Handler Maira Kalman Elizabeth Alexander e.e. cummings Sarah Manguso Helen Macdonald Lisa Randall science and technology science culture and society art and design

Selected with great deliberation and great care, the 15 best books of 2015.

best of 2015 children's books art and design art illustration e.e. cummings Isol Mac Barnett Dr. Seuss Carson Ellis Olivier Tallec Emily Hughes

At long last and with great joy, presenting the best children’s books of the year.

E.E. Cummings poetry lit history and literature Matthew Burgess Kris Di Giacomo Enchanted Lion

For E.E. Cummings’s birthday, the illustrated story of the beloved poet’s life and creative bravery – one of these 15 wonderful picture-book biographies of cultural icons.

E.E. Cummings lit art and design thought and opinion art culture and society history and literature

The Agony of the Artist (with a capital A) — E.E. Cummings on what it really means to be an artist, in a magnificent forgotten 1927 essay.

lit history andl literature Susan Cheever E.E. Cummings

In a world seduced by easy understanding, the modernists believed that difficulty enhanced the pleasures of reading. In a Cummings poem the reader must often pick his way toward comprehension, which comes, when it does, in a burst of delight and recognition.

[…]

[The modernists] were trying to slow down the seemingly inexorable rush of the world, to force people to notice their own lives. In the twenty-first century, that rush has now reached Force Five; we are all inundated with information and given no time to wonder what it means or where it came from. Access without understanding and facts without context have become our daily diet.

A Burst of Delight and Recognition – E.E. Cummings, the art of noticing, and the spirit of rebellion

education history and literature lit Ernest Hemingway william faulkner Anne Sexton e.e. cummings Norman Mailer

Open Culture assembles the report cards of famous authors – Anne Sexton, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, and Norman Mailer.

I’ve previously written about Sexton’s academic travails at greater depth here.

William Styron put the whole catastrophe best.