This selection made by E.E. Cummings himself from eleven books of poems constitutes a comprehensive introduction to his work.

This Norton Critical Edition includes: 166 poems spanning the range of Cummings's career, selections of his prose and dramatic writing, twelve paintings and sketches, and three facsimiles of his drafts-the first ever annotated and cross-genre collection of his work aimed at student readers. Annotations, headnotes and a thorough introduction by Milton A. Cohen, along with an essay by Cohen chronicling the development of Cummings's idiosyncratic style. Four contemporary reviews and six critical essays-by Randall Jarrell, Edmund Wilson, Isabelle Alfandary and Michael Webster, among others-prefaced by an overview. Comparative studies of two poems-featuring five different responses to each-designed to promote classroom discussion. A chronology, a selected bibliography and an index of the poems.

The one hundred and fifty-six poems here, arranged in twelve sections and introduced by E. E. Cummings's biographer, Richard S. Kennedy, include his most popular poems, spanning his earliest creations, his vivacious linguistic acrobatics, up to his last valedictory sonnets. Also featured are thirteen drawings, oils, and watercolors by Cummings, most of them never before published.

With a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn, this redesigned and fully reset edition of Complete Poems collects and presents all the poems published or designated for publication by E.E. Cummings in his lifetime.

Formally fractured and yet gleefully alive and whole, E.E. Cummings's groundbreaking modernist poetry expanded the boundaries of language. In A Miscellany, originally released in a limited run in 1958, Cummings lent his delightfully original voice to "a cluster of epigrams", forty-nine essays, a poem and three speeches from an unfinished play. Seven years later, George J. Firmage broadened the scope of this idiosyncratic collection, adding seven poems and essays, and many of Cummings's unpublished line drawings. Together, these pieces paint a distinctive portrait of Cummings's eccentric genius. His essays explore everything from Cubism to the circus, analyse his poetic contemporaries and satirise New York society. As Cummings wrote in his original foreword, A Miscellany "contain[s] a great deal of liveliness and nothing dead." This remains true today.

As a poet, Cummings was a pioneer not only in linguistic and typographic inventions, but also in sound and concrete poetry. But his prose is no less experimental; he wrote memoirs, essays, and fiction that are constantly provocative and often radically experimental. To read the avant-garde Cummings is to read a writer who consistently broke with established norms, "never to rest and never to have: only to grow." To not read the avant-garde Cummings is to not read Cummings.

Many years ago the prodigious and famously prolific E. E. Cummings sat in his study writing and thinking about sex. His private brooding gave way to poems and drawings of sexual and romantic love that delight and provoke. Here, collected for this first time in a single volume, are those erotic poems and sketches, culled from Cummings’s original manuscripts by the distinguished editor George James Firmage. from “16” may i feel said he (i’ll squeal said she just once said he) it’s fun said she (may i touch said he how much said she a lot said he) why not said she

E.E. Cummings is without question one of the major poets of this century, and this volume, first published in 1959, is indispensable for every lover of modern lyrical verse. It contains one hundred of Cummings's wittiest and most profound poems, harvested from thirty-five of the most radically creative years in contemporary American poetry. These poems exhibit all the extraordinary lyricism, playfulness, technical ingenuity, and compassion for which Cummings is famous. They demonstrate beautifully his extrapolations from traditional poetic structures and his departures from them, as well as the unique synthesis of lavish imagery and acute artistic precision that has won him the adulation and respect of critics and poetry lovers everywhere.

Four months after Cummings's death in September 1962, his widow, the photographer Marion Morehouse, collected the typescripts of 29 new poems. These poems, as well as uncollected poems published only in periodicals up to that time, make up 73 Poems. This is the final volume in Liveright's reissue of Cummings's individual volumes of poetry, with texts and settings based on E. E. Cummings: The Complete Poems 1904-1962.

The most notable work of fiction from our most beloved modernist poet, The Enormous Room was one of the greatest yet still not fully recognized American literary works to emerge out of World War I. Drawing on E. E. Cummings s experiences in France as a volunteer ambulance driver, this novel takes us through a series of mishaps that led to the poet s being arrested for treason and imprisoned. Out of this trauma Cummings produced a work like no other a story of oppression and injustice told with his characteristic linguistic energy and unflappable exuberance, which celebrates the spirit of the individual and offers a brave and brilliant opposition in the face of the inhumanity of war.

Illustrated with drawings Cummings made while imprisoned in France and featuring an illuminating new introduction by Susan Cheever, this reissued edition offers a unique and multifaceted lens onto the inner life of the poet in his youth and demands recognition by a twenty-first-century readership."

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894, Edward Estlin Cummings rebelled against the prevailing values of his Harvard and Unitarianism-steeped milieu. His relentless search for personal freedom led him to Greenwich Village in early 1917, where he established himself as a Modernist, composing his sui generis poems and abstract paintings. Later that year, he impulsively joined the war, serving in a Red Cross ambulance unit on the Western Front. His free-spirited, combative ways, however, soon got him tagged as a possible enemy of La Patrie, and he was summarily tossed into a French concentration camp at La Ferte-Mace in Normandy.

Unexpectedly, under the vilest conditions, Cummings found fulfillment of his ever-elusive quest for freedom. The Enormous Room (1922), the fictional account of his four-month confinement, reads like a Pilgrim's Progress of the spirit, a journey into dispossession, to a place among the most debased and deprived of human creatures. Yet Cummings's hopeful tone reflects the essential paradox of his experience: to lose everything -- all comforts, all possessions, all rights and privileges -- is to become free, and so to be saved. Drawing on the diverse voices of his colorful prisonmates -- Emile the Bum, the Fighting Sheeney, One-Eyed Dah-veed -- Cummings weaves a "crazy-quilt" of language, which makes The Enormous Room one of the most evocative instances of the Modernist spirit and technique, as well as "one of the very best of the war-books" (T. E. Lawrence).

Among many poems can be found "dying is fine)but Death," "so many selves(so many friends and gods," "when serpents bargain for the right to squirm," "no time ago," "I thank You God for most this amazing," and "now all the fingers of this tree(darling)have."

Published in 1958, "95 Poems" is the last book of new poems published in Cummings's lifetime. Remarkable for its vigor, freshness, interest in ordinary individuals, and awareness of the human life cycle, the book reflects Cummings's observations on nature and his prevailing gratitude for whatever life offers: "Time's a strange fellow: more he gives than takes." This new edition joins other individual uniform Liveright paperback volumes drawn from the "Complete Poems," most recently "Etcetera" and "22 and 50 Poems."