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 years before World War I were a fertile period for artists in Europe and the United States who were challenging aesthetic convention in music, writing, and the visual arts. These early pioneers of modernism sometimes preferred to work alone, but just as often they were associated with groups whose boundaries were permeable and freely changing. While these individual groups_including the Futurists, Imagists, Blue Rider, and the Second Vienna School_have been thoroughly studied, scholars of the period have often neglected the formative and pervasive interactions of these groups across geographic and artistic boundaries. Providing a historical taxonomy of this influential milieu, Milton Cohen demonstrates how these groups were largely responsible for the artistic innovation and nearly all the avant-garde agitation and major events of these years. With concluding appendices intended for scholars and specialists, this engagingly written book will be useful not only for classroom use and scholarly research, but will appeal to anyone interested in reading a fresh approach to the history of early modernism.