US poet and novelist. His work is marked by idiosyncratic punctuation and typography (often using only lower case letters in his verse, for example), and a subtle, lyric celebration of life. Before his first collection
Tulips and Chimneys (1923), Cummings published an avant-garde novel,
The Enormous Room (1922), based on his internment in a French concentration camp during World War I.
His typographical experiments were antecedents of the concrete and sound poetry of the 1960s.
© RM 2012. Helicon Publishing is division of RM.