I Thank You God For Most This Amazing. Poem by E. E. Cummings

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E.E. Cummings (1894-1962), was an American poet, painter, author, essayist and playwright who created a niche for himself in English poetry through his remarkable literary experimentations with style. A typical Cummings poem is spare and precise, employing a few key words eccentrically placed on the page. Some of these words were invented by Cummings, often by combining two common words into a new synthesis. He also revised grammatical and linguistic rules to suit his own purposes. The irregular punctuation seen in most of his poems are not by accident. That is how cummings intended them to be.
Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Edward Cummings and Rebecca Haswell Clarke, a well-known Unitarian couple in the city. His father was a professor at Harvard University who later became nationally known as the minister of South Congregational Church in Boston. Cummings decided to become a poet when he was still a child. Between the ages of eight and twenty-two, he wrote a poem a day, exploring many traditional poetic forms. He attended the Cambridge Latin High School, where he studied Latin and Greek. By the time he was in Harvard in 1916, modern poetry had caught his interest. Cummings earned both his BA and MA from Harvard. In April of 1917, with the First World War raging in Europe and the United States just becoming involved, he volunteered for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service in France. He was soon stationed on the French-German border with fellow American William Slater Brown, and the two young men became fast friends. To relieve the boredom of their assignment, they inserted veiled and provocative comments into their letters back home, trying to outwit and baffle the French censors. They also befriended soldiers in nearby units. Such activities led in September of 1917 to their being held on suspicion of treason and sent to an internment camp in Normandy for questioning. Only outraged protests from his father finally secured Cummings’ release in December of 1917. These experiences led to the publication of his first book, The Enormous Room.
In July 1918, Cummings was drafted into the U.S. Army and spent some six months at a training camp in Massachusetts. Upon leaving the army in January of 1919, Cummings resumed his affair with Elaine Thayer, the wife of his friend Schofield Thayer, which he had begun a year earlier. Thayer knew and approved of the relationship. In December of 1919 Elaine gave birth to Cummings’ daughter, Nancy, and Thayer gave the child his name. Cummings was not to marry Elaine until 1924, after she and Thayer divorced. This first marriage did not last long. The couple separated after two months and divorced nine months later. Cummings married his second wife Anne Minnerly Barton in 1929 but three years later, they separated. Afterwards, in 1934, he met Marion Morehouse, a fashion model and photographer. She lived with Cummings until his death.
The early 1920s were an extremely productive time for Cummings. He returned to Paris in 1921 and lived there for two years before returning to New York. Critical reaction for The Enormous Room was overwhelmingly positive and in 1923, Cummings’ first collection of poems, Tulips and Chimneys was published. Another collection quickly followed in 1925: XLI Poems. At the end of that year, Dial magazine chose Cummings for their annual award of $2,000, a sum equaling a full year’s income for the writer. During these years Cummings also traveled to Northern Africa and Mexico. He worked as an essayist and portrait artist for Vanity Fair magazine (1924-1927). In 1926, Cummings' parents were in a car crash; only his mother survived, although she was severely injured. His father's death had a profound effect on Cummings. In 1928, Cummings three act play, Him was first produced by the Provincetown Players in New York City.
In 1931, Cummings traveled to the Soviet Union. His diary of the visit, in which he bitterly attacked the Soviet regime for its dehumanizing policies, was published in 1933 as Eimi, the Greek word for “I am.” For some time after publication of Eimi, Cummings had a difficult time getting his poetry published. Cummings had to resort to self-publishing several volumes of his work during the later 1930s.
In 1952, his alma mater, Harvard University, awarded Cummings an honorary seat as a guest professor. Cummings spent the last decade of his life traveling, fulfilling speaking engagements, and spending time at his summer home, Joy Farm in Silver Lake, New Hampshire. He died of a stroke on September 3, 1962, at the age of 67 and was buried at Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston. At the time of his death, Cummings was recognized as the "second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost.
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