Complete Poems, 1904-1962

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. It spans his earliest creations, his vivacious linguistic acrobatics, and through his last valedictory sonnets. Combining Thoreau's controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited Bohemian, Cummings, together with Pound, Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. Today Cummings is recognized as the author of some of the most sensuous lyric poems in the English language as well as one of the most inventive American poets of his time—in the words of Richard Kostelanetz, “the major American poet of the middle-twentieth century.” Formally fractured and yet gleefully alive and whole, at once cubistic and figurative, Cummings's work expanded the boundaries of what language is and can do.