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& [AND]
Privately printed to avoid censorship, this group of poems Cummings titled & [AND], in honor of "the ampersand which Seltzer had denied him in Tulips and Chimneys"
- GenresPoetry
100 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1925
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30 people want to read
About the author
E.E. Cummings
369 books3,950 followersEdward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School.
He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.
After the war, he settled into a life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.
In 1920, The Dial published seven poems by Cummings, including "Buffalo Bill ’s.” Serving as Cummings’ debut to a wider American audience, these “experiments” foreshadowed the synthetic cubist strategy Cummings would explore in the next few years.
In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work toward further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.
The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted that Cummings is “one of the most individual poets who ever lived—and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings’s poems are loved because they are full of sentimentally, of sex, of more or less improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence.”
During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant.
At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.
source: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/e-...
He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.
After the war, he settled into a life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.
In 1920, The Dial published seven poems by Cummings, including "Buffalo Bill ’s.” Serving as Cummings’ debut to a wider American audience, these “experiments” foreshadowed the synthetic cubist strategy Cummings would explore in the next few years.
In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work toward further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.
The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted that Cummings is “one of the most individual poets who ever lived—and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings’s poems are loved because they are full of sentimentally, of sex, of more or less improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence.”
During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant.
At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.
source: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/e-...
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 8, 2017
"something which is worth the whole,
an inch of nothing for your soul."
- E.E. Cummings, &[AND], Sonnets--Actualities III
I remember eyes shockOH&some by E.E.
cummings early erotic sonnets when I
was justalone boy!weed, an awkward
shoot of hormones lust & love's potential.
Later recall I ears mouth seducedYEStripped by
same sonnets filledfull with dancing worms, &
electric fuzz -- stirred into hot fleshfir & hips
bumping to the sizzle of sex's maybes -- & yes.
Nows I re(ad & flect) on the pull&YESpower of
cherry slurps, sexy sonnets, & another's love.
an inch of nothing for your soul."
- E.E. Cummings, &[AND], Sonnets--Actualities III
I remember eyes shockOH&some by E.E.
cummings early erotic sonnets when I
was justalone boy!weed, an awkward
shoot of hormones lust & love's potential.
Later recall I ears mouth seducedYEStripped by
same sonnets filledfull with dancing worms, &
electric fuzz -- stirred into hot fleshfir & hips
bumping to the sizzle of sex's maybes -- & yes.
Nows I re(ad & flect) on the pull&YESpower of
cherry slurps, sexy sonnets, & another's love.
August 27, 2024
if you ever thought that you might like to have sex with ee cummings, boy do i have some poems for you!
these are beautiful, invasive, and deeply sensual. cummings’ words enter you, they grope you. i finished this yesterday morning and i can still feel his hands.
these are beautiful, invasive, and deeply sensual. cummings’ words enter you, they grope you. i finished this yesterday morning and i can still feel his hands.
September 7, 2019
Épater la bourgeoisie. Modernist experiments on the sensory experience of sex. Top tip: Actualities 7.
February 27, 2010
I am especially drawn to what cummings calls the sonnets. They mostly note the material of sex. To abuse Eliot, ee looks at a breast and sees the blue vein beneath the skin. These poems catch the physical, seldom the emotional. He records the sounds and smells of sex and the drive to do it again. It is one dimensional, but so is making sex all in the head and the heart. It is an interesting corrective, expressed with surprisingly little emotion. Has anyone put all the parts of sex together?
October 30, 2025
EE Cummings is to poetry as a warhead is to a juju fish.
March 19, 2015
Favorites:
when the spent day begins to frail
i will be M o ving in the Street of her
i like my body when it is with your
when the spent day begins to frail
i will be M o ving in the Street of her
i like my body when it is with your
February 9, 2018
Consistent Cummings. Few duds, but most are good. And there are several that trip you up with their startling beauty. A standout, of course, from part D, Sonnets--Actualities, VII: "i like my body when it is with your body." If you only read one of the poems from this volume, check that one out. It's the last one.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews