e.e CUMMINGS

" Seni diğerlerinden farksız kılmaya bütün gücüyle gece gündüz çalışan bir dünyada kendin olarak kalabilmek dünyanın en zor savaşını vermek demektir. Bu savaş başladı mı artık hiç bitmez..."(E.E.Cummings)


1953'te e. e. Cummings



Edward Estlin Cummings (1894 - 1962), E. E. Cummings ismini kullanan Amerikalı şair, ressam, deneme ve oyun yazarıdır. Hayatı boyunca dokuz yüzden fazla şiir, iki roman, birkaç tane de tiyatro oyunu ve deneme kitabının yazarı olan Cummings'in, bunların yanında birçok tablosu bulunmaktadır. 20. yüzyıl şiirinin en önde gelen ve popüler yüzlerinden biridir.

İsmi

E. E. Cummings'in geleneksel olmayan majüskül (büyük) harf kullanma tarzı zaman zaman yayıncı ve okurları tarafından isminin küçük harflerle ve araya nokta konulmadan yazılması suretiyle öne çıkarılmıştır. Ölümünden sonra eşi tarafından bir kitabın önsözünde belirtildiği üzre yazar sadece küçük harf kullanarak şiirlerini yazmıştır. Böylece ismi resmi olarak "e. e. cummings" olarak değiştirilir. Fakat daha sonra, Cummings tarafından eserlerini Fransızcaya çeviren kişiye yazılan bir mektup incelendiğinde isminin yazılışında büyük harf kullanılmasını tercih ettiği ortaya çıkar. Bugün Cummings'i araştıran bir kişi yazarın ismini küçük harfle yazmasının bir alçakgönüllülük göstergesi olduğunu düşünebilirken, bir diğeri bu durumu yazarın kibirli olmasıyla açıklamaktadır. Kısacası tartışmalar hâlâ devam etmektedir.

CAREER
In 1917 Cummings enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, along with his college friend John Dos Passos. Due to an administrative mix-up, Cummings was not assigned to an ambulance unit for five weeks, during which time he stayed in Paris. He fell in love with the city, to which he would return throughout his life.

During their service in the ambulance corp, they had sent letters home that drew the attention of the military censors and preferred the company of French soldiers over fellow ambulance drivers. The two openly expressed anti-war views; Cummings spoke of his lack of hatred for the Germans. On September 21, 1917, just five months after his belated assignment, he and a friend, William Slater Brown were arrested by the French military on suspicion of espionage and undesirable activities. They were held for 3½ months in a concentration camp at the Dépôt de Triage, in La Ferté-Macé, Orne, Normandy.

They were imprisoned with other detainees in a large room. Cummings' father failed to obtain his son's release through diplomatic channels and in December 1917 finally wrote a letter to President Wilson. Cummings was released on December 19, 1917, and Brown was released two months later. Cummings used his prison experience as the basis for his novel, The Enormous Room about which F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "Of all the work by young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives—The Enormous Room by e e cummings....Those few who cause books to live have not been able to endure the thought of its mortality."

Cummings returned to the United States on New Year's Day 1918. Later in 1918 he was drafted into the army. He served in the 12th Division at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, until November 1918.[4][5]

Cummings returned to Paris in 1921 and remained there for two years before returning to New York. During the rest of the 1920s and 1930s he returned to Paris a number of times, and traveled throughout Europe, meeting, among others, Pablo Picasso. In 1931 Cummings traveled to the Soviet Union and recounted his experiences in Eimi, published two years later. During these years Cummings also traveled to Northern Africa and Mexico and worked as an essayist and portrait artist for Vanity Fair magazine (1924 to 1927).

Cummings' papers are held at the Houghton Library at Harvard University and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Personal life

In 1926, Cummings' father was killed in a car accident. Though severely injured, Cummings' mother survived. Cummings detailed the accident in the following passage from his i: six nonlectures series given at Harvard (as part of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures) in 1952–1953:


... a locomotive cut the car in half, killing my father instantly. When two brakemen jumped from the halted train, they saw a woman standing – dazed but erect – beside a mangled machine; with blood spouting (as the older said to me) out of her head. One of her hands (the younger added) kept feeling her dress, as if trying to discover why it was wet. These men took my sixty-six year old mother by the arms and tried to lead her toward a nearby farmhouse; but she threw them off, strode straight to my father's body, and directed a group of scared spectators to cover him. When this had been done (and only then) she let them lead her away.

His father's death had a profound impact on Cummings, who entered a new period in his artistic life. Cummings began to focus on more important aspects of life in his poetry. He began this new period by paying homage to his father's memory in the poem "my father moved through dooms of love"

Born into a Unitarian family, Cummings exhibited transcendental leanings his entire life. As he grew in maturity and age, Cummings moved more toward an "I, Thou" relationship with God. His journals are replete with references to “le bon Dieu” as well as prayers for inspiration in his poetry and artwork (such as “Bon Dieu! may I some day do something truly great. amen.”). Cummings "also prayed for strength to be his essential self ('may I be I is the only prayer--not may I be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong'), and for relief of spirit in times of depression ('almighty God! I thank thee for my soul; & may I never die spiritually into a mere mind through disease of loneliness')."


i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes