E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls; if everything happens that can't be done; nobody loses all the time; O sweet spontaneous; when serpents bargain for the right to squirm LINKS The Academy of American Poets - Poetry Exhibits: E.E. Cummings http://www.poets.org/lit/POET/eecummin.htm This site contains a brief biography of Cummings, the texts to several of his poems, a selected bibliography, and a useful list of links. BIOGRAPHY E. E. Cummings (1894–1962) Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Edward Estlin Cummings attended Harvard (B.A., 1915; M.A., 1916), served as a volunteer ambulance driver in France during World War I, was imprisoned for three months in a French detention camp, served in the United States Army (1918–1919), then studied art and painting in Paris (1920–1924). His prose narrative The Enormous Room (1922), a recollection of his imprisonment, brought instant acclaim. Several volumes of poetry followed. His experiments with punctuation, line division, and capitalization make his work immediately recognizable. In a letter to young poets published in a high school newspaper, Cummings said, "[N]othing is quite so easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all the time—and whenever we do it, we're not poets."