e e cummings 
(1894 - 1962 )

e e cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He had an interesting habit of not capitalizing the initials of his first name or his last name.  He said he did that to emphasize that we are all the same.  cummings was born the son of a Unitarian minister, who grew up "only a butterfly's glide" from Harvard and "attended four Cambridge schools; the first, private-where everybody was extraordinarily kind; and where (in addition to learning nothing) I burst into tears and nosebleeds-the other three, public; where I flourished like the wicked and learned what the wicked learn, and were almost nobody cared about somebody else."  

After graduating from Harvard, cummings joined a volunteer American ambulance corps in France.  The United States had not yet entered World War I.  

A French censor decided that one of cumming's odd-looking letters home was suspicious.  cummings was arrested as a spy and held for three months in a prison camp, an experience he wrote about in a novel he called The Enormous Room (1922).  

In addition to using lower case letters in his poetry, cummings liked to space his words oddly across the page and punctuate with a style of his own.  While his punctuation is unusual, his themes are familiar: the joy, wonder and mystery of life and the miracle of individual identity.  He once advised a group of young poets to be themselves:  "...remember one thing only: that it is you-nobody else-who determines your destiny and decides your fate.  Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else."

Open "Elements of Literature, Fourth Course" to Page 552 and read "Since Feeling is First"  

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