A Miscellany
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- £10.99
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
A Miscellany, confined to a private edition for decades, sheds further light on the prodigious vision and imagination of the most inventive poet of the twentieth century: E.E. Cummings.
Formally fractured and yet gleefully alive and whole, E. E. Cummings’s groundbreaking modernist poetry expanded the boundaries of language. In A Miscellany, originally released in a limited run in 1958, Cummings lent his delightfully original voice to “a cluster of epigrams,” a poem, three speeches from an unfinished play, and forty-nine essays—most of them previously written for or published in magazines, anthologies, or art gallery catalogues. Seven years later, George J. Firmage—editor of much of Cummings’s work, including Complete Poems—broadened the scope of this delightfully eclectic collection, adding seven more poems and essays, and many of Cummings’s unpublished line drawings.
Together, these pieces paint a distinctive portrait of Cummings’s eccentric, yet precise, genius. Like his poetry, Cummings’s prose is lively; often witty, biting, and offbeat, he is an intelligent observer and critic of the modern. His essays explore everything from Cubism to the circus, equally quick to analyze his poetic contemporaries and satirize New York society. As Cummings wrote in his original foreword, A Miscellany contains “a great deal of liveliness and nothing dead.” This remains true today, more than fifty years after its original publication.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Originally published in limited edition in 1958, and then as an expanded version several years later, this long-out-of-print collection serves as a welcome reminder that Cummings's output encompassed much more than his famous verse. The content comprises mostly prose pieces, along with excerpts from an unfinished play and, of course, poems. Throughout, Cummings's distinctive style is in full flower, even as most of the pieces come from his early career as a Vanity Fair contributor in the 1920s. Satirical, pointed, and gleaming, Cummings's essays commented on the American fascination with France, the popularity of burlesque, and the rise of tabloids. More seriously, he also tackled modern artistic movements, such as cubism, that were flourishing at the time. Other pieces reveal the experimental and almost chaotic streak in Cummings's writing, with some working and others falling flat. Throughout, though, there are nuggets of universal observation that still ring true ("America makes prodigious mistakes. America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move"). The volume also includes many of Cummings's illustrations, revealing another facet of his abundant creativity. Cummings enthusiasts will delight that these writings are now readily available.
