hen and why did the work of E.E. Cummings become marginal? In the 1920s and ’30s, he was a clear standout among the many experimental writers and artists who constitute what we now call modernism. He published in the most influential “little magazines”—from The Liberator, where Jamaican radical Claude McKay championed an early poem, to the relatively staid Dial, which gave him its annual prize for “service to letters” in 1925, awarded to Marianne Moore the previous year and to William Carlos Williams the next. He was one of the first poets to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he corresponded extensively with Ezra Pound and John Dos Passos—a classmate at Harvard—and later with Elizabeth Bishop and W.H. Auden. But when I read Cummings in grad school, it was at the urging of my father-in-law, a union power plant worker who once included a late sonnet, “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in / my heart),” in a Christmas gift to his wife. I had to buy my own copy of the Complete Poems because the many copies at my university’s library were always on loan.
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