Two women walk past him, conversing with their noses pointed to the sky, in glistening attire, with fur scarves slung around their necks and ornate designs engraved into their dresses. His eyes shift from the gossiping women to a cluster of businessmen laughing while they smoked cigars inside a restaurant. The men dressed in black, colorless business suites, with fashionable ties, fashionable outfits, and with any accessory that could compliment their fashionable lives. People in the town were black and white, and they hadn't aspired for their lives to be anything unique. While these lives continued, Edward Estilin Cummings looked around the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts as his inspiration to be anything but "fashionable". .
E.E. Cummings" early life inspired his writing from his college days all the way until his last words. After his birth in 1894, Cummings grew up as an intellectual and at age seventeen attended Harvard, where his father was a professor. At a young age, Cummings graduated with his masters and traveled the world, and began to observe the world in a way that would later profoundly impact his writing. Among the many events that gave him inspiration, such as the rising power of upper-class America during the 1920s, his draft into The Great War would eventually push him to publish his first work, The Enormous Room. 1 The rest, as they say, is history. .
But why should we care? E.E. Cummings isn't the only activist who protested against conflict and American hierarchy, and pushed to "make love and not war." He sounds like the typical perception of an American hippie - big deal. However, E.E. Cummings was among the first to question modern America, and at the same time, create a unique writing style that would later distinguish him among the greatest writers in history. Through his poetry, Cummings rebels against the common perceptions of traditional American ideology in hopes to bring spiritual freedom to the rigidity of America.
