EE cummings

While at Harvard, his studies focused on English and the classics but his passion became poetry. As Cummings said in Nonlecture Three "Harvard presented him with a smattering of languages and sciences; with a glimpse of Homer, more than a glimpse of Aeschylus Sophocles Euripides and Aristophanes, and a deep glance at Dante and Shakespeare-. (Norman 34) During his first year at Harvard, Edward became a contributor to The Harvard Advocate, to which he remained a fixture until his graduation in 1916. Through his affiliation with The Advocate, Edward met John R. Dos Passos, who later played an integral role in the publishing of Cumming's first poetry collection in 1923.
             Tulips and Chimneys presented readers with a collection of Cummings early poems. Many of these poems were previously published in The Harvard Advocate, The Harvard monthly and a periodical called The Dial. Cumming's work debuted in The Dial in Issue I, January 1920 and presented readers with seven poems and four line drawings. This mix of work left his audience wondering if he was a poet or an artist. At the time of Tulips and Chimneys, E. E. Cummings was living in Paris and considered himself an artist. He even wrote to his father saying that he produced "five million drawings a month and a sentence or three, sometimes suitable for poetic consumption-. (Kidder 16) The drawings presented in The Dial followed the form and norm of the current artistic style, but his poetry showed signs of progression into the rising Modernist movement.
             As a collection of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys gathered sixty-six (out of 152) of Cummings poems and divided them into two main sections of verse. Tulips provided readers with longer free verse poetry and Chimneys provided them with mostly sonnets. Each section was then further divided into fourteen segments, which followed Cumming's desire to combine short poems into a longer sequence. Tulips consisted of Epithalamion of Nicolette Songs, Puella Mea Chansons Innocentes, Orientale, Amores, La Guerre, Impressions, Portraits, and Post Impressions.