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”, forty-nine essays, a poem and three speeches from an unfinished play. Seven years later, George J. Firmage broadened the scope of this idiosyncratic collection, adding seven poems and essays, and many of Cummings’s unpublished line drawings.Together, these pieces paint a distinctive portrait of Cummings’s eccentric genius. His essays explore everything from Cubism to the circus, analyse his poetic contemporaries and satirise New York society. As Cummings wrote in his original foreword, A Miscellany “contain[s] a great deal of liveliness and nothing dead.” This remains true today.
