“[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]”

“Lowercaseness: Susan Cheever on E. E. Cummings and the State of Biography” by Claire Luchette (2014)

In this interview for Poetry Magazine, author and biographer Susan Cheever discusses family friend E. E. Cummings. Her thoughts about his kindness toward her during her teen years inspired her need to write a biography to “bring him to life” for contemporary audiences. She discusses what some critics have called sexism and his feelings regarding masculinity and inadequacy, especially after his first divorce and the loss of his daughter. Cheever argues that Cummings’s poetic form may have been inspired by his rebellion against the upper crust of his day: “I think what he meant by the lowercase ‘i’ was a sort of humble playfulness.”

“Did Anyone Ever Tell You I Was Your Father?” by Christian Sawyer-Lauçanno (2005)

In this article from the April 22, 2005, edition of The Guardian, an excerpt from a biography, Sawyer-Lauçanno explains how Cummings’s first wife left Cummings for an Irish nobleman and took their daughter, Nancy, to Ireland. Cummings and Nancy did not meet again for 20 years. While their 1946 reunion was warm, if a surprise for Nancy, it never expanded to be close. Sawyer-Lauçanno discusses Cummings’s regrets regarding this, noting in particular journal entries he made in the 1950s, around the same time as when he wrote “[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in].” This may play into a biographical reading of the poem.

“Cummings and Modernism” by Matthew Main (1998)

Main, writing for the Okayama University of Japan, discusses Cummings’s uneasy fit into the definitions of Modernism and Romanticism, arguing that his stylistic innovations align him with Modernism, while his subject matter, often tied to nature, aligns him with the Romantics. According to Main, Cummings blended both movements, using “romantic intentions” with “grammar and diction” to describe transcendence.