Word: estlin
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When it was first published in 1933 (in an edition of 1,300 copies), Poet Edward Estlin Cummings' journal of a visit to Russia fell flat. Written in a stream-of-consciousness style filled with puns, parodies and typographical innovations, it seemed on the surface a needlessly complicated work on a subject of no great difficulty-a trip from Paris to Moscow (and back by Odessa and Constantinople) on which nothing happened...
...Nothin;'), of many a Negro spiritual and folksong. But it has been passed up by most U. S. poets. The first one to crack this national theme wide open, to taste all its implications and to manage to spit them out in undeviating American language, is Edward Estlin Cummings...
...Edward Estlin Cummings fulfills a U. S. tradition in being the cut-up son of a parson. The U. S. public (in so far as it has heard of him) takes him much less seriously than the unfortunate typesetters who have to follow his rocketing, pinwheeling copy. Whether Poet Cummings has started a tradition of his own is a question that only posterity will answer. To his own day he looks like a one-man poetic party. As leftwing, literarily, as they come, he is antipolitical; he pulls rude but only partly understandable faces at Communists, New Dealers and GOPartisans...
Compared with the utterances of Ezra Pound (TIME, March 20), the writing of Edward Estlin Cummings is as simple as ABC. Though to many a lay reader his typographical idiosyncrasies suggest a linotyper's nightmare, he is not really so difficult. Not a writer to be nodded over or dipped into at random, neither does he try to catch the reader napping. If he is read as carefully as he writes, he has few Joycean perplexities (aside from portmanteau words and puns); what looks like a puzzling shorthand will resolve itself into a longhand of his own invention, painstaking...
...brownstone basements in Greenwich Village are speakeasies. One that is not leads to the Painters & Sculptors Gallery where hung last week the first Eastern exhibition of the paintings of Edward Estlin Cummings, a curious gentleman who sometimes calls himself e e cummings, and writes poetry puzzling to the laity...