i: six nonlectures

“Marvelously unconventional...a credo of intense individualism.”—Atlantic

A brilliantly eccentric autobiography from one of the most widely read poets of the twentieth century.

“Let me cordially warn you, at the opening of these socalled lectures, that I haven’t the remotest intention of posing as a lecturer.” So begins the first of six delightfully off-kilter “nonlectures” delivered at Harvard in 1952–1953. Gleefully flouting the conventions of the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry, which had previously hosted T. S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, and other luminaries, E. E. Cummings declines to offer anything in the way of critical analysis, citing Rainer Maria Rilke’s contention that “Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little reached as with criticism.”

Instead, six nonlectures presents a kaleidoscopic tour of the great poet’s life, influences, and favorite poems, from Chaucer, Wordsworth, and Swinburne to selections of his own work. After an autobiographical sketch of his youth in Cambridge, Massachusetts—including reflections on his father’s tragic death, accounts of his formative relationships with the pragmatist philosophers William James and Josiah Royce, stories from his days as a Harvard undergraduate, and readings of his earliest attempts at poetry—Cummings captivates with stream-of-consciousness musings on a dizzying array of subjects: freedom and democracy, New York and Paris, Lenin’s tomb and high-speed elevators, death and Santa Claus.

Replete with digressions, irreverent wordplay, and, of course, parentheses, six nonlectures is a moving tribute to the spirit of artistic individuality, that dedication to unmitigated personal truth without which the poet “would cease to exist at all.”