E. E. Cummings

Edward Estin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1894. Cummings wanted to be a poet from a young age and wrote poetry daily from ages 8 to 22. He attended Harvard University, where he further refined his style. During WWI, Cummings served in the Ambulance Corps and then in the Army. After the war, Cummings made a name for himself as an avant-garde poet with the collections Tulips and Chimneys (1923) and XLI Poems (1925). Throughout the rest of his life, Cummings continued to write and publish poetry, with a lifetime body of work comprising roughly 2,900 poems. Cummings also published four plays and several essays. He died of a stroke in 1962, at age 67.