A Miscellany

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— editor of much of Cummings’s work, including Complete Poems— broadened the scope of this idiosyncratic collection of Cummings’s work, adding seven more poems and essays, and many of Cummings’s unpublished line drawings.Together, these pieces paint a distinctive portrait of Cummings’s eccentric, yet precise, genius. His essays explore everything from Cubism to the circus, equally quick to analyze his poetic contemporaries and satirize 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, more than fifty years after its original publication.