Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
I--Six Nonlectures

I--Six Nonlectures

Cummings, E. E.

Paperback

Series: Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Book 16

Poetry CriticismGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 0674440102
ISBN13: 9780674440104
Publisher: Belknap Press
Published: Jan 1 1991
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.33
Height: 0.36 Width: 5.22 Depth: 8.20
Language: English

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.

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