Description:
New York: Henry Holt and Company,, 1944. First edition. This collection includes antiwar poems and portraits of people important to Cummings. It won the 1945 Shelley Memorial Award. The collection was influenced by Cummings's happiness with his wife, Marion Morehouse, and the time spent at his summer home in New Hampshire. It expresses "the individualistic philosophy of life that Cummings had developed out of his dedication to art and his casting off the restraints of society. What emerges is his affirmation of life in all its essential forms, but especially in whatever is natural, unpretentious, and unique" (ANB). Octavo. Original grey cloth, spine lettered in blue. With dust jacket. Spine ends gently rubbed; jacket unclipped, closed tears and creasing to extremities, a little loss to spine ends, soiling to panels, tape repair to verso: a fine copy in very good jacket.