Share this page E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) was born and brought up in Cambridge Massachusetts, and is remembered above all for his startling innovations in syntax and typography. His early experiments in poetry whilst still a child were encouraged by liberal parents to whom Cummings remained close, particularly his father, a professor of sociology and political science at Harvard, and a Unitarian minister whose religious beliefs influenced the transcendental strand in Cummings' work. He graduated from Harvard in 1916, his commencement address entitled 'New Art' suggesting the modernist/imagist direction in which his poetry would flow. He then volunteered for the ambulance service in the First World War, but once in France was arrested, erroneously, on suspicion of espionage and spent three and a half months in a detention camp. Despite this negative early experience of the continent, the avant garde cultural life of Paris later became of lasting importance to him. Cummings' debut collection, Tulips and Chimneys , appeared in 1923 and presented for the first time his eccentric use of grammar and punctuation, an approach, influenced by Gertrude Stein, that gave his poetry a radical freshness. His own experience as a painter, as well as a writer, meant that for Cummings the appearance of the poem on the page contributes significantly to its mood and meaning. Typical stylistic devices in his work include: running words together; scattering punctuation symbols cross the page; subverting the syntactical conventions of the English sentence; intentional misspellings and phonetic spellings and the invention of