E. E. Cummings' Modernism and the Classics by J Alison Rosenblitt

E. E. Cummings' Modernism and the Classics by J Alison Rosenblitt

This volume is a major, ground-breaking study of the modernist E. E. Cummings' engagement with the classics. With his experimental form and syntax, his irreverence, and his rejection of the highbrow, there are probably few current readers who would name Cummings if asked to identify 20th-century Anglophone poets in the Classical tradition. But for most of his life, and even for ten or twenty years after his death, this is how many readers and critics did see Cummings. He specialised in the study of classical literature as an undergraduate at Harvard, and his contemporaries saw him as a 'pagan' poet or a 'Juvenalian' satirist, with an Aristophanic sense of humour. In E.E. Cummings' Modernism and the Classics, Alison Rosenblitt aims to recover for the contemporary reader this lost understanding of Cummings as a classicizing poet. The book also includes an edition of previously unpublished work by Cummings himself, unearthed from archival research. For the first time, the reader has access to the full scope of Cummings' translations from Horace, Homer, and Greek drama, as well as two short pieces of classically-related prose, a short 'Alcaics' and a previously unknown and classicizing parody of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. This new work is exciting in its own right and essential to understanding Cummings' development as a poet.

The extent of the bibliography is really impressiveRosenblitt offers a rich discussion of Cummings and his poetry, and the influence of Classics on both. Overall, it is a fine and interesting book.

J. Alison Rosenblitt trained as an ancient historian and has published both in the field of Roman history and in the field of classical reception. As an historian, she studies ancient historiography (especially Sallust), late republican political history, and Roman oratory. On the classical reception side, she is interested in the poetry of the Great War and in early modernism and its relationship to the classics. She specializes in E.E. Cummings, whose relationship to the classical past is provocative and disobedient. Dr Rosenblitt took a double first in Ancient and Modern History at Wadham College, Oxford, with academic prizes, and completed her D.Phil. at Balliol College, Oxford. She has been a lecturer at various Oxford colleges and was a Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780198767152
ISBN 10	0198767153
Title	E. E. Cummings' Modernism and the Classics
Author	J Alison Rosenblitt
Series	Classical Presences
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Year published	2016-09-29
Number of pages	394
Prizes	Winner of Joint Winner of the 2018 First Book Award, Classical Association of the Midwest and South.
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.