Spring is like a perhaps hand

E.E. Cummings’s poetry is largely preoccupied with love and nature, though he lived and wrote through turbulent periods of history. Despite his professed lack of interest in politics, Cummings’s literary career was heavily influenced by the poet’s political choices. For instance, Cummings volunteered for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in 1917 after graduating with his master’s degree from Harvard. He did this to help with the war efforts while preserving his pacifist leanings. His laissez-faire attitude, anti-war leanings, and boredom-induced littering of letters home with suspicious phrases meant to provoke the French censors led to his imprisonment on suspicion of espionage. His imprisonment of nearly half a year was the subject of his first book, The Enormous Room, which kickstarted his publishing career. After returning to the United States, he was drafted in the army in 1918.

In 1931, E.E. Cummings visited the Soviet Union. At the time, the Soviet Union was considered an anti-capitalist beacon of hope by American Leftists. Expecting to find a communist utopia, Cummings instead discovered a brutal dictatorship. After returning home, Cummings published an account of his trip that attacked the Soviet regime: Eimi (1933). Because this offended the sensibilities of liberal publishers, Cummings’s heretofore successful poetry manuscripts were blacklisted.