Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962) - Poetry, Prose and Politics or La Salle Enome Revisited.

Abstract

Cummings has been regarded as one of the leading lyricists America has produced. His writing is well known for its typographical eccentricity. Neither of these aspects is my primary concern but when they intrude upon quotations (as they inevitably will) I ask that they at least be tolerated, if not appreciated.

Cumming's novel The Enormous Room is about politics - not party politics
nor petty local government-type politics, but petty world politics. The novel is only a 'novel' because it doesn't give the actual names of individuals
involved, otherwise it is a piece of documentary prose. In April 1917 Cummings and his friend Slater Brown joined the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps (an American volunteer unit serving in France). On September 21st, as a result of some letters of Brown being intercepted by a French censor, both Cummings and Brown were arrested and moved to La Ferte Mace detention/concentration camp. Cummings was not released until December 19th and then only as a result of desperate letters written by his father to the President of the United States. The Enormous Room is concerned with the seventy-odd men who lived in the eighty foot by forty foot room at the prison, and the manner in which they reacted to the confinement and torture.