The Beauty of Living | J. Alison Rosenblitt

My review of J. Alison Rosenblitt’s The Beauty of Living: E.E. Cummings in the Great War ran today at WBUR’s The ARTery.

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My review of J. Alison Rosenblitt’s THE BEAUTY OF LIVING, a biography of E.E. Cummings that focuses on his youth and his experiences in the First World War, ran today @wburartery. Rosenblitt offers two propositions: first, that Cummings’s experiences as a volunteer ambulance driver on the front influenced his poetry and makes him a “war poet.” Sure, the influence is there, as it is for many of his generation, but calling him a war poet seems reductive. He’s not Wilfred Owen, who is famous specifically for writing about his war experiences. Cummings is so much more than that; that he isn’t regarded as a war poet isn’t a slight, it’s a recognition of his range. Second: that his brief relationship with Marie Louise Lallemand had a profound impact on his writing. Most definitely! Rosenblitt does Lallemand justice where prior biographers have ignored her because she was a sex worker and thus inconvenient to their narrative. A fun book, focused in scope but rich with detail and only slightly muddled by the framing around the Great War. . . . #bookreview #bookrecommendation #bookstagram #bookstagrammer #bookblogger #bookblog #bookobsessed #bookaddict #poetry #poet #biography #eecummings #modernism

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