The Beauty of Living: E. E. Cummings in the Great War
J. Alison Rosenblitt
Aug 2020 · Highbridge Audio · Narrated by David Colacci
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10 hr 2 min
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About this audiobook
Intimate and richly detailed, The Beauty of Living begins with E. E. Cummings's Cambridge upbringing and his relationship with his socially progressive but domestically domineering father. It follows Cummings through his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he fell into a circle of aspiring writers including John Dos Passos, who became a lifelong friend. Steeped in classical paganism and literary Decadence, Cummings and his friends rode the explosion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, and other "modern" movements in the arts. As the United States prepared to enter World War I, Cummings volunteered as an ambulance driver, shipped out to Paris, and met his first love, Marie Louise Lallemand, who was working in Paris as a prostitute. Soon after reaching the front, however, he was unjustly imprisoned in a brutal French detention center at La Ferté-Macé. Through this confrontation with arbitrary and sadistic authority, he found the courage to listen to his own voice.
Probing an underexamined yet formative time in the poet's life, this deeply researched account illuminates his ideas about love, justice, humanity, and brutality. J. Alison Rosenblitt weaves together letters and journal entries with astute analyses of poems that span Cummings's career, revealing the origins of one of the twentieth century's most famous poets.
Probing an underexamined yet formative time in the poet's life, this deeply researched account illuminates his ideas about love, justice, humanity, and brutality. J. Alison Rosenblitt weaves together letters and journal entries with astute analyses of poems that span Cummings's career, revealing the origins of one of the twentieth century's most famous poets.
About the author
J. Alison Rosenblitt is the director of studies in classics at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford. The author of The Beauty of Living: E. E. Cummings in the Great War and E. E. Cummings' Modernism and the Classics: Each Imperishable Stanza, she lives in England.
David Colacci has been an actor and a director for over thirty years, and has worked as a narrator for over fifteen years. He has won AudioFile Earphones Awards, earned Audie nominations, and been included in Best of the Year lists by such publications as Publishers Weekly, AudioFile magazine, and Library Journal.
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