Gateway Stories to the Classics: “enormous SMALLNESS”

January 6, 2025

by Missy Andrews

Some of us love poetry all our lives. Others write it all of theirs. Edward Estling Cummings (a.k.a. E. E. Cummings) did both. After writing his first poem in 1897 at the tender age of three, Cummings went on to pen some 2,900 poems in his lifetime. By the time of his death in 1962, he had received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work and held the Charles Eliot Norton professorship at Harvard University, his alma mater. In addition to poetry, Cummings produced several notable prose works and plays; why, he even dabbled in the visual arts!

For students who haven’t yet fallen for the word play that enchanted E.E., Matthew Burgess’s illustrated picture book biography of Cummings provides a fine introduction to both the man and the matter. “Inside an enormous city in a house on a very small street, there once lived a poet I would like you to meet.” enormous SMALLNESS playfully relates the story of this little man, who left such a big mark in the field of poetry.

Burgess writes of Edward’s childhood, describing his growing affinity for words and language, his creative sense of space and rhythm, and his eye for everyday beauty. As he narrates the poet’s life and artistic development, he offers his readers some samples of Cummings’ delicious verse, like this one:

love is a place

and through this place of

love move

(with brightness of peace)

all places

And this one:

o(round)moon,how

you(round

than round)float;

who

lly &(rOunder than)

:ldenly(Round

est)

And also this one:

who are you,little i

(five or six years old)

peering from some high

window;at the gold

of november sunset

(and feeling:that if day

has to become night

this is a beautiful way)

Biographer Burgess knows that merely quoting Cummings can’t do him justice; one must see this poet’s work on the printed page. Cummings uses space inventively and bends the rules of grammar and punctuation to convey his sense of things. He settles lower case letters where capitals should be. Sometimes he crushes words together, eliminating the spaces between them. Sometimes he stretches them past their borders to suit his purpose. More important than the rules he breaks, however, is Cummings’s desire to help others see inside the words. He wants his readers to feel and taste and smell language as he does. Burgess is equally invested in giving his readers an immersive experience with the poet; he presents Cummings’ poems authentically.

Artist Kris Di Giacomo illustrates Cummings’ word art with the same kind of rule bending, using various types and typefaces to indicate the fullness and tone of the words themselves. Words share equal space with the illustrations in the book, merging with the pictures as concrete elements of design. With each illustration, Di Giacomo retains Cummings’ singular style and use of space. In Di Giacomo’s imagination, Cummings’s words are living seeds that germinate into bouquets of ideas. The illustrator’s imaginative rendering of the biographer’s text and the poet’s verse culminate in something like concrete poetry.

Most notably, this book captures Cummings’ playfulness with language. The poet never lost his childlike wonder over words, handling them throughout his life like baubles and toys. Adults who would read Cummings must learn to play again, rediscovering their own wonder at the nature of language. Parents and educators will find this easy when reading it aloud to their littles, as enormous SMALLNESS is sure to delight readers of all ages. In the spirit of Cummings:

this

is a

b o o k

forEvery

one!