This centennial edition of E. E. Cumming's Complete Poems, published in celebration of his birth on October 14, 1894, contains all of the poems published or designated for publication by the poet in his lifetime. At the time of his death in 1962, E. E. Cummings was, next to Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in America. Combining Thoreau's controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited bohemian, Cummings, together with Pound, Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. He is recognized on the one hand as the author of some of the most beautiful lyric poems written in the English language, and on the other as one of the most inventive American poets of his time—in the worlds of Richard Kostelanetz, "the major American poet of the middle-twentieth-century."

这是一本别出心裁、充满诗意的小书，卡明斯用令人耳目一新的形式，通过六次“非演讲”讲述了作者的家庭，他的成长，他的诗歌理念与奇思妙想，以及对影响他创作的诗人们的评价，辅以大量经典的诗歌赏析。书中处处闪耀着奇思妙想的火花，在奇特的形式外壳之下，卡明斯显示出卓越的抒情才能和艺术敏感。