October 14, 1894

E. E. Cummings (October 14, 1894 to September 3, 1962), a noted American poet, disproves the idea that artist thrive on miserable childhoods. His was a warm family, middle-class, and ideal.

Cummings is famous for his innovative formatting bent to poetic ends. In poem fifty-seven, from the volume Xaipe (1950) E. E. Cummings described a still cat in this manner (the bolding is mine):

(im)c-a-t(mo)
b,i;l:e:

This is the first stanza. According to his one of his biographers, Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno (E.E. Cummings: A Biography, 2004), this poem led to some hard feelings with his friend William Carlos Williams. Mike Wallace, in 1957, asked Williams point blank if the lines we quote above, were really poetry. The program was Nitebeat and William Carlos Williams said, on the air, that he would "reject that effort as a poem."

The subsequent estrangement of the poets ended after a few months. I not only see a feline snoozing, in Cummings' poetry quoted here, but a tail tip twitching.