The Enormous Room

Cummings volunteered for an ambulance corps in France in 1917, was arrested by French authorities on suspicion of disloyalty after his letters drew a censor’s attention, and spent roughly three months in a detention camp at La Ferté-Macé. The book is the account of that one large room and the men held in it, written in a deliberately unmilitary, anti-official voice.

It is a first book by a poet and reads like one — the interest is at least as much in the sentences as in the events.

Context: E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) is best known for his poetry and its typographic experiments. The Enormous Room was his first book and is his best-known prose.

Connections

• E. E. Cummings — the author.
• World War I — the war he volunteered into and was detained inside.
• Literature