Tulips and Chimneys

New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923. First Edition. Hard Cover. Good/No Jacket. First edition (Firmage A3a). Corners rubbed and exposed, spine toned and just beginning to split along rear joint, owner bookplate with the surname Schubert on front endpaper. Includes acetate jacket (probably added later) with some loss from corners. 1923 Hard Cover. 125 pp. Beige cloth spine with paper label, brown paper over boards. Author's first poetry collection, and second book overall (after The Enormous Room), published before he did away with the capitalization and punctuation in his name. "Cummings expressed ideas through new grammatical usage: he employed verbs as nouns, and other locutions as new linguistic creations (for example, 'wherelings, whenlings / daughters of ifbut offspring of hopefear / sons of unless and children of almost / never shall guess'). He indulged in free play with punctuation and capitalization. Lowercase letters were the rule; capitals were used only for special emphasis; punctuation marks were omitted for ambiguous statement; others were introduced for jarring effects. His use of the lowercase letter 'i' not only became a well-known means of self-reference in his work, but also reflected a role that he created for himself: he was the underling, the unnoticed dreamer, the downtrodden one, the child in the man; yet by asserting his individuality in this way, he thrust himself forward and established a memorable persona. His first manuscript book of poems, 'Tulips & Chimneys,' was a gathering of work in traditional verse forms as well as in his newest unconventional forms of expressiveness. It included lush lyrics from his Harvard years, tender love poems, erotic epigrams, sonnets (some crammed with literary allusion, others merely attempting to depict ordinary scenes of life - on city streets, in cafes, in rooming houses), celebrations of the beauties of the natural world, and harsh satires directed at politicians, generals, professors, the clergy, and national leaders. The publishing world was not yet ready for some of Cummings's poems about drunks, prostitutes, Salvation Army workers, gangsters, or bums. Thus, the original version of Cummings's manuscript did not survive the forbidding selectivity of editors, and it eventually emerged as three books: Tulips and Chimneys (1923), XLI Poems (1925), and (privately printed) & (1925)." - Dictionary of National Biography