What do you think?
Rate this book
E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised
Previously unpublished writings of E. E. Cummings. The book collects almost all of EEC's occasional prose pieces, most of which date from the 20s and 30s.
335 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
34 people are currently reading
555 people want to read
About the author
E.E. Cummings
369 books3,931 followersEdward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School.
He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.
After the war, he settled into a life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.
In 1920, The Dial published seven poems by Cummings, including "Buffalo Bill ’s.” Serving as Cummings’ debut to a wider American audience, these “experiments” foreshadowed the synthetic cubist strategy Cummings would explore in the next few years.
In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work toward further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.
The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted that Cummings is “one of the most individual poets who ever lived—and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings’s poems are loved because they are full of sentimentally, of sex, of more or less improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence.”
During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant.
At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.
source: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/e-...
He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.
After the war, he settled into a life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.
In 1920, The Dial published seven poems by Cummings, including "Buffalo Bill ’s.” Serving as Cummings’ debut to a wider American audience, these “experiments” foreshadowed the synthetic cubist strategy Cummings would explore in the next few years.
In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work toward further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.
The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted that Cummings is “one of the most individual poets who ever lived—and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings’s poems are loved because they are full of sentimentally, of sex, of more or less improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence.”
During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant.
At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.
source: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/e-...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 15, 2025
If you find yourself inundated with the pressure to uncritically accept AI, read this book.
January 7, 2023
A bit repetitive in the end, but overall good. I think it is nice to always take into account who are the "collateral damages" of this new era.
May 5, 2023
Good points in this book, but the writing itself was a slog, and it ended up feeling both repetitive and a bit vague. For a piece making a similar argument in MUCH more clear and approachable language, see Ted Chiang's piece in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/science/ann...
July 1, 2025
3.5/5
Some important stuff here, but there has been so much movement in the field since the book was published that it's probably easier to stay up to date on a very worthwhile cause by simply reading stuff online. Also, this wasn't the easiest to get into - not as bad as some academic writing I've read, but not particularly accessible either.
Some important stuff here, but there has been so much movement in the field since the book was published that it's probably easier to stay up to date on a very worthwhile cause by simply reading stuff online. Also, this wasn't the easiest to get into - not as bad as some academic writing I've read, but not particularly accessible either.
February 18, 2025
Given the near-term acceleration of adoption of AI systems that will undoubtedly exacerbate inequality and provide an avenue for automation of oppressive behavior (and already is and has), this book is starkly more important and immediately relevant now more than ever and I highly recommend it.
April 21, 2023
A radical approach to AI that I have yet to encounter - a very refreshing take on an movement that often focuses on reform rather than abolition. Arguments have stuck with me for a long time and I frequently go back to my notes on this one. I have also listening to him talk on 'Tech Won't Save Us' - which is worth a listen!
August 24, 2023
Amazing book which unexpectedly changed my life in some ways.
Definitely recommended reading for all interested in AI.
Definitely recommended reading for all interested in AI.
Read
February 5, 2024Charts AI as solutionism, and as reinforcement rather than challenge of society's ills and norms, then pursues some ways and forms in which communities can resist the structures created and maintained by AI. Good quick read
May 26, 2025
3.5
This was a good and informative book on the importance of resisting the proliferation of AI systems because of how they reinforce a lot of the societal issues that have already been exacerbating over the past few decades. They've also been increasingly weaponized to prop up authoritarian states and control their citizens. I found the first half of the book to be compelling, although I was already quite familiar with a lot of the issues of AI in terms of how it magnifies biases present online and therefore contributes to building up an environment more misogynist, homophobic, and racist. The latter section of the book goes into how McQuillan thinks we should combat AI and that is by creating more workers and people's councils that can challenge the supremacy of AI just as it's had a history of challenging multinational corporations and governments in the past. At one point, he even says we need to"occupy AI," directly referencing the Occupy Movement in the early 2010s.
I was hesitant getting into this book because I have a bit of a knee-jerk skepticism whenever "anti-fascism" is used to justify action. Fascism as a concept seems to me to have become such a ubiquitous catch-all term that it resembles its historical use by the left throughout the 20th century to describe any system or form of political organization they disliked, just like "Commie" and "Tankie" were used by opposing parties the other way around. But I tried being open-minded here and I think that what McQuillan is referring to by fascism here is in the negative sense of a loss of true democracy and democratic values.
Overall, however, I didn't find his solution to the rise of AI to be that realizable or feasible. It's a completely different situation for workers to rally together through shared common ground to protest against the forces that disrupt their unity and sense of human dignity, than for us to somehow replicate that on a global scale with regards to AI, especially since its production and development is getting more and more decentralized (in China, for example). The book was clearly written before the rise of Large Language Models and just how much they have revolutionized how we interact with information around us. It doesn't seem like something we can just decide to all protest against in unity with other people globally. I have a feeling that McQuillan didn't expect just how much technology would accelerate over the past three years to the point that makes his suggestions here even harder to put into action. Still, this is an interesting book that is worth reading to better understanding the many flaws of AI systems that have caused consternation amongst experts in the field over the past decade or so. It just feels a bit outdated to read today since it doesn't engage with the field's latest paradigm-shifting developments such as LLMs and image and video creation. Maybe he can write a follow up that gets into those more and expand this book. We definitely need it.
This was a good and informative book on the importance of resisting the proliferation of AI systems because of how they reinforce a lot of the societal issues that have already been exacerbating over the past few decades. They've also been increasingly weaponized to prop up authoritarian states and control their citizens. I found the first half of the book to be compelling, although I was already quite familiar with a lot of the issues of AI in terms of how it magnifies biases present online and therefore contributes to building up an environment more misogynist, homophobic, and racist. The latter section of the book goes into how McQuillan thinks we should combat AI and that is by creating more workers and people's councils that can challenge the supremacy of AI just as it's had a history of challenging multinational corporations and governments in the past. At one point, he even says we need to"occupy AI," directly referencing the Occupy Movement in the early 2010s.
I was hesitant getting into this book because I have a bit of a knee-jerk skepticism whenever "anti-fascism" is used to justify action. Fascism as a concept seems to me to have become such a ubiquitous catch-all term that it resembles its historical use by the left throughout the 20th century to describe any system or form of political organization they disliked, just like "Commie" and "Tankie" were used by opposing parties the other way around. But I tried being open-minded here and I think that what McQuillan is referring to by fascism here is in the negative sense of a loss of true democracy and democratic values.
Overall, however, I didn't find his solution to the rise of AI to be that realizable or feasible. It's a completely different situation for workers to rally together through shared common ground to protest against the forces that disrupt their unity and sense of human dignity, than for us to somehow replicate that on a global scale with regards to AI, especially since its production and development is getting more and more decentralized (in China, for example). The book was clearly written before the rise of Large Language Models and just how much they have revolutionized how we interact with information around us. It doesn't seem like something we can just decide to all protest against in unity with other people globally. I have a feeling that McQuillan didn't expect just how much technology would accelerate over the past three years to the point that makes his suggestions here even harder to put into action. Still, this is an interesting book that is worth reading to better understanding the many flaws of AI systems that have caused consternation amongst experts in the field over the past decade or so. It just feels a bit outdated to read today since it doesn't engage with the field's latest paradigm-shifting developments such as LLMs and image and video creation. Maybe he can write a follow up that gets into those more and expand this book. We definitely need it.
January 5, 2023
Really stands out amidst the several books on AI ethics. This is quite an amazing book, and the perspectives used are very enlightening. This uses a very marxist-aligned viewpoint of AI as automation, and argues why AI is underpinned by an ethos of highlighting boundaries and attenuating the expression of interdependencies. The critique used here is very sharp and to the point, with a generous sprinkling of various real-world scenarios that highlight the point. It eventually ends with a few chapters on how a new anti-fascist approach to AI design could be reimagined. The book clearly states what should be the foundational ethos of an anti-fascist approach to AI, one of which is fraternity and reciprocity. It seeks to take the carceral ethos out of AI in a very deep sense, and says how AI could flourish while allowing human beings to remain human.
August 20, 2024
We have a few differences in thought, but generally amazing. A foundational text, highly worth the read for anybody.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
