No Thanks (poetry collection)

Last updated
First edition (publ. Golden Eagle Press) NoThanksCummings.jpg
First edition (publ. Golden Eagle Press)

No Thanks is a 1935 collection of poetry by E. E. Cummings. He self-published the collection with the help of his mother and dedicated it to the fourteen publishing houses who turned the collection down. [1] The first edition is unconventionally bound not on the left but rather the top, like a stenographer's pad.

Reprint A reprint was published in 1998 [2] and was edited by George James Firmage , who is known for editing many of Cummings other works. Liveright described the book as:

No Thanks was first published in 1935; although Cummings was by then in mid-career, he had still not achieved recognition, and the title refers ironically to publishers' rejections. No Thanks contains some of Cummings's most daring literary experiments, and it represents most fully his view of life—romantic individualism. The poems celebrate an openly felt response to the beauties of the natural world, and they give first place to love, especially sexual love, in all its manifestations.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">E. E. Cummings</span> American author (1894–1962)

Edward Estlin Cummings, who was also known as E. E. Cummings, e. e. Cummings, and e e Cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. He wrote approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays, and several essays. He is often regarded as one of the most important American poets of the 20th century. Cummings is associated with modernist free-form poetry. Much of his work has idiosyncratic syntax and uses lower-case spellings for poetic expression.

Richard David Bach is an American writer. He has written numerous works of fiction and also non-fiction flight-related titles. His works include Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970) and Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977), both of which were among the 1970s' biggest sellers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Bloch</span> American fiction writer (1917–1994)

Robert Albert Bloch was an American fiction writer, primarily of crime, psychological horror and fantasy, much of which has been dramatized for radio, cinema and television. He also wrote a relatively small amount of science fiction. His writing career lasted 60 years, including more than 30 years in television and film. He began his professional writing career immediately after graduation from high school, aged 17. Best known as the writer of Psycho (1959), the basis for the film of the same name by Alfred Hitchcock, Bloch wrote hundreds of short stories and over 30 novels. He was a protégé of H. P. Lovecraft, who was the first to seriously encourage his talent. However, while he started emulating Lovecraft and his brand of cosmic horror, he later specialized in crime and horror stories working with a more psychological approach.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">D. H. Lawrence</span> English writer and poet (1885–1930)

David Herbert Lawrence was an English novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. His modernist works reflect on modernity, social alienation and industrialization, while championing sexuality, vitality and instinct. Several of his novels, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover, were the subject of censorship trials for their radical portrayals of sexuality and use of explicit language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">E. F. Benson</span> English novelist and writer (1867–1940)

Edward Frederic Benson was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, historian and short story writer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dashiell Hammett</span> American writer (1894–1961)

Samuel Dashiell Hammett was an American writer of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories. He was also a screenwriter and political activist. Among the characters he created are Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, The Continental Op and the comic strip character Secret Agent X-9.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rupert Hart-Davis</span> British publisher and editor (1907–1999)

Sir Rupert Charles Hart-Davis was an English publisher and editor. He founded the publishing company Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd. As a biographer, he is remembered for his Hugh Walpole (1952), as an editor, for his Collected Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962), and, as both editor and part-author, for the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cecil Day-Lewis</span> Irish-born British poet (1904–1972)

Cecil Day-Lewis, often written as C. Day-Lewis, was an Anglo-Irish poet and Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. He also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake, most of which feature the fictional detective Nigel Strangeways.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Desnos</span> French writer

Robert Desnos was a French poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement.

<i>Autobiography of a Yogi</i> Autobiography of Paramahansa Yogananda

Autobiography of a Yogi is an autobiography of Paramahansa Yogananda published in 1946.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Gill (theologian)</span> English Baptist pastor, biblical scholar and theologian (1697-1771)

John Gill was an English Baptist pastor, biblical scholar, and theologian who held to a firm Calvinistic soteriology. Born in Kettering, Northamptonshire, he attended Kettering Grammar School where he mastered the Latin classics and learned Greek by age 11. He continued self-study in everything from logic to Hebrew, his love for the latter remaining throughout his life.

<i>Krazy Kat</i> American comic strip by George Herriman which ran from 1913 to 1944

Krazy Kat is an American newspaper comic strip, created by cartoonist George Herriman, which ran from 1913 to 1944. It first appeared in the New York Evening Journal, whose owner, William Randolph Hearst, was a major booster for the strip throughout its run. The characters had been introduced previously in a side strip with Herriman's earlier creation, The Dingbat Family. The phrase "Krazy Kat" originated there, said by the mouse by way of describing the cat. Set in a dreamlike portrayal of Herriman's vacation home of Coconino County, Arizona, KrazyKat's mixture of offbeat surrealism, innocent playfulness and poetic, idiosyncratic language has made it a favorite of comics aficionados and art critics for more than 80 years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leonard Strong</span>

Leonard Alfred George Strong was a popular English novelist, critic, historian, and poet, and published under the name L. A. G. Strong. He served as a director of the publishers Methuen Ltd. from 1938 to 1958.

William Levi Crawford was an American publisher and editor.

Santa Claus: A Morality is a play written by 20th-century poet E. E. Cummings in 1946. The play is an allegorical Christmas tale consisting of one act of five scenes. In the play, Santa Claus deals with the increasing materialism and lust for knowledge around him and becomes consumed by it because of Death. However, the love Santa has for his family allows him to reject these things.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Orwell bibliography</span> Literary work of George Orwell

The bibliography of George Orwell includes journalism, essays, novels, and non-fiction books written by the British writer Eric Blair (1903–1950), either under his own name or, more usually, under his pen name George Orwell. Orwell was a prolific writer on topics related to contemporary English society and literary criticism, who has been declared "perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture." His non-fiction cultural and political criticism constitutes the majority of his work, but Orwell also wrote in several genres of fictional literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Letters of Charles Lamb</span>

The 19th-century English writer Charles Lamb's letters were addressed to, among others, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Godwin, and Thomas Hood, all of whom were close friends. They are valued for the light they throw on the English literary world in the Romantic era and on the evolution of Lamb's essays, and still more for their own "charm, wit and quality".

<i>1 × 1</i> 1944 book of poetry by E. E. Cummings

1 × 1 is a 1944 book of poetry by American poet E. E. Cummings. Cummings's biographer Richard S. Kennedy described the theme of the book, Cummings's ninth, as "oneness and the means whereby that oneness is achieved—love". The book contains 54 poems, including portraits of people important to Cummings, and antiwar poems. It received the Shelley Memorial Award in 1945, and was reissued by publisher Harcourt Brace in 1954.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Since feeling is first</span> 1926 poem by E. E. Cummings

"since feeling is first" is a poem written by E. E. Cummings. The poem was first published in 1926 in Is 5, a collection of poems published by Boni and Liveright, and, like most Cummings poems, is referred to by its first line. In the collection, the poem is labeled Four VI. The poem is written in Cummings's characteristic style, which lacks traditional orthography and punctuation.

Him is a three-act play written by poet E.E. Cummings. The play was first published in November 1927 and premiered in New York during the spring of 1928. Him is sometimes called a precursor to Theatre of the Absurd but has also been described as being surrealistic and in the German expressionist tradition. It is heavily influenced by Freudian psychology as well as popular culture of the 1920s.

References

  1. Cheever, Susan (2015). E.E. Cummings: a life. New York. p. 117. ISBN   9781101910481.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  2. Cummings, E. E. (1998) [1935]. Firmage, George (ed.). No Thanks (reprint ed.). Liveright. ISBN   978-0-87140-395-7.