Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0871405288, Hardcover)

ViVa is the third book of Cummings's poetry to be reissued in editions newly offset from the authoritative Complete Poems 1904-1962, edited by George James Firmage. E. E. Cummings, along with Pound, Eliot, and Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. He is recognized as the author of some of the most beautiful lyric poems written in the English language and also as one of the most inventive American poets of his time. Fresh and candid, by turns earthy, tender, defiant, and romantic, Cummings's poems celebrate the uniqueness of each individual, the need to protest the dehumanizing force of organizations, and the exuberant power of love. The poems in the Complete Poems 1904-1962, and in the individual poetry volumes that are part of it, are the most complete and textually accurate editions of Cummings's work ever issued. The editor has gone back to the poet's original manuscripts to ensure the absolute accuracy of the transcriptions, including the spatial arrangement of the typography, which now conforms as precisely as possible to Cummings's very specific intentions.