E. E. Cummings, The Enormous Room

Download PDF Add to Bookshelf Report an Error
The Enormous Room

was written in the fall of 1920 and published by Boni and Liveright in New York in 1922. It is the firsthand account of Cummings’ incarceration in a French military detention centre during World War I. Loosely modelled around John Bunyan’s allegorical narrative

The Pilgrim’s Progress

, Cummings’ text presents the story of his arrest, imprisonment and release as a journey towards perception. Through a mixture of reportage, poetic prose, interjections in French and line drawings, Cummings creates a series of studies of his captors and fellow inmates, revealing his contempt for cruelty and authority, and his irrepressible delight in the variety of human nature.

When America formally entered WWI in 1917, Cummings signed up as a volunteer ambulance driver with the

2016 words

Citation: Hutchison, Hazel McNair. "The Enormous Room". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 March 2007 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=955, accessed 19 March 2024.]

955 The Enormous Room 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here

Leave Feedback

The Literary Encyclopedia is a living community of scholars. We welcome comments which will help us improve.