This Norton Critical Edition includes:

• 166 poems spanning the range of Cummings’s career, selections of his prose and dramatic writing, twelve paintings and sketches, and three facsimiles of his drafts—the first ever annotated and cross-genre collection of his work aimed at student readers.
• Annotations, headnotes and a thorough introduction by Milton A. Cohen, along with an essay by Cohen chronicling the development of Cummings’s idiosyncratic style.
• Four contemporary reviews and six critical essays—by Randall Jarrell, Edmund Wilson, Isabelle Alfandary and Michael Webster, among others—prefaced by an overview.
• Comparative studies of two poems—featuring five different responses to each—designed to promote classroom discussion.
• A chronology, a selected bibliography and an index of the poems.