E. E. Cummings

E. E. CUMMINGS,the American poet and painter who holds the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Harvard for the current year, began his first talk by saying: “Let me cordially warn you, at the opening of these socalled lectures, that I haven’t the remotest intention of posing as a lecturer. Lecturing is presumably a form of teaching; and presumably a teacher is somebody who knows. I never did, and still don’t, know. What has always fascinated me is not teaching, but learning: and I assure you that if the acceptance of a Charles Eliot Norton professorship hadn’t rapidly entangled itself with the expectation of learning a very great deal, I should now be somewhere else.” Mr. Cummings’s six nonlectures are appearing in book form this autumn with the title i, under the imprint of the Harvard University Press.

E. E. CUMMINGS, the American poet and painter who holds the Charles Eliot Norton Chair at Harvard for the current year, began his first talk by saying: “Let me cordially warn you, at the opening of these socalled lectures, that I haven’t the remotest intention of posing as a lecturer. Lecturing is presumably a form of teaching; and presumably a teacher is somebody who knows. I never did, and still don’t, know. What has always fascinated me is not teaching, but learning; and I assure you that if the acceptance of a Charles Eliot Norton professorship hadn’t rapidly entangled itself with the expectation of learning a very great deal, I should now be somewhere else.”Mr. Cummings’s six nonlectures, of which the Atlantic will publish two, are appearing in book form this autumn with the title i, under the imprint of the Harvard University Press.