Enjoy fast, FREE delivery, exclusive deals and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Instant streaming of thousands of movies and TV episodes with Prime Video
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Buy new:
$12.19$12.19
FREE delivery: Friday, May 26 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon.
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
Buy used: $7.79
Other Sellers on Amazon
& FREE Shipping
85% positive over last 12 months
FREE Shipping
43% positive over last 12 months
FREE Shipping
87% positive over last 12 months
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
100 Selected Poems Paperback – January 10, 1994
| Price | New from | Used from |
- Kindle
$9.99 Read with Our Free App - Paperback
$12.19114 Used from $1.34 30 New from $7.98 1 Collectible from $30.00
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length121 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherGrove Press
- Publication dateJanuary 10, 1994
- Reading age16 years and up
- Dimensions5.25 x 0.25 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-109780802130723
- ISBN-13978-0802130723
- Lexile measureNP
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now
Frequently bought together

What do customers buy after viewing this item?
- Most purchased | Highest ratedin this set of products
Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary OliverPaperback
Editorial Reviews
Review
To my way of thinking Cummings is, within his field of personal emotion, the lyrical field, one of the inventors of our time. He puts his inventions down with an unexpected refurbishing of phrase and a filigree delicacy of hairbreadth exact statement that is a continual challenge.”John Dos Passos
No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive both to the general and the special reader; since the early twenties, Cummings has been more widely imitated and easily appreciated than any other modernist poet.”Randall Jarrell
He has more control over language than any poet since Joyce. . . . Everybody delights in reading him.”Karl Shapiro
E.E. Cummings is a concentrate of titanic significance, a positive character’; and only ingenuousness could attempt to suggest in a word the heroic’ aspect of his painting, his poems, and his resistances. He does not make aesthetic mistakes.”Marianne Moore
Product details
- ASIN : 0802130720
- Publisher : Grove Press (January 10, 1994)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 121 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780802130723
- ISBN-13 : 978-0802130723
- Reading age : 16 years and up
- Lexile measure : NP
- Item Weight : 4.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.25 x 0.25 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #246,463 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #146 in Poetry Literary Criticism (Books)
- #212 in Poetry Anthologies (Books)
- #703 in Literary Criticism & Theory
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) was among the most influential, widely read, and revered modernist poets. His many awards included an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Bollingen Prize. Among his many volumes are The Enormous Room and Tulips & Chimneys.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
As an end note, the layout of the book does the content no favors. The type is quite small [9 or 10 point] and the inter-lineal spacing is tight. Because of the title, "100 Selected Poems," each poem is given a huge number that hovers above the text but not balanced on the page spread. None of this affects the contents, but it makes ease of reading a hit-and-run victim.
But he RARELY becomes more coherent for more than a stanza. Here's one I think is good:
pleasure and pain are merely surfaces
(one itself showing, itself hiding one)
life's only and true value neither is
love makes the little thickness of the coin
And here's one that ain't quite up to it:
nothing may, quite
your my (my your
and) self without,
completely dare
be beautiful
Anyhow, in addition to a large mess, there are many good metaphors in his poems - comparing the sun to a worker striking for a living wage, and death putting on a universe (like a garment I imagine), but his primary trait that sets him apart from other poets seems to be his constant personification of words like when, where, until, most, etc. The punctuation really isn't very noticable.
I like the imagination of Cummings, but sometimes he's just too incoherent for my taste. Although he did say a few things I'd like to keep in mind:
"Deeds cannot dream what dreams can do"
"How should contented fools of fact envision the mystery of freedom?"
These kind of remind me of the Road Song of the Bandar Log from the Jungle Book.
At the same time, unfortunately, this collection provides numerous examples of cummings' more irritating work. Virtually all of the best poems are in the first half of this chronological volume; after that, cummings devolves into increasingly tiresome verbal gimmicks. The actual content in these later poems is slight, and the self-congratulatory tone becomes grating. Nonetheless, given the high quality of the early poetry, this book remains a firm recommendation.
Although he is a great poet, and certainly unique, even his small poems need a great deal of time to process. So despite this book only being slightly over 100 pages long, expect to spend some time with it.
For those who read poetry, enjoy poetry, and prefer poetry, I am sure you will find something intriguing and awesome inside of these pages, and for that reason I think it still has merit. Unfortunately, I'm not much of a poetry-reader myself and so it was a bit of a struggle. Still, his poignant language and cunning word choice kept me intrigued, so there's that.
These poems are his less language experiments and more poetry. the book includes Poems such as He said she said and Some where I have traveled boyond any experience.
The poems are so well crafted and precise yet emotional. The rythum of these poems is also captivating. Cummings is an artist of words who with 50 word may be able to beat any picture.














