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.
