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Saturday, April 16, 2005

cummings plagiarism claims coming


“The typographical freedom is the only freedom; the rest of the poem follows a hackneyed route of sentiment and cliché,” a writer in The Telegraph notes of a poem by e e cummings. UD would note this of cummingzez entire output, with a couple of exceptions. (Here’s a bunch of his poems, if you must.)

Anyway, the most recent biographer of e e cummings (who by all accounts was a real shit) is about to be accused of plagiarism in an article in the next Harper‘s magazine. A New York Times article tells us that the Harper’s writer will claim the book “contains numerous passages that echo or directly copy parts of a well-regarded 25-year-old biography of Cummings.” Wyatt Mason will conclude that the just-released biography "is jammed with instances of wholesale borrowing - not only of research but of storytelling and language."

The biography’s author acknowledges a small amount of “not conscious” lack of attribution -- an understandable “oversight” in a very long book.