Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 14, 1894. He earned a BA from Harvard and volunteered to go to France during World War I with the Ambulance Corps. After the war, he stayed in Paris, writing and painting, and later returned to the US. He died in Conway, New Hampshire, in 1962. Cummings is one of the most innovative contemporary poets, though in some ways is oddly traditional. He drops or distorts punctuation and syntax, but at the same time uses rhymes and off-rhymes more characteristic of earlier styles. Cummings published more than nine hundred poems and other works.