The son of a Harvard professor, Edward Estlin Cummings joined the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in 1917 and served in France. Antiwar sentiments in his letters home as well as unruly behavior while he was serving abroad drew the attention of French authorities, who arrested him and his friend William Slater Brown on suspicion of sedition. They were held in a military detention camp in Normandy for more than three months. This incarceration would provide the material for Cummings’s first book, The Enormous Room, a fictionalized memoir published in 1922. Hundreds of poems would follow, many of which expressed his disillusioned view of the war and the rhetoric that accompanied it.
my sweet old etcetera
aunt lucy during the recent
war could and what
is more did tell you just
what everybody was fighting
for,
my sister
isabel created hundreds
(and
hundreds)of socks not to
mention shirts fleaproof earwarmers
etcetera wristers etcetera,my
mother hoped that
i would die etcetera
bravely of course my father used
to become hoarse talking about how it was
a privilege and if only he
could meanwhile my
self etcetera lay quietly
in the deep mud et
cetera
(dreaming,
et
cetera,of
Your smile
eyes knees and of your Etcetera)
From is 5 (1926)