The following is a set of guidelines for contributing to this repository and the e.e. cummings free poetry archive at cummings.ee.
This project is governed by a Code of Conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code. Please report unacceptable behavior to b@palewi.re.
This site is run by Ben Welsh. You can reach him at b@palewi.re. All of the poems here, as well as all of the code, are available for free in the public domain.
Due to the way U.S. copyright law works, each Jan. 1 another year of past literature opens up. In the last few years, Cummings' first books have clicked over. As more poems enter the public domain, they will be added here. Since the poems are free, I figure the code ought to be too.
If you see an error on the site, you can file an issue here on GitHub or send a report to b@palewi.re. All types of bug reports are welcome. If believe you have spotted a typo in how the poetry was transcribed, please be as detailed as possible about the error and provide your sourcing.
The tables of contents and texts on this site are largely drawn from first editions published in the 1920's. The order of poems and their groupings attempt to be faithful to those texts.
Small exceptions are made when spellings and spacings in the first editions vary from Liveright’s “Complete Poems,” which Cummings scholars regard as the most authoritative source.
The standard approach for transcribing poems thus far has been to use the first edition as the initial guide. Then, when the poem is proofed prior to being republished, the transcription is compared against the Liveright edition. In the rare case of an inconsistency, the copy found in the Liveright version is substituted.
A scanned first edition of the “Tulips and Chimneys” can be found in this repository. A scanned first edition of “XLI Poems” has been posted online by Hathi Trust. A scanned first edition of "is 5" has been uploaded to archive.org.
Gaps in the archive can be filled by adding new files to the _data/poems directory. Poems should be in YAML format and stored in a folder slugged to match the book where it was published. Poem file names should be slugged to match the poem's name.
For instance, the poem "Chansons Innocentes I" appears in the book "Tulips and Chimneys." So, following standard slugging conventions, the file is stored at _data/poems/tulips-and-chimneys/chansons-innocentes-i.yaml. The slugs should match what is found in the book's table of contents file.
The poem file should have at least three keys: title for the name of the poem; first_line for the opening line; and text for the full contents of the poem. The convention here is to store the text as a multi-line string with one space of indentation. Here, as an example, is "Chansons Innoncentes I":
title: Chansons Innocentes I
first_line: in Just-
text: |-1
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it’s
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
weeIn cases where the poem's layout would be ruined by the text wrapping common on small devices, such as mobile phones, a nowrap attribute in the YAML file should be set to true. This will overflow the text on all devices and maintain the integrity of the author's linebreaks in all cases.
Most of Cummings’s poems don't have a title or headline. When they do, the titled attribute should be set to true.
White space: When entering poems into the YAML file, you should endeavor to include white spaces that, as best as possible, line up with the indentations seen on the page. Use spaces rather than tabs. Due to the variable letter spacing of fonts, there is no way to perfectly recreate the original document. The stylesheets used to format the archive's website allow for the letter spacing of fonts to be adjusted on a line by line basis, which is where fine tuning can be applied.
Quotation marks: Curly quotes should be used unless it's clear the author intended otherwise.
Ellipses: Consecutive periods should be used, not any special character marks. Look carefully and count how many the author included. If there are no white spaces between the periods and the surrounding words, do not insert any.