During the last years of his life E. E. Cummings made a modest living on the high-school lecture circuit. In the spring of 1958 his schedule took him to read his adventurous poems at the uptight girls’ school in Westchester where I was a miserable 15-year-old sophomore with failing grades.

I vaguely knew that Cummings had been a friend of my father (the novelist John Cheever), who loved to tell stories about Cummings’s gallantry and his ability to live elegantly on almost no money—an ability my father himself struggled to cultivate. When my father was a young writer in New York City, in the golden days before marriage and children pressured him to move to the suburbs, the older Cummings had been his beloved friend and adviser.

On that cold night in 1958, Cummings was near the end of his celebrated and controversial 40-year career as this country’s first popular modernist poet. Primarily remembered these days for its funky punctuation, his work was in fact a wildly ambitious attempt at creating a new way of seeing the world through language—and this even applied to his signature. The progression from Cummings’s official name (Edward Estlin Cummings) to his signature as a Harvard undergrad (E. Estlin Cummings) to the emblem for which he became famous (e. e. cummings) began with his use of a lowercase i in his poems in the 1920s, though he wouldn’t adopt the style officially until the late 50s.

Cummings was part of a powerful group of writers and artists, which included James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse—some of whom were his friends—and he strained to reshape the triangle between the reader, the writer, and the subject of the poem, novel, or painting. As early as his 1915 Harvard College graduation speech, Cummings told his audience that “the New Art, maligned though it may be by fakirs and fanatics, will appear in its essential spirit … as a courageous and genuine exploration of untrodden ways.”

Modernism as Cummings and his mid-20th-century colleagues embraced it had three parts. The first was the method of using sounds instead of meanings to connect words to the reader’s feelings. The second was the idea of stripping away all unnecessary things to bring attention to form and structure: the formerly hidden skeleton of a work would now be exuberantly visible. The third facet of modernism was an embrace of adversity. In a world seduced by easy understanding, the modernists believed that difficulty enhanced the pleasures of reading. In a Cummings poem the reader must often pick his way toward comprehension, which comes, when it does, in a burst of delight and recognition. Like many of his fellow modernists—there were those who walked out of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913, and that same year viewers at New York’s Armory Show were scandalized by Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)—Cummings was sometimes reviled by those he saw as the fakirs and fanatics of the critical establishment. Poetry arbiter Helen Vendler suggested that his poems were repellent and foolish: “What is wrong with a man who writes this?” she asked.