None of these discoveries would have been possible were it not for Harvard’s Houghton Library, which made Cummings’ personal papers available to Sawyer-Lauçanno, including suicide notes and reflections on consultations with his psychiatrists. “Nearly every scrap of paper he had written was saved,” he said. They added up to hundreds of boxes of diaries, correspondence, and drafts of poetry.

The sheer bulk of this collection made research a grueling task; Sawyer-Lauçanno spent a full year simply reading through all the documents. He confesses that so overwhelming was the abundance of information, “there were times when I didn’t want to find anything else out.”

The year of research was followed by three years of intense writing, during which Sawyer-Lauçanno said he “was more attuned to the world of 1924 than 2004.” Yet for a work of this 600 page volume’s scope, he considers four years a short duration.

The archival method Sawyer-Lauçanno employed was necessary due to the time elapsed since the subject’s life. The book “was very different from [his previous biographies] in that there were few people alive that knew him during his early and even middle years to interview. In a sense I wrote it five or ten years too late.”

Though surely more difficult, Sawyer-Lauçanno said his reliance on Cummings’ own writings rather than the accounts of friends and family resulted in the truest and most comprehensive extant portrait of the poet.

One of the charges commonly levied against Cummings was that he did not develop as a poet. According to Sawyer-Lauçanno, this accusation springs from that fact that Cummings was “so good so early. For the rest of his life he continually refined early experiments.” Continuity is not a sign of weakness here, but of maturity.

Studying Cummings’ “more difficult poems that function at the syllabic or even phonemic level” along with the huge number of drafts that “vary only by one word, or the spacing of words, or in the margins” gave Sawyer-Lauçanno a reverence for Cummings’ skill. “[His poems] seem so spontaneous, so lively and so free yet they represent such craftsmanship. He appeals to the ear and to the eye,” he said.

At the book’s beginning there is a note on Cummings’ peculiar capitalization practices, explaining that as “a small eye poet” he objected to his name and the pronoun “I” being capitalized in poetry, but not in personal correspondence.

This tension between outward presentation and inner message will keep Cummings’ poetry, as well as his biography, relevant far into the future.