EIMI

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EIMI is a 1933 travelogue by American poet E. E. Cummings about his 1931 trip to the Soviet Union. The 432-page book covers his May 14 to June 14 travels in Moscow, Kyiv, and Odesa. Cummings carried a portable typewriter, kept detailed notes, and wrote the book after returning to the United States. Although it reads like non-fiction, it was first marketed as a novel by Covici-Friede, a New York publisher. The writing uses abstract prose verse, with unusual punctuation, spacing, and line breaks to echo the confusion a non-Russian speaker feels in a big Soviet city, in a style similar to James Joyce’s Ulysses.

In Moscow, Cummings reconnected with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, an old Harvard acquaintance who had become a committed Communist and who tried—unsuccessfully—to win Cummings to the Soviet cause. He also met Joan London, daughter of Jack London, and her husband, reporter Charles Malamuth. The book’s themes include Cummings’s growing disappointment with what he saw as squalor and inefficiency, and the limits on intellectual and artistic freedom. He even calls the Soviet Union an “uncircus of noncreatures.” Lenin’s tomb and its preserved body provoked a strong reaction and inspired some of the book’s most dynamic writing, which he characterizes as a descent similar to Dante’s Inferno.

Publishing the work was difficult: many left-leaning publishers would not publish his poetry, so Cummings self-published several volumes in the late 1930s. Marianne Moore described EIMI in Poetry (1933) as a “large poem” and an “enormous dream” about the proletarian fable, noting Cummings’s shifting grammar and lyric style. EIMI went out of print for nearly fifty years and was reissued in 2007 by Liveright, bringing renewed attention. Critics like Frank Bures called it a very political travelogue that links the places he visited to bigger questions about the worlds we create and inhabit.