Renowned for his formally fractured, gleefully alive poetry, E.E. Cummings is not often thought of as a war poet. But his service in France and stint as a prisoner during World War I—the basis for his book, The Enormous Room—changed him radically. Weaving together letters, journal entries, and sketches with astute analyses of poems, J. Alison Rosenblitt surveys here Cummings's years at Cambridge and Harvard, his experimentation with various modernist movements, his lifelong friendship with John Dos Passos, and his transformative experiences as an ambulance driver and a POW.