By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘In Spite of Everything’ (or, as the poet himself has it, without capitals, ‘in spite of everything’) is a short lyric poem by the American modernist poet E. E. Cummings (or, as he would himself have it, e. e. cummings). Cummings (1894-1962) was an innovative and distinctive poet famed for his lack of capital letters in his poetry and his idiosyncratic approach to punctuation.