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Comment by themarkn | Hacker News Reader

I like the poem. I also like this take on what we should do about capitalizing his name, it feels like it's as close as we can get to a rule: http://eecpoem.pbworks.com/w/page/9068325/Decapitalization ... Where he changed it, keep it changed, everywhere else, use standard capitalization.

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I don’t know about that. Should we also do such things w.r.t. gender pronouns? Current etiquette suggest that no, we should follow the preferences of the person on this. Why not then do the same about the spelling of their name?

I agree we should follow the preference. That's what I'm saying to do. My understanding from the link I posted is that EE Cummings did not want to always have his name lowercased: he chose to do it in certain contexts for specific artistic reasons. When we lowercase the name as though he intended to communicate something by having his name always be lowercase, we're creating an artistic statement for him that he never intended to make in the first place.

> EE Cummings did not want to always have his name lowercased: he chose to do it in certain contexts for specific artistic reasons

On careful reading of the link, I can not find any support for the claim that he sometimes used a capitalized version of his name. If he did normally capitalize, and only used the lowercased version in artistic contexts, that would certainly give credence to your idea. But the link does not give any support for this.

Here is some support for the claim that he sometimes used a capitalized version of his name.

Quoting from http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/cummings/caps2.html :

> As we may have mentioned, due to the kindness of D. Jon Grossman's son, Jerome, we have the complete file of Jon's correspondence with Cummings. On making a preliminary tour through these letters, we found Jon preparing a French edition of his translations of Cummings' poetry, and on 27 February 1951 he wrote to the poet: "are you E.E.Cummings, ee cummings, or what?(so far as the title page is concerned)wd u like title page all in lowercase?"

> The poet replied on 1 March 1951: "E.E.Cummings, unless your printer prefers E. E. Cummings/ titlepage up to you;but may it not be tricksy svp[.]"

> That seems definitive to us: may it not be tricksy!

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