e.e. cummings’s paint box at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

No one can accuse E. E. Cummings, best known for his self-proclaimed poempictures, of dabbling in painting; more than 1,600 oils and watercolors were in the Cummings estate, and this did not include those he’d sold. One critic claimed, “Compared with his writings, Cummings’s art is as soft and wholesome as fresh butter.” Cummings responded, “Since my writing is hard, then the natural thing would be that my paintings are soft.” He also knew what his paintings were not: “painstakingly washed flat surfaces sans brushstrokes” or “fine camel’s hair delineation.” Instead, he pinpointed his style as “chunking ahead with a big brush held loosely & loaded with paint.” The condition of his paint box reflects this exuberance.

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Anne Sexton’s typewriter at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

Of those authors who did embrace the typewriter, few asked more of the machine than poet Anne Sexton, who milked her Royal Quiet De Luxe for all it was worth, employing it as both a tool and subject. In an essay about her time as a writer-in-residence in Boston, she quotes her youngest daughter as saying, “A mother is someone who types all day” and then Sexton later complains of “fingers sore from constant typing.” Her typewriter appears frequently in her poems: sometimes watchful (“the forty-eight keys of the typewriter/each an eyeball that is never shut”); sometimes as a poor substitute (“and this is the typewriter that sits before me/where yesterday only your body sat before me”); sometimes as the poet itself (“I am, each day,/typing out the God my typewriter believes in”); and sometimes as victim (“For I pray that my typewriter, ever faithful, will not break even though I threw it across the hospital room six years ago.”).

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