PATCHIN PLACE is a little street of three-story brick houses, with an iron gate at one end and a fence at the other, in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. From this street, where the tree of heaven which also grows in Brooklyn thrusts bravely upward from narrow sidewalks, a man emerges almost every day bound for Washington Square, a few blocks away. A weathered hat rides high on a head seeking to soar from squared shoulders loosely draped in an old jacket, from the left pocket of which protrudes a notebook. The face under the hat takes daylight as though it and the light and air are friends. Hazel eyes, which now seem abstracted, can, in the closer proximity of a room, . pierce disconcertingly or brim with laughter or mischief like a child's. The nose is strong, the mouth full and sensual, the chin arrogant. The ears are large and seemingly tense with listening; they belong to a man who is a born eavesdropper of human speech, machinery or a dissolving sliver of birdsong. On rainy days his slim figure strides buoyantly un der an ancient black umbrella, held aloft like a balloonman's bouquet of balloons.

His name is E. E. (for Edward Estlin) Cummings, and he is probably America's most respected lyric poet, though his ver bal and typographical high jinks have often rattled critics as well as typesetters.

Recently, new honors have come to him in a rush: the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award at the University of Chicago, the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, and the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry at Harvard, where Cummings (who graduated in 1915) will give six lectures, beginning this week.

The very things in his work that have set the conventional-minded to spluttering with outrage have made Cummings a writ ers' writer and a particular idol of the young. A few years ago, when Cummings went to Bennington College in Vermont to give a reading, the entire audience of girls rose as he mounted the platform and chanted in unison one of his poems:

Buffalo Bill's defunct who used to ride a water smooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreej our five pigeonsjustlikethat Jesus he was a handsome man and what i want to know is how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death At Bennington as in other schools, Cummings' typographical arrangements are being studied for what they are -- devices to give readers a maximum of communication and excitement.

Cummings himself wrote: "I can express it in 15 words, by quoting The Eternal Question and Immortal Answer of Burlesk, viz., 'Would you hit a woman with a child? -- No, I'd hit her with a brick.' Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement." His typog raphy is also sometimes a cover for irreverences -- and occasionally for obscenities.

In addition to his plays (Him and Santa Claus), and a ballet-scenario (Tom}, two prose works have added to his reputation.

The Enormous Room is one of the few classics in English that was inspired by World War I; it was out of Cummings' own experience in a French war prison. Eimi (Greek for I am), re cently republished, is the journal of Cummings' trip to Russia in 1931. He did not like what he saw, and when he frankly said so ("I'd just as soon be imprisoned in freedom as free in a jail"), he was labeled a Fascist by what he terms "America's would-be sovietizers." Cummings paints, too. His canvases hang in many private collections and have been exhibited in various cities. Oddly enough, they are as loosely brushed and easy to understand as his poems are precise and difficult.

In his ground-floor apartment, jammed with books, hung with of crowded with knickknacks, including herds of carved elephants trekking over shelves and mantel, Cummings entertains his friends. He sits in a straight chair tilted against the wall. Crumpled bills, spilled coins, dropped when he returned from his walk, strew the table at his side. His eyes light up -- he has decided to needle one of those present. His tongue is sharp and witty, and he talks fast, sometimes out of the side of his mouth, with a mimic's art and the insistence of a barker.

But in the midst of company he may suddenly rise, reach for one of his many close-filled notebooks, and go to his up stairs studio to work.

He has always gone his own way. His integrity is as iron-clad as that of the man in his poem: my specialty is living said a man (who could not earn his bread because he would not sell his head) An editor to whom he offered five poems sent him a check for three of them and, rejected the other two. Cummings disdainfully returned the check, and the editor capitulated and bought all five. In spite of his publishers' anxiety, Cummings insisted on publishing one book without a title and others with such bristlers as XLI Poems, CIOPW, and 1 X 1.

His credo, which appeared early -- "i would/ suggest that certain ideas gestures/ rhymes, like Gillette Razor Blades/ hav ing been used and reused/ to the mystical moment of dullness emphatically are/ Not To Be Resharpened" -- left many "tra ditional" poets blitzed and unforgiving. He is antiscientific : I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance He is the foremost celebrant of love among modern poets --"we're wonderful one times one" is a reiterated theme. "I have no sentimentality at all. If you haven't got that you're not afraid to write about love and death," he says. In a time when it is he fashionable to hate one's mother and father, he has written: if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have one . . . and in recent years, at readings he has given, he has included a long elegy on his father, the late Rev. Edward Cummings, a Unitarian minister and sometime teacher of English at Harvard.

At 58, Cummings says he is glad he is not younger; his generation had something to revolt against, the new generations have only anarchy. He spends his summers on a farm in New Hampshire, inherited from his mother. There are over 300 acres of woodland, which he has left strictly alone. On a long screened-in porch facing the mountains of the Sandwich Range, he and Mrs. Cummings take their meals. There is no electricity, and at night reading is done by kerosene lamplight. For trips to the village he drives a 1929 Ford sedan, upholstered and roomy as an old-fashioned Pullman, that rides high over the rutted dirt roads.

In overalls, doing the chores, the esthetic rebel of the '20s looks a inch the Yankee individualist he is. Once he fired a .38 over the heads of trespassers, who quickly vanished at the b (anG)!

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