E. E. Cummings 's experimentation with form and language places him among the most innovative of twentieth-century poets. He developed a style so unique that his poetry was not fully appreciated until after his death. Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new and unique style of poetic expression. Like Charles Williams and many other poets of his time, Cummings expresses in his poetry his philosophical views of individualism and transcendentalism, and his criticism towards society 's intolerance of nonconformists. He particularly conveys his philosophy of individualism and view of how we are all forced to conform in his poem’s ‘anyone lived …show more content…
The form of the poem reflects the spontaneity that an individual can have within the restricted views of mainstream society. The ungrammatical structure of the poem endorses Cummings views of being a nonconformist, as he promotes that he does not need to abide by society’s restrictions on language and grammar in order to portray and write a story. Through his experimentation with poetic form and language, Cummings is able to promote his philosophy on individualism in ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’.
In ‘maggie and milly and molly and may’, Cummings expresses and promotes his transcendentalist philosophical views through the use of personification. In the second couplet of the poem, Cummings introduces maggie, and she symbolizes the ‘sweetly’ troubled one. When Maggie was in a time of trouble, she turned to nature (the shell), as transcendentalists do, to find comfort. Maggie not only finds nature, she also finds art in the form of music. The shell ‘sings’ to her, personifying the shell as a person who can sing. It is through the shell and its ‘song’ that maggie loses her woes and finds her inner self, hence conveying transcendentalism and individualism. Cummings used personification in ‘maggie and milly and molly and may’ to help promote his philosophical views of transcendentalism and individualism.
A homophone was used in the end rhyme of ‘maggie and milly and
You would not ever think of using your two main senses such as sight and sound in writing, correct? Well E.E Cummings has defied the odds of basic and traditional poetry. E.E Cummings takes advantage of these various techniques to create a completely new meaning to poetry - but how does he do this? For example, when I read one of his poems for the first time, I perceived it as different and peculiar, but as I began to look more into his poetry, it displayed his techniques to construct a unique and expressive writing style.
“Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.” E. E. Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1860. He had trouble publishing some of his early books so he had to pay to print them himself. He became one of America's best poets. How did E. E. Cummings visual and auditory techniques? To begin with visual means sight and auditory means sound. E.E. Cumming creates meaning in his poetry by using visual and auditory techniques.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, writer of the novel The Great Gatsby, and E.E. Cummings, writer of the poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town”, convey a similar theme in their works through the use of tone, imagery, and symbolism. Both selections are about love and reveal that death is real.
e. e. cummings' poem, "next to of course god america i," is a wonderful example of stylistic variation in a text. Once again, we see his skill and mastery at manipulating the English language in order to foreground a thought and turn it into a commentary on society. As with all of cummings works, there is evidence of a multitude of variances and deviances at work, however, I shall concentrate on the area of language variance, more specifically, domain.
E. E. Cummings was a poet, but he broke all the rules of poetry. Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1984. He also attended Harvard University. E. E. Cummings had no choice but to print and pay for his own poetry being nobody would publish them for him. How does E. E Cummings use sight and sound to create meaning? E. E. Cummings creates meaning in his poetry by using visual techniques and auditory techniques.
“Anyone lived in a pretty how town” of E. E. Cummings is about an infamous man in a particular town. Writing the poem, Cummings’ purpose is to convey to the public a cruel fact, that people become less aware of each other in this society.
Cummings showed carelessness through tone. The Tone in this poem is selfish but the poem still showed carelessness. The first piece of text evidence said in the poem to show selfish and carelessness is “One day anyone died i guess.” “””( and noone stooped to kiss his face)””” (Cummings 25-26). This showed carelessness because on the literal meaning of the poem when anyone dies no one comes and visit them or tell them goodbye but on the love story of the poem when anyone died no one came to kissed him and tell him bye.
Life in society becomes quite busy as individuals age. From rushing to work or school, there is rarely time for anything else. Therefore, because of the busy lives individuals have, it causes them to be incapable of focussing on the little things in life. E.E. Cummings, reveals this as the cycle of life in “anyone lived in a pretty how town”. Cummings use of dictation creates an abnormal setting of life, which reflects reality. Not only, does Cummings create such a setting but also uses pronouns, as a dual meaning, to suggest people whose names were unknown. In the poem, no one is a man and anyone is a woman. These pronouns represent these two individuals because it exhibits that no one actually knows them because they are too busy with their
E. E. Cummings, an author known for his various poems and other forms of artwork, wrote numerous works of poetry over a vast amount of subjects. While the subject matter of the poems differ, a few elements of Cummings' style stays the same in virtually all his poems, some of which is important and some of which is not. The fact that Cummings uses enjambment in his poetry is a stylistic trademark that however annoying its use may be is consistent. Other stylistic trademarks of Cummings' poetry are that Cummings has a control over the tone of each of his poems and that each of his poems has its theme located near the end of the poem. While these traits that may not be highlighted in most of the analysis of his poems, each does occur quite
Cummings” pg.13). Cummings continued to publish volumes of poetry at a rate of approximately one every four or five years (“E.E. Cummings pg.14). The last honor involved giving a series of public talks; published as i: six Nonlecture (1953), they provide a succinct and charming summation of his life and personal philosophy. Two years later he received a National Book Award citation for poems 1923-1954, and two years after that he won the prestigious bollingen prize in poetry from Yale University (“E.E. Cummings” pg.15). (In his poetry he often ignored the rules of capitalization and has sometimes been referred to as e.e. Cummings) expanded the boundaries of poetry through typographic and linguistic experimentation (Frazee, “E.E. Cummings). An avoidance of capital letters and creative placement of punctuation soon became his trademarks. His experimental poetry took many forms, some amusing, some satirical, some beautiful, some profound, and some which did not make much sense (Frazee “E.E. Cummings”). Typical stylistic devices in his work include: running words together; scattering punctuation symbols cross the page; subverting the conventions of the English sentence; intentional misspellings and phonetic spellings and the invention of compound words such as “puddle-wonderful” (“E.E. Cummings”). However, this obvious experimentation is often combined with strict formal structures and traditional
The poem suddenly becomes much darker in the last stanza and a Billy Collins explains how teachers, students or general readers of poetry ‘torture’ a poem by being what he believes is cruelly analytical. He says, “all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it”. Here, the poem is being personified yet again and this brings about an almost human connection between the reader and the poem. This use of personification is effective as it makes the
The speaker in E.E. Cummings’ poem, “When Serpents Bargain for the Right to Squirm,” shares with the reader their observations and opinions of both nature and mankind. In an ironic tone, qualities of mankind are applied to nature throughout the poem. Seemingly mocking the characteristics of man when compared to nature. Through his use of comparable personification, ironic diction, and definitive syntax, Cummings acknowledges mankind's distorted view of itself as well as the distinct differences that exist between mankind and nature.
Cummings’ impressive education consists of a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from Harvard, in which he graduated near the top of his class. He submitted many of his poems to the newspaper at Harvard, which sparked his interest towards a career as a poet. When his first poem was published, the publisher left all the letters of E.E. Cummings’ name lowercase. Cummings soon adopted this as his own personal trademark. The style of Cummings’ writing was what made his poems so distinctive. No matter what the topic, he always incorporated a lyrical flow to the poem. Cummings “experimented with typography, slang, dialect, jazz rhymes, and jagged lines” (Anderson et al). By exploring the possibilities of poetry, Cummings was able to create poems that have a beat that corresponds with the tone, mood, and theme of the poem.
“The relationship between the energies of the inquiring mind that an intelligent reader brings to the poem and the poem’s refusal to yield a single comprehensive interpretation enacts vividly the everlasting intercourse between the human mind, with its instinct to organise and harmonise, and the baffling powers of the universe about it.”
In his poem “Acquainted with the Night,” Robert Frost describes a character who spends his nights wandering the city streets. The reader can infer from both Frost’s tone, and the time of day in which the speaker chooses to walk, that the character is in a world of isolation. This is especially evident in the lines, “When far away an interrupted cry/ Came over houses from another street,/ But not to call me back or say good-by” (Frost 898). From this line, the reader understands that the poem’s speaker feels as if he is completely isolated in the world. In a similar way, E. E. Cummings poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town” expresses the loneliness felt by people of this era. Cummings creative use of pronouns gives the poem a double entendre. The characters, anyone and noone, can represent their literal meanings, or a single man and woman. Therefore, when Cummings writes that “noone loves him more by more,” he could mean that anyone is being loved greatly, or not at all. This loneliness is expressed yet again when Cummings informs the reader, “Women and men (both little and small)/ cared for anyone not at all” (Cummings 922). The works of both Frost and Cummings both portray the hardship that accompanied the feeling of loneliness during the modern