When I was a sophomore at high school, I had to do a research project on a poet. After researching for the right poet, I finally found the one who is unique and extraordinary: E.E. Cummings. He was a poet who hated following traditional poetry. Cummings was part of the Modernist movement, and he believed he could write poetry that had its own unique shape, structure, and form.
Cummings was influenced by the era of Modernism. Modernism is a literary period that deals with experimentation. The purpose of Modernism was to create poems that never follow traditional poetry, it is basically free style. Cummings was keen to Modernism and tried to apply it in his writings. One of Cummings’ famous poems is “in Just-spring.” Grumman writes, “E.E. Cummings’ ‘in Just-spring,’ one of his most
…show more content…
The readers can see spring, hear spring by the noises of life, and taste spring with the nice breeze and the fresh cut grass. Cummings conveys the message of innocence in the poem by using a few words and the way the poem is structured as well as the punctuation that helps readers understand Cummings’ thinking of innocence, the beginning of life, and happiness. Cummings rewrote the poem with significant changes. Grumman says, “First he changed the entire 1916 version’s capital letters-the beginning of his practice of using capitalization for emphasis only. He also removed all commas and periods. To better ‘punctuate’ his ‘score,’ he broke his stanzas into smaller ones, some but a line in length.” For instance, Cummings uses the word “goat-footed” in one stanza. In one stanza, he writes, “in Just- / when the world is mud- / luscious the little / lame balloonman / whistles far and wee” (Cummings, in Just).Grumman knows that this experimentation with punctuation and grammar helps readers understand his poems and understand that Cummings added a twist in the poem. Cummings starts off with “in Just” and excluded the word “spring” so readers are
First of all, E.E Cummings uses two techniques one of them is visual techniques to create meaning and make poems look like drawings, for example “a leaf falls” in Document A.The poem is like if a leaf is falling down from a tree.And also in the poem the word “loneliness” is spelled for the leaf getting separated from the others.In “the grasshopper jumps” document B is it like a grasshopper leaping
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.
EE Cummings was and is still one of the most well-regarded and unique poets of all time. His poems were unusual, but his strange way of writing is what grabbed people’s attention and made him so special. Many incidents in Cummings’ life affected his poetry, his experiences and his personality, which could clearly be observed in the poems he wrote. Cummings became such a well-known poet due to the effect of his life events on his poetry, his peculiar writing style and his strong connection with the topics of love and lust. The struggles and successes of his life developed his poetry in a huge manner.
E. E. Cummings is often known as having many talents. Although he is mainly remembered as a poet, he also published many books, drawings, paintings, and plays. His individuality led him to abandon traditional forms and structures, causing him to experiment with many techniques and styles. He often disregarded punctuation in an order to allow the reader a more active role into the reading process of his work. He also played around with misspellings, suggesting the world of advertising and entertainment. Cummings chose to write mainly in
By the end of the poem there is another shift in tone. The tone takes on a more hopeful meaning. Now, Bryant uses the spring season to compare to a new age. He mentions, “The youth in life's green spring, and he who goes/ In the full strength of years, matron, and maid,/ The bow'd with age, the infant in the smiles.”(68-70) The rebirth of human life compares to nature in the sense that when nature is reborn in springtime everything turns green. The reader ends the poem with an enlightened sense of feeling instead of the dark and gloomy feeling they felt at the beginning of the poem.
The Arrival of Spring There comes a day when the wind stops blowing so fierce, the snow seems to be disappearing into the ground, and there the air becomes warmer. Then, in a week's time, the scent of living things sprouting pervades the air, and warm breezes begin blowing. Water comes down from the sky liquid instead of crystallized. In his poem [in Just-], e.e. Cummings captures the joy at the coming of spring through the perspective of a child or adolescent; he does so by using euphony, rhythm, line breaking, irregular spacing, and imagery.
I think the way Cummings placed all the words in order, he represented a good story. As a reader I was enjoying and had a feeling that I’m reading a story. This sequence of words and step by step definition made it easily for me to understand better the whole meaning behind the poem. For example at first he started by giving an idea about people’s ordinary life that no one cares for each other anymore.
The reader also obtains a visual effect when reading Cummings' "in Just-." In this poem, the main topic is springtime and the various aspects of that season. Cummings creates the words "mud-luscious" and "puddle-wonderful" to provide the reader with images of spring from a child's perspective. Adults would view mud and puddles as a negative aspect of spring, resulting from the melting of snow and the showers that usually occur at that time of the year. However, by creating these words, Cummings brings the reader back to their own childhood when mud and puddles were wonderful aspects of spring.
Edward Estlin Cummings, better known as E.E. Cummings, was a 20th century modernist poet who experimented with form punctuation, spelling and syntax. He often wrote in sonnet and fee verse about nature, death, love and human experience. In his poems “anyone lived in a pretty how town” and “old age sticks” Cummings exemplifies imagery through unusual syntax and typography to convert the themes of his poems. The poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town” is a love story about two people who were very much different from the rest of the town.
The major literary device that Cummings uses in the poem is the use of tone. Cummings chooses to use a cacophonous tone for this poem unlike the tone in which he used for the poem the sky was. The use of the cacophonous tone allows the reader to further grasp how much the process of change must hurt as it recalls memories of how the reader has undergone change in their life in addition to the harsh sound that emphasizes Cummings' theme.
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
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.
Modernist Poets E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, and T.S. Eliot Change the Face of American Poetry
E.E. Cummings is known for his unique use of diction, using nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs as nouns. What examples can you find in this poem? In the poem, “[i carry you in my heart(i carry it in]” cummings followed a nontraditional form of writing when creating his own “grammar rules” with punctuation, capitalization, spacing and pacing. I think that the main purpose of this and his reasoning behind it to diversify the meaning and generality of his poem. I think he was trying to be unique, and different while applying his own individual creativity through writing. For example, he uses a unique form of diction in stanza one when he says, “and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling.” Normally, this would not be worded the way it is, the sentence structure would be stronger and would flow better, however cummings still was able to apply meaning to that line by saying that everything he is and everything he has is because of his love. He also uses nouns in a distinctive way. For instance, he says in stanza three, “which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide.” Soul in this cause would already be considered a noun, however, he is rather using it more of a possession of his own. Cummings has a weird way of placing things within this poem. In most poems, everything is aligned to the left and follows down to the next line but in this poem the start of the second stanza, “i fear” is aligned all the way to the right. I think the purpose of this is to emphasize the fear, he is describing how strong his love is for this person but with love comes fear. By using these different forms of language and his uniqueness of grammar he was able to be different and find a new way for the reader to understand the power within his
Poetry is considered to be a representational text in which one explores ideas by using symbols. Poetry can be interpreted many different ways and is even harder to interpret when the original author has come and gone. Poetry is an incredible form of literature because the way it has the ability to use the reader as part of its own power. In other words, poetry uses the feelings and past experiences of the reader to interpret things differently from one to another, sometimes not even by choice of the author. Two famous poets come to mind to anybody who has ever been in an English class, Robert Frost and E.E. Cummings. Both of these poets have had numerous famous pieces due to the fact that they both