E.E. Cummings and his Life as a Poet

1981 Words4 Pages

This research paper is going to be about E.E. Cummings his life as a poet. How he wrote his poems the grammar he used in his poems. The rewards that E.E. Cummings got before his death. There is going to be three poems that are going to be a critical analyzed for the literary devices used and the type of poem in the three poems.

Biography

His early experiments in poetry whilst still a child were encouraged by liberal parents to whom Cummings remained close (“E.E. Cummings”). After an unsuccessful stint in private school, Cummings father switched him to the Agassiz school, of which Maria Baldwin was the head. Here he displayed a talent for memorizing the poems of Longfellow and Emerson and, before his teens, wrote some simple, two-or-four-line poems (Frazee, “E.E. Cummings”). His poetry covered many subjects, but he was particularly taken with physical love and the miracle of life. He wrote several poems praising God for the rivers, trees, and animals: lions and tigers and especially the elephants (Frazee, “E.E. Cummings). His own experience as a painter, as well as a writer, meant that for Cummings the appearance of the poem on the page contributes significantly to its mood and meaning (“E.E. Cummings”). His first published poems appeared in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets in 1917. These eight pieces feature the experimental verse forms and the lowercase personal pronoun “I” that were to become his trademark. The copyeditor of the book, however, mistook Cumming’s intentions as typographical errors and made “corrections” (vol12: Pg.149). Cummings recorded the experience in The Enormous Room (1922), an experimental prose work that remains one of the best of war literature ever written by an American (“E.E. Cummings” pg.13). He...

... middle of paper ...

...narrator being walled off from the rest of world (“E.E. Cummings pg.60). Cummings again uses synaesthesia in the last two lines of the fourth stanza, together with a whole bevy of transcendental metaphors that add infinite complexity to what is being described. By working through the metaphors and attempting to imagine for himself what love is and what it means, by accepting that love is a never-ending process of “opening” and “closing”, he has achieved a transcendental understanding, reflected in the perfect rhyme of the last four lines (“E.E. Cummings pg.61).

The poems were critically analyzed and talked about what type of poems the three are about. How E.E. Cummings wrote his poems the grammar he used to write the poems. E.E. Cummings uses lowercase letters when you need uppercase letters. E.E. Cummings was the one who expanded the boundaries in typographic.

Open Document