Edward Estlin Cummings: Poem Analysis

In the 1920’s and 1930’s, Edward Estlin Cummings came up with an innovated and unique way of creating poetry. Although, many poets had created their own rules, Cummings broke all those classic rules and did what no one else had done before. He was a painter as well as poet and used both of his talents to create new poetry. The way Cummings exposes his poems help the reader to distinguish his attitude and go deeper into what he’s trying to say. Cummings can be most likely known for his unusual way to use punctuations. He uses white spaces on his poems as much as he uses periods, commas, and colons to make the reader think about his poems. As a reader, it is really hard sometimes to read or understand most of his poems, however it gives a creative

What Cummings is trying to do in this poem is to emphasize what is important to him. So, “in” is not important, it’s a part to complete what he is going to say. However, “Just-” being capitalized gets the reader attention. The next line starts with “spring” if we put this in a whole sentence it would say “in Just- spring” and it can be referred as it only happens in this season, spring. This poem not only gives an example of capitalized letters, but also uses compound words and blank spaces. For example, “whistles far and wee/ and eddieandbill come/ running from marbles and piracies and it’s/ spring” (953). The words whistles and far have a big white space between them and also, he leaves blank spaces in each line of his stanzas. He uses this tool to cause emotions in the reader. When you read an article or any other type of poem, you stop when you see a comma, period or colons. However, Cummings poems makes the reader create their own pauses and wonder why those blank places are

When you first read this poem is hard to understand the reason of this type of writing. Cummings did not use any periods, commas, or colons to create pauses. However, the use of some words and the way they are place in each line makes a clear understanding of what his poem is referring to. For example, he opens his poem with quotations marks, the reader can get confused at first, but at the end of the poem we realized that is a speech. Cummings did not punctuate his poems to emphasize the tone of the speaker. The speaker is opposing patriotism and is trying to convince others to see America the way is: people killing each other for liberty. Cummings also adds the compound word “deafanddumb” this can help the reader know that it’s only one word to say “everyone”, but using that makes the poem more interesting. By the end of this poem, Cummings closes with the line “He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water” Can you see how he uses the white space again? This help the reader pause and think about what he just read and relate it to the speech being told. The last part of this line tells the reader that the speaker used most of his voice and probably was yelling because of the need of