Ee Cummings Visual Techniques

It was in 1894 in Cambridge Massachusetts when notable poet Edward Estlin Cummings was born. Edward Estlin Cummings (or E.E. Cummings) is most known for his creative and unique poems and recognizable style. Starting at a very young age, E. E. Cummings wrote his own poems and eventually attended Harvard University and graduated in 1917. His works make people use their sense of sight & hearing to understand the poems because “... language is meant to be spoken as well as written, heard as well as seen”. Edward Cummings uses sight and sound to create meaning by adding visual and auditory techniques into his poems.
First and foremost, what are visual and auditory techniques and examples of it? Visual techniques help to “create visual imagery, or the sense of how something looks.” (entertainment. howstuffworks.com). For example, adding descriptive language can give the reader a mental picture that’s about the poem and concrete poetry is “where the words or lines of the poem actually make a picture or visually reflect what the poem is about”(entertainment.howstuffworks. com). In addition, “ sound techniques like onomatopoeia to create auditory imagery, they can also enlist visual techniques”(entertainment.howstuffworks.com). When E.E. Cummings uses these techniques, they deepen the meaning of his poems and make his poems

For example, in his poem “l(a leaf falls)oneliness”, the poem is written in a downwards manner, mimicking a leaf falling, thus making it lonely since it’s all by itself and perhaps falling off of a tree. In addition, in his other poem “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”, the words are all spaced out and separate to obtain the shape of a grasshopper which is what the poem is relating to. Both of these poems contain concrete (or shape) poetry: “the words or lines of the poem actually make a picture or visually reflect what the poem is about”