Essay On Ee Cummings The Rebel Writer

E. E. Cummings – The Rebel Writer
E. E. Cummings was one of the best writers in his time. With no limits in his writing, he was allowed to go anywhere in the world of literature. He played with punctuation and imagery in almost every poem he wrote. He was very rebellious when it came to writing and wanted to go outside of the comfort zone of English literature. Over his life span, he wrote many extraordinary and fantastic works that were inspired by many different personal experiences, from his mother being supportive to being held in prison. This is just the story of an incredible writer and where his ideas may have stemmed from.
Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 14, 1894 (Dendinger). He was the first-born of the family and had only one other sibling (Dendinger). His father, Edward Cummings, was a Harvard graduate, an ordained Unitarian minister, and pastor of the South Congregational Church (Dendinger). Rebecca Haswell Clarke spent her time as a stay at home mother encouraging Cummings to be the poet he was (Goldfarb).
Earlier on in his life, he played with mainly children from other Harvard graduates, causing him to grow up in the environment (Goldfarb). Some believe this is one of the reasons he became a writer but others believe it is because of how supportive his mother was during his youngest years. Rebecca Clarke encouraged her son to start a dairy at the age of six and continued doing so until he was thirteen (Goldfarb). He started publishing his works in high school whenever he began writing for the paper (Goldfarb). Cummings continued to write throughout college as well whenever he published articles in Harvard’s two literary periodicals (Goldfarb).
Cummings rebelled in his college ...

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...s, the mood changes abruptly and surprises the audience because none of them believe the main hero can die (Rollyson). It creates the feeling of falseness in the audience. Cummings also makes it known that while Buffalo Bill was stunning and attractive, his looks did nothing in helping him stay alive, breaking all the rules in a traditional heroism story (Rollyson).
The most known literary device Cummings used however was his use of strange and unordinary punctuation. In his critical review, Carl Rollyson said, “Cummings is known as a poet who attacks conventional uses of grammar, and he turns capitalization, hyphens, apostrophes, and spaces between words to new uses” (Rollyson). He separates sentences in odd ways and where other authors would put punctuation, Cummings puts nothing (Rollyson). His use of pushing outside the boundaries is very prominent in his poems.