The Poetry of E.E. Cummings

3454 Words7 Pages

The Poetry of E.E. Cummings

Edward Estlen Cummings engages the intuitiveness of readers of his poetry with precision. A painter as well as poet, Cummings uses words to create vivid and visceral moments of meaning that are the beating heart of Cummings’ poetry.

The form and content of E. E. Cummingspoetry is driven by and results from his own personal philosophy regarding the transcendent importance of love and individualism over reason and societal norms. The relationships between those central themes are here explored in three of his poems, published within a span of fourteen years, with the main focus being the poem, “anyone lived in a pretty how town”.

Cummings was a critical lightening rod in his day, and remains controversial even among some of today’s critics. He is, however, one of America’s most-read poets (Silea 2; Baum 104). The target of this controversy was less his subject matter than the manner in which he expressed it. To varying degrees at different stages of his life, he deconstructed the English language, breaking grammatical structures into bits and pieces, only to put them back together in new and thought-provoking ways. He did not do this in ignorance, but with keen awareness of the rules upon which he transgressed: “trying to write poetry before you’ve learned all there is to know about writing is like…trying build yourself a house from the ridgepole down;instead of laying the foundations first & then erecting a structure on them, story by story” (Letters 205).

By today’s standards, this flouting of convention may seem quite tame. This would in likelihood not be the case were it not for the ground broken, plowed and sown by Cummings.

One of Cumming’s ...

... middle of paper ...

...Poems. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1926.

Dupee, F. W., and George Stade, eds. Selected Letters of E. E. Cummings. London: Andre Deutsch Limited, 1969.

Dumas, Bethany. E. E. Cummings: A Remembrance of Miracles. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1974.

Fairley, Irene. E. E. Cummings and Ungrammar: A Study of Syntactic Deviance in his Poems. New York: Watermill Publishers, 1975.

Friedman, Norman. E. E. Cummings: The Growth of a Writer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964.

---. (Re) Valuing Cummings: further essays on the poet. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.

Marks, Barry. E. E. Cummings. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1964.

Silea, Charles V. “E. E. Cummings: The Relationship between Poetic Form and Content,” Diss. Kent State University, 1962.

Open Document