E. E. Cummings's Poetry
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Edward Estlin Cummings is an outstanding and unusual American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. His name would also often be written in the lowercase register like “e e cummings” in the style of some of his poems. The literary legacy of this extraordinary author contains approximately 3000 poetic works. From the first view on his work one might be strongly astonished. Edward Cummings managed to combine in his works the modernist ideas of new age reflected in avant-garde tendencies and the traditional approach to poetry creation. Despite such large differences in the style of writing, his poems often concern the topics of love and nature, besides showing the theme
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However, perhaps the most important pattern used in this poetry is the change of seasons. The author uses the rotating of them several times throughout the poem. However, not only the seasons are connected in the poetry with natural phenomena. To make even larger emphasis on the reader, poet uses the visualization of the seasons and even makes them more sensual by replacing the seasons with so called emphatic images “stars rain sun moon”. This idea was developed by Theo Steinmann in his "Semantic Rhythm in 'Anyone Lived In A Pretty How Town" when he said, “With each of the abstract terms the poet associates a natural phenomenon characterizing the particular season on the sensuous level of human experience so that one may stand emblematically for the other: sun -summer; moon -autumn; stars - winter; rain – spring” (Steinmann, 71-73). This regularity of natural seasons is distorted by the reactions of human to these changes and to the seasons themselves. For example, winter is associated by many people with death or with something unpleasant. That is how the author creates the mood of his poem. The readers subconsciously receive those signals which cause them feel the one or the other thing. In addition to that, the natural change of seasons plays an important role since it reveals one of the main ideas of the universe: life goes in cycles and the end is also always the beginning, so that nature is
Throughout history there have been many poets and some have succeeded while other didn’t have the same luck. But in history e.e. Cummings has stunned people with his creativity and exposure to the real world and not living in the fantasy people imagine they live in. Cummings was a great poet, and was able to make his own way of writing while he was also involved greatly in the modernist movement. But he demonstrates all his uniqueness in all and every poem, delivering people with knowledge and making them see the world with different eyes as in the poem “Since feeling is first”.
In “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why?” Edna St. Vincent Millay says that “the summer sang in me” meaning that she was once as bright and lively as the warm summer months. In the winter everyone wants to bundle up and be lazy, but when summer comes along the sunshine tends to take away the limits that the cold once had on us. She uses the metaphor of summer to express the freedom she once felt in her youth, and the winter in contrast to the dull meaningless life she has now. There are many poets that feel a connection with the changing of seasons. In “Odes to the West Wind” Percy Bysshe Shelley describes his hopes and his expectations for the seasons to inspire the world.
The poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town” by E.E. Cummings talks about the cycle of life and the importance of structure, symbolism, and language of the poem. For instance, the poem has nine stanzas, which has a rhyming pattern of AABC. The rhythm of the poem is significant for it supports one of themes, the cycle of life. Cumming uses season to explain the poem's progress. “spring summer autumn winter” (3) and “sun moon stars rain” (8) symbolizes time passing, which represents life passing. In the poem, as the seasons and skies rotate, life continues along with them. In addition, the uses of the words “snow” (22), “buried” (27), “was by was” (28), and “day by day” (29) leading to death. Towards the end of the poem, the depression of death was mention, but Cumming was just stating the n...
In both texts, they mentioned the seasons being created to provide different weather for the things that are vital to our lives. For example, in the winter is meant to rest and relax and the summer is meant to ripen as stated in the Hymn to the Sun. An example of the winter being a resting time is when bears and squares go into hibernation. During the summer, fruit starts to ripen for humans to eat. Without having different seasons, some of the things that humans need to survive would not be
Seasons can convey a multitude of meanings. Though the Kokinshū consists of numerous sections, the seasonal sections are the best at conveying the power of human creativity. The seasons in poetry are used to show everything from the passage of time as well as evoke feelings such as loneliness and love. As shown in the spring sections of the Kokinshū, seasons are treated in poetry through their progression from one part of the season to another, seasonal imagery in describing the season, related emotional expressions, and the linking of human emotion to the natural surroundings.
Throughout his poetry career, his voice varies according to the topic he selects, while his unique poetic devices and consistent theme represent who he is as a poet.
E. E. Cummings ' "anyone lived in a pretty how town" is often interpreted as a love poem (Macksoud 72), but it can be analyzed more deeply to reflect societal themes. Cummings ' use of grammar and punctuation is unconventional and at the same time organized in a way that draws the reader to certain conclusions about the way the citizens of the "how town" live. None of the protagonists are given a name, and yet knowing their titles—"anyone," "women and men," "children," "someone," "everyone," and "noone"—and analyzing the contrast between the individual and the group is essential to understanding the message the poem conveys (Kidder 143).
Edward Estlin Cummings, commonly referred to as E. E. Cummings, was born on October 14, 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was a source of vast knowledge and was responsible for many creative works other than his poetry, such as novels, plays, and paintings. He published his first book of poetry Tulips and Chimneys in 1923. Many of his poems are known for the visual effects they create through his unusual placement of words on the page, as well as, his lack of punctuation and capitalization. The manner in which Cummings arranges the words of his poems creates an image in the reader's mind of the topic he is discussing, such as a season or climbing stairs. His visual style also brings emotions, such as loneliness or cheerfulness, to the reader's mind. Due to this creativity, Cummings won many awards, such as the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize in poetry (Marks 17).
Literally, this is a poem discribing the seasons. Frosts interpertation of the seasons is original in the fact that it is not only autumn that causes him grief, but summer. Spring is portrayed as painfully quick in its retirement; "Her early leaf's a flower,/ But only so an hour.". Most would associate summer as a season brimming with life, perhaps the realization of what was began in spring. As Frost preceives it however, from the moment spring...
Modernist Poets - E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, and T.S. Eliot Changes the Face of American Poetry Modernist poets such as E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, and T.S. Eliot changed the face of American poetry by destroying the notion that American culture is far inferior to European culture. These and other American poets accomplished the feat of defining an American poetic style in the Modern Era by means of a truly American idea. That idea is the melting pot. Just as American culture exists as a mixture of races, beliefs, and ideas, the new American style of poetry exists as a mixture of old English styles with a new concept of the international style. Modern poets experiment with language, theme, and convention to "cleanse language and culture of old and worn-out meanings, and introduce to poetry what is American in thought, sensibility, perception, observation, and diction [. . .].
The use of the word “heart” emphasises this passion as the heart is considered the most important organ and so demonstrates how his passion (the “summer” in the sentence) is alive. Within these three poems, the use of nature as a mechanism impacted the poems, allowing them to convey meanings in an ambiguous sense yet still get across the general meaning of the poem.
Nature is an important theme in every frost poem. Nature usually symbolizes age or other things throughout Frost’s poems. In lines 5-10 it says, “Often you must have seen them loaded with ice a sunny winter morning after a rain. They click upon themselves as the breeze rises, and turn many-colored as the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells.” This demonstrates how nature can sometimes symbolize something. Also in lines 29-33 it says, “ By riding them down over and over again until he took the stiffness out of them, and not one but hung limp, not one was left for him to conquer. He learned all there was to learn about not launching too soon.” In lines 44-48 it says, And life is too much like a pathless wood where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs broken across it, and one eye is weeping from a twig’s having lashed across it open. I’d like to get away from earth for a while.”
Most of his poems are influenced by love; time spent
Stanza three explains what life was like at the farm he lived on, as the previous stanzas have. Line twenty describes the landscape and how beautiful it is. It describes it as Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air,” (20). Lines twenty one through twenty three use more imagery to describe the landscape. They use words such as “lovely and watery” (21) to show how pleasant it was to gaze upon the land. The word “And” is also repeated in the beginning of each of these lines which creates suspense. They also show repetition by repeating words such as “green” and it brings up the starry night again. Line twenty four talks about owls and how they are starting to come out. The day is starting to end and there is still beauty in everything. Now night has begun and all the things that made the day happy and carefree are starting to disappear. Lines twenty five through twenty seven use imagery to show that the moon is appearing and the horses and everything else is disappearing into the night. This begins to show that the youth the speaker is experiencing is starting to
The first section is called “Burial of the Dead” which is a reference to a burial service in a church. In the poem it says that April is the cruelest month, which is ironic because April is normally considered to be the month of renewal. In the beginning of the poem, the passing of seasons, symbolizes a natural cycle of death and a “new beginning”. In this section of the poem, historical context is represented because the deaths are symbolically the soldiers and other casualties that were lost in the war.... ...