Seeing By Ee Cummings

“Seeing” the Unseen

The brain conjures sight internally from carefully crafted text as easily as the lung breathes in and out. Did you see in your mind imagine a lung decompressing and expanding? Then the visual imagery in that statement served its purpose. Imagery is how a poet can make their point, how they set their scenes, and how action commences through the poet’s utilization of the different aspects of written language. When it comes to literary works, converting the visual to visual takes skill, and an excellent poet can shape a phrase or a word into a treat for the eyes. For a word to appear in an image out of paper and ink, poets from different times use varied methods to achieve the same goal. Specifically, E. E. Cummings uses abstract

The poem Man-Moth is littered with imagery-making structures that are part of her main method in creating visualized pictures. She sticks to using these traditional types of imagery because they are easy for the reader to understand and visualize, as well as getting the point across that she is trying to make. An excellent example occurs when Bishop is describing the way that the main character’s eyes look in lines 41-43: If you catch him, / hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil, / an entire night itself” (Bishop 2). The author creates a picture in the metaphoric style through the way she describes his eye, being “an entire night itself”, giving the reader a greater sense of how truly dark the Man-Moth’s eye is. This style of metaphor is her way of setting up images in a fully explored form that also allow the reader to fully understand what she is trying to say. She utilizes figurative language, created in a metaphoric structure that is fully fleshed out in phrase form, and in doing so, neatly fulfills the poet’s task of “taking a scenario, personal landscape, philosophical concept, or relationship dynamic and render it in terms both sublime and clarified” (Beasley 32). Bishop’s metaphors are clear as day, ironically creating both complex and simple ideas and forming a relatable image by the structure of the phrase itself. In her writing,

E. Cummings were two very different writers who wrote visual imagery into their poetry that was meant to impact their readers into seeing a visual image when their poems are read. They each have stylistic preferences in their poetry, and each wrote their images into existences differently, even though they both create visual imagery. Individually, Bishop uses solidly concrete imagery in direct contrast to the vague abstract images created by Cummings. She focuses on creating her ideas using words that conjure up images that appeal to the senses. Cummings, on the other hand, selects words that are abstract in nature that invite readers to come up with thousands of different visions based on personal experience. He opens the door to mental exploration with phrases like “a final dream of bells” and “all nearness pauses” while Bishop draws a picture and fills it in with concrete words like “cracks”, “battered”, “shadow”, and “moon”. Besides word choice, each poet has a different take on how their imagery is literally constructed, not just the phrases they use. Cummings strays far from typical word structure by rearranging the whole layout of a phrase used to create an image in order to make an impression on the reader, moving around adjectives and relegating the noun to the very end of the sentence. However, Elizabeth Bishop sticks within a different method and her visual imagery is framed in the style of metaphor and simile. This method of containing