Monday, March 19, 2012

What are the major characteristics of E. E. Cummings's poems?

There are two aspects of the poetry of E.E. Cummings that
make him significant:


  1. He was on the "cutting
    edge" of the Modernist, experimental movement.  His poetry is new in its typography, its
    syntax (he uses nouns for verbs and vice versa), grammar, and punctuation, introducing
    audiences to the innovations of verse and prose in the early parat of the twentieth
    century.

  2. Cummings was an effective satirist and
    intense lyric poet.  His targets for satire are often hypocrisy and the submergence of
    the individual in the military and in society  because of the "mass mind of the mass
    market."  His lyric poems celebrate love and the truth of the moment, herald
    individuality, exalt a child-like love for nature.  In an age that was reserved in its
    feeling, Cummings was personal and unapologetic about his lustful feelings and
    individual desires.

Possessing a highly
personal and idiosyncratic style, Cummings appeals much to youth in his giving of new
life to the ideas that have always been.  His poetry exists in the present,  in the
aliveness and pure essence of the state of being without regard to the flow of time. 
His poetry is existential and romantic both:


readability="18">

Spring is like a perhaps
hand


(which comes
carefully


out of Nowhere)
arranging


a window, into which people look
(while


people stare


arranging
and changing placing


carefully there a
strange


thing an a known thing here)
and


changing everything
carefully....



In these lines
from the poem "Spring is like a perhaps hand," Cummings demonstrates the
existentialism--coming out of Nowhere--and romanticism--nature/Spring that is "like a
perhaps hand" that people watch appreciatively through a windo. The odd use of syntax in
"perhaps hand" is apparent as is "arranging and changing and placing
carefully." 

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