Tuesday, March 8, 2005

e.e. cummings paper

Any comments will help. I have yet to make my works cited page and although the paper is somewhat close to finalization, it isn't yet. I can still tighten up the language, among other things.

---

E.E. Cummings was a poet, painter, and man. His use of style and technique has been ridiculed, as well as praised, by critics. Cummings was always about the individual. He began with a traditional poetic style, as of that of Keats and others. From there, he began using his emerging style. At first this new style was very compressed, even foreign, but in his later poems it is refined and near wholeness. To further understand Cummings' poetry, a deep analysis of his various uses of language and typography will enrich understanding and let one see the beauty of his poems.

Cummings used language in many ways. One was by juxtaposition. By juxtaposing two terms together, he was able to form a new word. Although mainly lingustic, it is also typographical: words such as greentwittering have a certain aesthetic quality to them that makes them interesting to eye (Maurer). Most often, though, juxtaposition is used to speed up the tempo. An example of this is in the well-known poem, "in Just-":

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

Another way it is used is to produce telescoped (two or more images uniquely compressed together to make them seem as one) imagery:

(past now float he--shes chiselled from darkness,
slicesofnight with greyrockfaces-also)once,
a spoolhat priest with a bellhat(all got up fit
to, why it's. . .with redder than orange than
redorange petticoats)bride

"Slicesofnight," "greyrockfaces," "spoolhat," "bellhat," and "redorange" all juxtapose two words together and make interesting, telescoped imagery. Also, by juxtaposition, Cummings may create a new concept by two unlike descriptives, such as timeshaped or flowerterrible (Maurer). Other times, he telescopes two images together so tightly as to create a portmanteau (a word made by combining two words together - brunch is a good example) word, such as unknowndulous, a combination of undulous and unknown (Baum).

Metonymy is perhaps one of the most interesting devices cummings uses. Metonymy is a figure of speech. It substitutes a different word for another, such as "wheels" to refer to a car, or "Washington" to refer to the United States Government. But Cummings doesn't use metonymy in quite the same way.

Cummings' early books are full of favorite words. Thrilling, flowers, utter, skillful, groping, crisp, keen, actual, stars. These early words are often used as metonymies. Flower and other words are metaphorical shorthand for concepts Cummings finds worthy. Flowers mean growth, existing. Stars stand for the fixed beauty of nature.

As he progressed in his style, Cummings began using more abstract words as this "metaphorical shorthand." Yes is used as a noun. It is everything positive. If is something hesitant, not certain, not complete:

yes is a pleasant country:
if's wintry
(my lovely)
let's open the year
both is the very weather
(not either)
my treasure, when violets appear
love is a deeper season
than reason;
my sweet one
(and april's where we're)

Metonymy is based on reduction. Cummings was heavy on compression of language: using as little words as possible to say the most. Therfore, he uses metonymy. It creates a certain thrill when read. It has a type of novelty. It says much in a few words. This peculiar use of language is just like an author's use of symbols, adding meaning with each use (Baum).

Perhaps most worth mentioning is Cumming's use of compression. His use of compression daunts some of his poems and makes them nearly unaccessible to the reader unless they read closely. His earlier work deliberately violated a reader's traditional expectations. Instead, he chose to write individualistically. His 1952 "nonlecture two" exemplifies this: "so far as i am concerned, poetry and every other art is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality." When readers would write for explanations of his poems, he would answer them, but harshly (Thompson). Eventually Cummings' attitudes towards his reading audience changed, and his style became more reader-accessible.

With the poem "listen," first published in 1923, it is written in a way as to show something as it is happening. To Cummings, the use of language is not faithful, conventional syntax is historical, and is written as if the thoughts, feelings, and sensations have already happened (Baum). But in reality, there's no order to it. It's just an explosion where the senses are attacked all at once. This was Cummings' aim with the compression of language - he tried to recreate an experience from the ground up, without falsifying temporal order, but by writing something as if it were happening right in the poem (the numbers indicate the line spacing):

1listenthis a dog barks andthis crowd of people and are these steeplesglitter O why eyes houses the smiles5cried gestures buttered with sunlightO, listenleaves in are move push leaves green are crisply writhea new spikes of the by river chuckles see clean whymirrors cries people bark gestures10come O you if come who with listen runme with I quickListen13irrevocably14 (something arrives)15noiselessly in things lives treesat its own pace, certainly silently17comes1819yes20you cannot hurry it with a thousand poems2122you cannot stop it with all the policement in the world

When reading this, we feel just as disoriented as we would if the events were happening to us. But it is nearly unreadable, and those who haven't read a lot of cummings probably won't be able to swallow it. In its final 1967 version, "(listen)," Cummings carefully rewrote the poem. It is much more reader-friendly, and asks the reader to participate rather than demands (Thompson).

(listen)
this a dog barks and
how crazily houses
eyes people smiles
faces streets
steeples and eagerly
tumbl
ing through wonder
ful sunlight
--look--
selves, stir:writhe
o-p-e-n-i-n-g
are (leaves;flowers) dreams
,come quickly come
run run
with me now
jump shout (laugh
dance cry
sing) for it's Spring
--irrevocably;
and in
earth sky trees
:every
where a miracle arrives
(yes)
you and i may not
hurry it with
a thousand poems
my darling
but nobody will stop it
With All The Policemen In The World

Cummings' later style considers the reader in mind. The poetry is conventional yet screams Cummings at the same time. The poem retains its feeling of everything happening at the very moment, but is much more focused.

Cummings was also a painter, and tried to bring the aesthetics of the painters to his poetry. His way of doing so was mainly through typography. The most remedial among these is his use of capitalization. Like Emily Dickinson, he capitalized important nouns for emphasis. However, unlike Dickinson, he did not capitalize the beginning letter of every line in his poems. The reason for this is he didn't want to give unnecessary emphasis. He also didn't capitalize the pronoun "I" as it is traditionally. His use of "i" showed his individualism, and segregates the author from the speaker of the poem. This leaves him free to put emphasis where it truly belongs.

Cummings also employs spacing as a typographical tool. Cumming's use of spacing is often to slow down the tempo. Its other uses were to squeeze more meaning out of a poem, and to put extreme emphasis on a particular word by alienating it from parts of the poem. Below is a poem showing how spacing may be used to strain more meaning from a poem:

l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness

There are many layers of meaning to this poem, but our concern is with spacing. The very look of this poem because of the spacing is like a leaf falling in a spiral pattern, then lying on the ground. Also, the letter "l" looks like the numerical "1" on a keyboard. That is one of the main points of this poem: when a leaf falls to death, it falls alone. Also there is "l(a," the french pronoun for "the," which shows even more oneness. Then there is "one," which immediately catches the eye. If Cummings would have just written the poem regularily, it would just read "a leaf falls/ loneliness," but instead he brings the spatial and aesthetic qualities of the painters and crafts something wholly beautiful, short, and full of meaning (Semansky).

Another typographical tool Cummings used was punctuation. Cummings' use of punctuation is tied into spacing in the sense that they slow down the tempo. Some critics proclaim Cummings dots his poetry with too much punctuation, but the punctuation serves as a minor time control. His use of parentheses is also very important. It's another technique of immediacy he uses, which helps to show something instantaneously happening. He usually uses them in pairs, but will often put down only one parenthesis as an opening or closing mark. This shows that the poem is only a fragment of something larger, as if hinting at something unsaid (Baum).

Cummings brought the aesthetics of the painters to poetry. He himself was a painter as well, and followed in the footsteps of the cubists. His techniques of immediacy take apart a moment and put it back together, just as the cubists (only they used an actual image), and try to make others see it as he saw it. His early poems were somewhat romantic and traditional, but his later poems show him to be a transcendentalist like Walt Whitman or Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his style to be anything but traditional. His other techniques and his developed style showed him to be a unique, original poet.
Comments (1)