food for creative making, doing, and thinking
Source: poetryfoundation.org
One of the most influential figures in the modernist poetry movement, E. E. Cummings was born 120 years ago today. Cummings’s life is almost as interesting as his work itself, and I could spend hours talking about both his biography and his poetry; however, I couldn’t help but bring up a few facts about Cummings’s life that I found most interesting in his biography on the Poetry Foundation website. Cummings always knew he wanted to be a poet, even from a very young age. “Between the ages of eight and twenty-two, he wrote a poem a day,” which I find to be an incredible display of ambition and dedication to his craft. Much of his childhood was spent studying and practicing traditional poetic forms. It was not until he attended Harvard University in 1916 that Cummings really began to experiment with more modernist approaches to poetry. Cummings then “began to write avant-garde poems in which conventional punctuation and syntax were ignored in favor of a dynamic use of language.” Following his graduation from Harvard, Cummings engaged in a variety of jobs, ranging from working for a mail order book dealer to serving in World War I by volunteering for a French ambulance service to being drafted into the US Army upon the country’s entrance into the war in 1918. Cummings resumed writing poetry upon his departure from the army in 1919, which led to a very successful and productive period of time for the writer. He published his first book, The Enormous Room, and his first collection of poems, Tulips and Chimneys, in 1923, which is said to have “established his reputation as an avant-garde poet conducting daring experiments with language.”
I really appreciate Cummings’s careful attention to and manipulation of language through syntax and sound. Cummings’s work is distinctive in that it has a certain consciousness about it in terms of how it is presented on the page itself. Cummings is also very innovative in his use of punctuation, capitalization, and spacing. His heavy use of parentheses in many of his poems allows for the words to read more fluidly and freely, similar to the stream-of-consciousness that we all experience while thinking day to day. Despite Cummings’s sophisticated use of various poetic techniques, all of Cummings’s poems are centered around rather mundane subject matter, or, as many critics claim, are “unabashedly focused on such traditional and somewhat passe poetic themes as love, childhood, and flowers.”
Cummings is also considered to be one of the greatest love poets of all time. Here is one of my favorites titled “[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]”.
[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]