e.e. cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings
1894-1962
“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you everybody else means to
fight the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting. “
Source: http://www.nascitur.com/cummings/cummings.html
Cummings Biography
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“In 1917, after working briefly for a mail-order publishing company, the only
regular employment in his career, Cummings volunteered to serve in the
Norton-Harjes Ambulance group in France. Here he and a friend were
imprisoned (on false grounds) for three months in a French detention camp.
The Enormous Room (1922), his witty and absorbing account of the
experience, was also the first of his literary attacks on authoritarianism. Eimi
(1933), a later travel journal, focused with much less successful results on the
collectivized Soviet Union.”
“At the end of the First World War Cummings went to Paris to study art. On
his return to New York in 1924 he found himself a celebrity, both for The
Enormous Room and for Tulips and Chimneys (1923), his first collection of
poetry (for which his old classmate John Dos Passos had finally found a
publisher). Clearly influenced by Gertrude Stein's syntactical and Amy
Lowell's imagistic experiments, Cummings's early poems had nevertheless
discovered an original way of describing the chaotic immediacy of sensuous
experience. The games they play with language (adverbs functioning as nouns,
for instance) and lyric form combine with their deliberately simplistic view of
the world (the individual and spontaneity versus collectivism and rational
thought) to give them the gleeful and precocious tone which became, a
hallmark of his work. Love poems, satirical squibs, and descriptive nature
poems would always be his favoured forms.”
Source: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cummings/cummings_life.htm
Critical Analysis of
“next to of course god america i”
Sources:
http://www.foothilltech.org/rgeib/amex/wwi/
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cummings/nexttoofcourse.htm
THE WAR TO END ALL WARS
"The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations
of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no
indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are
but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been
made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them."
Woodrow Wilson's War Message
April 2, 1917
Richard S. Kennedy (1994)
[The poem contains] a new satirical device...namely the use of allusive quotations or fragments of
quotations, a technique that he learned from T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. But unlike Eliot or Pound he
does not employ this technique for general cultural criticism, rather, he aims to produce real laughter by
ridiculing his subjects. In [this poem], carefully worked out in sonnet form, he pillories a Fourth-of-July
speechmaker by choosing patriotic and religious cliches common to platform oratory and compressing
fragments of them together in order to demonstrate by this jumble the meaningless emptiness that these
appeals have....
from Richard S. Kennedy, E. E. Cummings Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1994): 71.
William V. Davis (1970)
[Davis comments on the inverted syntax of the final line]
...Here the adverb "rapidly" occurs in a most unlikely position in this sentence (which is a sentence even
though the end punctuation is lacking)....Why...would cummings have inverted the syntax...? If we
eliminate the necessity for rhyming the final word of the poem with the final word of line eleven
("slaughter"), since clearly the necessary rhyme could have been achieved without inverting the syntax
("And rapidly drank a glass of water"), then cummings must have had some other reason for the inverted
syntax. And what better reason than that in a sonnet in which he has combined two forms [the Italian and
English], and in a poem which expresses a theme of "inverted" or confused philosophy, cummings, as
persona, inverts his apparently objective commentary on the situation and the words in which he reports
his commentary? In short then, this syntactical inversion here at the end of the poem serves to indicate
the similar tranformation [sic] of the sonnet form which cummings has effected in terms of form and
further serves to point to the "inverted" philosophy of the speaker of lines one through thirteen.
from William V. Davis, "Cummings' 'next to of course god america i.'" Concerning Poetry 3 (1970): 15.
“next to of course god america i”
Continued…
Brian Docherty
‘next to of course god america i’ is a satire on both the cliché-spouting patriot and the gullibility of his
audience. cummings includes most of the clichés politicians mouth at election time, and his point is that
while anyone who dared to criticise any of these concepts would be labelled un-American and a commie
subversive, it is politicians like this who have muted the voice of liberty. His general attitude to politicians
is expressed succinctly in ‘a politician is an arse upon’, a two-line epigram m the best classical tradition.
From Docherty, Brian, "e.e. cummings." In American Poetry: The Modernist Ideal. Ed. Clive Bloom and
Brian Docherty. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.  1995 The Editorial Board Lumiere (Cooperative
Press) Ltd.
Critical Analysis of
“my sweet old etcetera”
Source: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cummings/etcetera.htm
Rushworth M. Kidder (1979)
...it contrasts the reality of a soldier's life on the front with the fictions entertained by his
family at home. His "aunt lucy" is the newsmonger; his sister knits socks, shirts, and
"fleaproof earwarmers"; his parents tout such abstractions as courage and loyalty; and all the
while the soldier himself lies "in the deep mud" dreaming of "Your smile / eyes knees and of
your Etcetera." The repeated "etcetera" changes its grammatical role significantly as the
poem progresses. First used to amplify adjectives ("sweet old"), it next amplifies the nouns
in the list of things his sister knits. It then modifies a verb ("my / mother hoped that / I
would die etcetera / bravely"). This gradual shift stresses its use in the last line as a noun in
its own right, where "your Etcetera" stands for some noun or nouns which, if printed, would
call down the wrath of Sumner [secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of
Vice] and his Vice Society....
from Rushworth M Kidder, E. E. Cummings: An Introduction to the Poetry (New York: Columbia UP,
1979): 72 and 73.
Critical Analysis of
“i sing of olaf glad and big”
Source: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cummings/olaf.htm
Gary Lane (1976)
"Arma virumque" sang Vergil, beginning an epic distinguished for its civility; Cummings, adopting and adapting
that classical form, sings the man alone. The difference is implicative of both the spirit and the art of Cummings'
poem. Olaf embraces an integrity of private rather than public convictions; acknowledging only his personal sense
of truth rather than merging his will with the gods', he is a veritable anti-Aeneas, a new kind of hero. His
poem...neatly reverses classical expectation by a series of ironic twists. It is a small new epic....
From the outset, the poem's force resides primarily in its play upon heroic tradition. We learn not "the anger of
Peleus' son Achilleus/ and its destruction" ...but the gentleness of Olaf, "whose warmest heart recoiled at war"; big
and blond, our hero may be the physical image of the Germanic warrior, but his temperament is otherwise. The
form does not undercut heroism--we do not deal here with mock epic--it instead offers alternative heroic values. In
the Iliad, Achilles is a hero of physical strength, sulking like a child when Briseis is taken from him, but at last
achieving immortality by slaughtering Trojans. Olaf's strength is moral. Scarcely annoyed as his self-righteous and
sadistic torturers attempt to strip him of human dignity, he achieves epic stature by refusing to kill.
The shift has important implications. Heroic epic... is based on communal values; a hero's greatness is a measure of
the degree to which he exemplifies the qualities his society most prizes. With Olaf it is different. He must give up
not merely his life but also the good name that valiance customarily wins, the hero's renown and reputation.... He
can do so lightly, however, defying both the military force of his nation and its massively conformed opinions,
because he answers to an individual rather than a collective truth, to personal vision rather than social regard.
Cummings' instrument of truth here is irony.... As the irony gathers, Cummings unmasks the modern bankruptcy of
collective values. In a society so perverted that torture has become socially correct--it is administered by the
"wellbeloved colonel(trig/ westpointer most succinctly bred) "--sometimes only profanity can express the sacred
heart. Refusing to "kiss your fucking flag,"' Olaf avoids the polite Latin that in our century has time and again been
used to justify atrocity. His taut Anglo-Saxon, direct as his behavior, is comment enough on his suave persecutors.
from Gary Lane I Am: A Study of E. E. Cummings' Poems (Lawrence, Kansas: UP of Kansas, 1976): 39, 40 and
41.
Brian Docherty
Another poem which contrasts institutional thinking with the plight of the individual is ‘i
sing of Olaf glad and big’. Again there is a strong rhythm and deftly placed rhyme,
employed to make the message clear. Olaf is a principled individual, probably a secondgeneration Swedish American from the Mid-West farm belt, brought up in the Lutheran
church. He is a heroic figure who dies for his beliefs after enduring barbaric treatment,
including the ultimate obscenity with red-hot bayonets. American democracy and freedom
suffer grievously at the hand of their supposed defendants, ironically described as ‘(a
yearning nation’s blueeyed pride)’, while the pacifist traitor is lauded as ‘more brave than
me: more blond than you’. cummings is impartial in his attitude to regimes where correct
attitudes are instilled and maintained by force. America and Russia are two faces of the
same coin as far as he is concerned.
From Docherty, Brian, "e.e. cummings." In American Poetry: The Modernist Ideal. Ed.
Clive Bloom and Brian Docherty. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.  1995 The
Editorial Board Lumiere (Cooperative Press) Ltd.
Hints for Reading Cummings
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Read the poem (at least initially) at its natural pace: let your eyes follow along the words
wherever they lie. Do not stop and analyze or try to figure out what things mean or why words
are misspelled/broken.
Pay special attention as you read to how YOU feel. When a word is broken do you slow down?
Speed up? Get confused? Surprised? Cummings is creating these emotions in you simply by
organization and word choice...they are intentional.
When you finish any poem the first time through, you may not understand it, but you are often
left with a general feeling of what it was about. Think about that at the end of the Cummings
poem: it is often the main point. Keep that fact in mind as you read back through it.
As you mull back through the poem trying to understand each part, be sure to read as you read
the first time: at the poem's pace. Each phrase may not make sense, but does it create an emotion
in you? Does the phrase give you some unquantifiable impression of what its talking about? Do
not be afraid to accept that impression as correct.
Often words are broken up over long parts of the poem, perhaps with an entire phrase or even
verse in the middle of the word. Figure out what the words are, then read again knowing what
word is being interrupted or reorganized.
If you still don't understand anything about the poem, pick up a few other Cummings poems and
read them to get a feel for what he does, then come back.
Of course, the other basic ways to read poetry also apply. Just remember that often Cummings
poems are expressing a single emotion. If you are trying to analyze such a poem, it is probably
most interesting to focus on how he goes about extracting this feeling from you with only ink and
paper.
Source: http://www.nascitur.com/cummings/hints.html
4 Poems read aloud by Cummings
¾ “a man who had fallen among thieves”
¾ “next to of course god america i”
¾ “my sweet old etcetera”
¾ “since feeling is first”
<click in icon below to listen, if problem exists, right click on hyperlink listed below and
select open hyperlink>
Source: http://media.salon.com/mp3s/cummings011402.mp3