e.e. cummings is known for his unique and creative uses of sounds and rhythms, unusual
poetical and grammatical structure, meter and rhyme, slant rhyme, odd word choices, and
pronouns. cummings’ is known for his poetry containing love. He is known for writing in a
painter’s eye to place words and letters on a page. cummings is talented at setting times
realistically and using descriptive words to set a scene exactly how it appears to him.
cummings always pushed himself to do better to exceed his highest point. He carries the
ability to create a strong character for people in his poems. Because cummings came from a
loving, supportive family and experienced several marriages, majority of his poems represent
different figures of love represented and interpreted in various ways.
Edward Estlin cummings grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father was a
sociology professor at Harvard. His parents fully supported and encouraged him in
everything he did, which in his case, showed a love for poetry and art at an early age. He
studied at Harvard from 1911 to 1915, wrote poems daily, and joined the editorial board of
the Harvard Monthly (a college literary magazine). He became interested with various forms
of avant-garde art during his senior year. He started to incorporate elements of Gertrude
Stein, Ezra Pund, Igor Stravunsky, and Pablo Picasso’s styles into his poetry and paintings.
In 1917, cummings moved to New York, where he was employed at a mail-order book
company. He started working full-time on his poetry and art. When World War I progressed,
he volunteered for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service, which was stationed in France.
cummings and his friend, William Slater Brown, were separated from their unit when they
arrived overseas, where they spent five weeks in Paris. This experience led cummings to
write his first book, The Enormous Room, which is based on how he was a twenty-three yearold man who was living in a big room with other prisoners under miserable conditions. This
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story tells about how he experiences, firsthand, to be a political prisoner under concentration
camp conditions. This is when his career began.
cummings is known for following his own rules when it comes to the use of language.
The first line of “somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond” is clearly a sentence with
grammatical errors; he runs the words of the poem together, so that spaces are unused after
the comma. “In fact, he continues this throughout the entire poem anywhere there is a comma
in the middle of a line,” said Ryan D. Poquette. This critic believes that this is relevant to
cummings’ theme of love. How cummings is deeply in love and doesn’t want to take the
usual pause that punctuation marks create. This is also shown by the use of periods
throughout the poem – he does not use periods at all. cummings neglects the rule of
capitalizing the first letter of a sentence and the pronoun “I;” therefore, this is also supportive
to Poquette’s theory. cummings lack of capitalization was to represent that there is no
beginning to the poem; it is symbolic to Cumming’s eternal love, because it implies neither a
start nor ending. His lack of capitalizing the pronoun “I” represents how he was extremely
devoted to his lover. cummings is a completely humble person; his poems blatantly show
him “signing away any power he has over himself to his beloved,” said Poquette. A typical
person says one observation, then another observation that addresses a different aspect.
Unlike cummings, he believes this isn’t good enough; he wants to describe every feeling he
feels at once. These feelings are indicated by parentheses throughout the poem. His poem
shows the mystery of the power his beloved holds over him, he wants his readers to know
what’s going on in his mind. These are the keys of knowing and understanding e.e.
cummings’ poetry.
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e.e. cummings’ “Anyone lived in a pretty how town” resembles a preschool song. It has a
playful rhythm and sound that complements nature’s sequences of life cycles throughout all
nine stanzas, like a merry-go-round. Although this poem may seem cheerful, this only masks
the idea of life’s boredom and death in the four-line stanzas, which lead to everyone dying.
The opening stanzas explain the joy and playful rhythm in the small-town. They celebrate
life and acknowledged “anyone” who is a “he” who sang and danced in the “spring” of life.
This line is repeated as line 24, which has a tone that leads the reader to the death of the
town. The line “sun moon stars rain” break the easygoing pace to show how “anyone”
matured toward the summer. The children in the third stanza notices “anyone” and “noone”
(the female persona) fall in love. As “someones married their everyones,” the poem begins to
show hints of life’s insignificance. As the poem progresses, cummings speaks about the
constant cycles of life and death. At the end of the poem, “anyone” and “noone” shows that
the midst of life and death exists, yet life still continues through its natural cycle.
In cummings’ book 95 Poems, there lays a poem named “old age sticks.” Sean Robisch
analyzes how cummings never titles his poems and the first lines of his poems are the
implied titles. The first sentence implies either the poem is about sticks (if read as a noun) or
if it speaks about an old age who sticks around for a very long time (if read as a verb). The
old age is portrayed as destructive and obstinate. This is when cummings began to play with
words to make a more profound point. The first stanza begins with a closed parenthesis with
no open half; this is a signal of cummings’ puzzle. This mark could show that cummings is in
the middle of parenthetical insertion into a different discussion, possibly an argument that
had begun before the poem began. It may represent an obstacle from an “old age” point of
view, or it can possibly replace the rules of a period; there are many ways to see how the
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parenthesis is used, but both critics and readers believe it is used in replacement of a word or
punctuation to symbolize a statement. The poem speaks about how “old age” posts signs,
which represents how readers can reread a line several times and interpret it differently each
time it has been read. A sign that read “No Trespassing” was mentioned in both stanzas two
and three, but is interpreted differently. “Trespass” was divided to show the connection and
separation of the two parts of the word; this shows how old age is educated and utilizing his
bilingual education in both French and English. “No” the sign said, “Tres” which means
very, and “Pas” which means negative or not – this means that the sign also says “No Very
Not.” The youth is oblivious to this sign; they neglect the old age’s strict rules by knocking
down the “Keep Off” signs. The youth, in the poem, believe they can do whatever they want;
this is when cummings introduces the emotional aspect of the poem. “Go on” implies the
passage of time; although the youth may think this only speaks about business, the youth are
unaware that the true business is actually for the youth to grow old. During this time, the
youth may feel as the time goes by very slow, but they don’t realize how quick it is for them
to get to an old age, this thought is indicated by the like break before the last line. The space
cummings created in the people is very much related to time and the physical act of growing,
which the youth may interpret as growing in weight and height, but they don’t understand
that this is said to grow in a personal, mental matter as well.
cummings had three major influences to his writing. First for foremost, his family and
education was his first influence. His family always encouraged and supported him in what
he did, no matter what it was. He felt that it was important to specify his scholarly
background, where he was regarded as an iconoclast and experimentalist for the first half of
his career. During the second half of his career, he was revealed as a traditionalist. cummings
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was an authentic and original innovator who was an incredible craftsman and respectful of
the art of the past, regardless of his characteristic pose of the innocent child. His second
influence is related to his move to New York to pursue his career. This move gave him his
first view of Paris, which lead to the experience he wrote about in his book, The Enormous
Room. His last influences were his several marriages. His first wife’s name was Elaine Orr,
who he had a relationship with in 1924 and had a daughter named Nancy. He lost all legal
rights to his child, who was raised entirely apart from him after his ex-wife remarried. In the
late 1920s, he married a woman named Anne Barton, but their relationship did not last very
long. In the early 1930s, cummings met and married Marion Morehouse, a fashion model,
actress, and photographer. She remained with him for the rest of his life.
cummings is one of the most well-known American authors in the world. He has won a
plethora of awards, honors, and prizes during his lifetime, including the BOLLINGEN
PRIZE (1958), the BOSTON ARTS FESTIVAL AWARD (1957), and a two-year FORD
FOUNDATION grant of $15,000 (1959). cummings passed away on September 3rd, 1962 in
North Conway New Hampshire. His death was caused by a stroke after going inside to get
some rest after splitting some wood. His literary experimentations still continue to encourage
others to experiment with different styles and types of writing. He has become an advocate to
the children of America an inspiration to all Americans to this day.
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