Essay: Unlock the Innovative Genius of E.E. Cummings—Modernist and Poet Extraordinaire

Many critics find E. E. Cummings as a modernist who had reformed much of poetry writing. Cummings had been a poetry writer with some of his millennium’s best sonnets. A sonnet is from the Italian word “sonetto” which means “small song” (“Sonnet”). A sonnet is composed of fourteen lines of an iambic pentameter in poetry, which is a verse line of five lyrics consisting of one short syllable followed by one long one. Each line has 10 syllables in a sonnet, with the special rhythm scheme. Literature includes numerous forms of sonnets, including the Italian sonnets, the Shakespearean sonnet, the Spenserian sonnet, the Miltonic Sonnet, Terza Rima Sonnet, and Curtal Sonnet. Cummings was famous for defying these laws and being creative given the pattern and rhyme schemes in each of those styles of sonnets. His cheerful poems of love revealed his artistic passion for language and the modern style. Edward E. Cummings, to my experience, is an innovator. There are several factors that have contributed to the creativity that will be illustrated in this essay as evidence of his inventiveness and innovation.
In the time of creative transition, Cummings was born in 1984 to a family whose father was a professor at Harvard (Potts). Growing up in the world Cummings was in the company of stimulating people. His neighbor was Professor William James, a philosopher in Arts who gave a non-conformist graduation lecture on “The New Art.” The thesis concludes, in a research by Hopwood et al., that the character of each person is affected by the setting in which he or she grows up, and also their stability and development to adulthood later. Not only was Cummings not intelligent, his father was, and his neighbor was, and this encouraged him to think openly as a student as he went on to enter university. Cummings studied under the professorship of the University who had a passion for Matisse, Cezanne, Brancusi and Amy Lowell that inspired him. The painters so much loved by the professor gave Cummings a taste of art which he would follow later on. After his education, Cummings went on to Paris, where he served as an ambulance driver (Freitas) during the First World War. The works of great painters, photographers, poets, and authors like Pablo Picasso, Henri Gaudier-Breska, Ezra Pound, and Gleizes were introduced to Cummings in Paris. During Cummings’s later works the works of the most celebrated painters and poets during Paris were an influence. Many of his poems seemed as if Cummings were more interested in how to interpret his works, which at the time was not the same for other poets. His time’s climate in Paris was a significant contributing factor to the poetry breakthrough. Like other painters, Cummings believed in experimentation which, unlike other poets, shows in most of his poems.
Following the war, Cummings returned from Paris and published “The Enormous Room,” a fictional account of his time at war in France Capital. He wrote about topical subjects in his poetry, which seemed to be derailed by needless lyrics and typographic controversies and transformed them into the greatest poems of the period. His subjects were rich in expressions of passion, childhood, playfulness and flowers that made him popularly loved and despised in other corners. Cummings wrote a humorous version on his debut “Tulips and Chimneys” which was the most ambitious poem. Among the subjects he dealt with was love and politics. Cummings ‘ motives have never been clear; his poems have words that have purposely omitted their relevance to the meaning of ideas. This impact was sketchy, but it made almost everything mean by the poem. His racial satire was inserted into some of the African American, Jewish, Asian-American, and even Mexican-American, political poems he had published. His ability to address such issues helped him to break down social barriers in the 1900s, where he spoke in blunt tones about these issues.
Another proof of his creativity was his development of grammatical complexities in his poems (Candyland 15-22). Cummings ‘ works opened a door to the next generation of poets opening up new linguistic possibilities for authors. Throughout his plays, his poems represented a morphological innovation and a syntactic innovation. In producing the many words in his poems, which often sound strange but at the same time familiar, the morphological creativity in his work is evident. In the poem “480,” Cummings writes, “is the underlove and subjugation of / beauty,” from which we know “love” and “wish” but understand that the sentence implies a different interpretation. Moreover, the morphological innovation in his research can be argued for using the nature of grammar and word choice, which aims at ambiguity and ultimately means that a sentence has multiple meanings. For example, one of his poems “1 x 1,” he wrote,
“Yes is a pleasant country
If’s wintry
(my lovely)
Let’s open the year.”
“Yes” is used as a noun symbolising positivity, and in this context, “no” symbolises uncertainty and incompleteness. Such terms offer “linguistic shocks” to a reader but they also open the reader’s mind to his own useful resourcefulness in exploring any possibility of the new interpretation that he could think of after reading the poem. The syntactic invention is likewise another aspect of his work. In his deletion of specific words, syntactic creativity is seen which makes his poems have a succinct and rich language. Deletion may be ungrammatic but it does nothing to impair a poem’s readability. Deletion in fact was so common in poetry that instead of being unusual, it was considered an impact. For example, in the poem “VIII,” a deletion of “she is” occurs in the first paragraph, which produces a fragmented sentence. The deletions in Cumming’s work produce an interesting look at the nature of poetry and its representations when read in a grammatically correct sentence, it will read “She is magnificent against a fathoming jelly.”
Cummings is, in my opinion, a great innovator of language and his use of creativity brings more possibilities within poetry of various meanings. His education, his experience of before, during and after the First World War and his work are evidence of his creativity and his contribution to poetry and art. His syntactic deletion and fragmentation developments enrich the full sense of poetry and allow the reader to make self-interpretations of what the author really means. Edward Estlin Cummings is an acrobat in the linguistic sense.