The Poetry of E. E. Cummings

LOVE , NATURE AND BEAUTY IN THE POEMS

OF E .E . CUMMINGS

Introduction

e .e . Cummings was considered to be one of the greatest and innovative American poets of the 20th century . It can be very frustrating sometimes to read his works and anyone who lacks the patience and the love for poetry and language would easily dismiss his poems as child 's play . But the reader must understand that what he aimed to do is revolutionize form moving away from traditional view of how poems should be . Despite this , his poems

still resonate of age old ideas that have captured the hearts and imagination of men since the ancient times . Themes such as love , beauty and nature are prevalent in his works . The following poems which I will present are great examples of these themes

Some of them are very personal , which is just right because poetry for Cummings is a highly personal art form . He describes poetry being forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality .poetry is being , not doing .if poetry is your goal you 've got to forget all about punishments and all about rewards and all about self-styled obligations and duties and responsibilities (Cummings 24

Born Edward Eslin Cummings , e .e . cummings was a son of a Unitarian minister in Cambridge , Massachusetts . His mother Rebecca Haswell Clarke encouraged him to write at an early age . He attended Harvard College earning magna cum laude honors in Greek and English . In 1916 , just one year after getting his A .B , he received his A .M . also in Harvard During World War I , he served with the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in France and was arrested on suspicion of espionage . He spent four months in a concentration camp in La Ferte-Mace and used his experiences to write The Enormous Room , an autobiographical work that earned him fame and celebrity status back in the United States . After the war , he moved to New York and started writing poems for avant-garde publications . He married Elaine Orr in 1942 and had a daughter with her named Nancy . She broke up with her less than a year into their marriage (Kennedy 2000

He spent the 1920s in Paris and began writing his great collection of poems . Returning to the United States with his third wife Marion Morehouse , Cummings settled into a life of literary and artistic (he was also an accomplished painter ) activities until his death from a stroke in 1962 in North Conway , New Hampshire (ibid

Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town

Images of a beautiful rural setting come to mind just hearing the title . And it does give us a fresh happy feeling but the poem is very much deeper than that . Disguising the cycle of nature in the ordinary happenings of a small town , spring , summer , fall and winter is described in stanzas , each symbolized by children , men , women , noone and anyone Steinman (71 ) ascribes the different emotional response ' of each person to the winter , how their...