E.E. Cummings: Use of Language and Meaning in His Poetry

A detailed Summary of E.E. Cummings: Use of Language and Meaning in His Poetry

The poetry of E.E. Cummings often builds its meaning from carefully wrought language that plays with words and word forms, creating its own music from the sounds, while the meaning has to be discerned from the sound, from the movement, and from the differences between the language of this poet and the language of direct conversation. A poem like "anyone lived in a pretty how town" creates an image through its use of language, an image that must be examined and reconsidered in light of the words selected. The original image emerges from the sound of the words, while deeper meanings are found in the details.

Myers and Wojahn (1991) note how Cummings is seen as a poet known for his experiments with language, and they see him as writing at a time when the old unities were disintegrating, while they see cummings as a "romantic idealist to want to cut himself off from the world" (p. 126). They further state,

But his language does not discover great things; rather, it goes to local effects, with larger thematic issues left unattended except on a very local level. His language is inadequate to deal with the big issues; when he moves to larger issues it is through generalizations-"anyone lived in a pretty how town," for example--as

Occasional gaming with the parts of speech may produce a stimulating freshness of language. Mr. Cummings, however, carries the trick so far that it loses its effect, the more so since he shifts his grammatical categories for the sole purpose, apparently, of stating that no categories whatsoever are of any importance. Why, then, bother to shift them? (Schlauch 1956, p. 66).

Cummings creates an image of isolation that comes about when everyone is together and the same, for isolation in a crowd is worse than being alone. He does this using various changes in language, linguistic games, and altered word uses to create a musical statement that leaves a clear impression on the reader.

Schlauch (1956) takes exception to the way Cummings uses and changes language and writes,

Given the way the poem begins, with the line "anyone lived in a pretty how town," "anyone" is first contrasted with "noone," the second word being created as an analog to the first, though by the end of the poem the two words have been conflated so that "anyone" and "noone" refers to all the same people. At the same time, "anyone" can be taken to refer to one specific person, the "anyone" who is the subject of the poem, and who feels like "noone" by the end because once he dies, no one cares or pays their respects. Deutsch (1952) cites the opening stanza as an example of the way cummings uses traditional rhythms in a different way, in this case making "his own particular music out of a nursery jingle" (Deutsch 1952, p. 114). This jingle uses variations on the nursery rhyme sound to achieve its ends: "The alterations of emphasis in this lyric give ordinary words extraordinary meanings and turn them into a dance that is also the story of a marriage" (Deutsch 1952, p. 114). The poem tells a story that covers the year, indicated by a repeated variation on line 3, "spring summer autumn winter," along with the repeated "sun moon stars rain" also to indicate the passage of time and the sameness of the days.

His poems, themselves extensions of personal speech, are addressed to the man. For all the devastation of his wit, he reaches the heights of expression in the more inclusive beauty of such songs as "anyone lived in a pretty how town" . . . and the unsurpassed "my father moved through dooms of love" (Baum 1962, p. 162).

Throughout, cummings uses pronouns in different ways to link people together so that the experience of one is really a reflection of the experience of all, even when the two may seem quite different. The wedding is a bringing together of "someones" and "everyones," the specific and the general. Cummings ties the meaning of entire poem together by repeating ideas and images, as when he links "with up so floating many bells down" in the second line with the same words in stanza six.

The most obvious example of toying with langua

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Approximate Word count = 1919
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English