The significant works of E.E. Cummings - Research Paper Example

His personal story reflected in poems such as number 34 about his father and All in green went my love riding, which relates his relationship to the female sex. He is best remembered, however, for his avant-guarde use of language Near the end of his life, Cummings wrote little i, a poem that looked back to his childhood and in a few short lines expressed the memory of a child from the point of view of his childhood home. He wrote “who are you little i/(five or six years old)/peering from some high/window; at the gold/of November sunset” (Reef, 1).

Cummings began his relationship with poetry at a young age. His mother wrote poetry and encouraged her son to jot down his ideas and thoughts and put them into poetic form. Cummings once said “I did not decide to become a poet- I was always writing poetry” (Reef 5). Poetry was a part of his life from such a young age that he never knew a time when he was not writing and his prolific list of work reveals the depth to which the art form allowed for his expression Cummings, who is known for using lower case letters in spite of grammatical correctness, is also known for his overt sentimentality.

His poem number 34 from his 50 Poems expresses his love for his father who had died in a car accident in 1926. The first stanza, ‘my father moved through dooms of love/through sames of am through haves of give,/singing each morning out of each night/my father moved through depths of height” (Bloom 10). This work, however sentimental, does reveal the differences between himself and his father. His father is characterized as open and loving, an attachment to the divine love that was lacking in the emotional sphere of Cummings who was more comfortable in isolation, his experience in life leaving him with the difficulty of love and the realities of death.

He writes in the work “though dull were all we taste as bright/ bitter all utterly things sweet,/maggoty minus and dumb death/all we inherit. All bequeath/” as a discussion of the inevitability of death making all that is sweet in life have a bit of bitterness as it will pass into the oblivion of death. In his poem All in Green Went My Love Riding, the predatory nature of the female can be observed through the construction of the phrasing, coupled with the last line that suggests that more than once he had fallen to the hunt of a woman.

Cora Robey states that “Cummings borrows from the Classic and Medieval past and evokes the method of the Pre-Raphaelite poets in exploring his theme: the lover’s vision of feminine cruelty” (Robey 23). Cummings uses imagery such as “the famished arrows” in order to continue the underlying theme of the cruelty of the exercise. The hunt is wrapped in beautiful concepts such as “the great horse of gold/into the silver dawn” which envelops the hunt in visual beauty, the emotional content rife with the fear of the consummation of that hunt - that the speaker will fall to the wiles, his desire to do so as much apparent as his realization that he will ‘die’ from the experience (Lehman 393).

In experimenting with language, Cummings used simple language and turned the sentence structure, juxtaposing the combinations in order to create interesting and unexpected relationships between them (Kidder and Oppenheim 79). In his poem, may i feel said he, Cummings explores a sexual interlude using very simple language the grinds like wheel over and over, the syntax