Writing Style & Genre
Cummings’s poetry is original, unique and individualistic. His writing consists of him experimenting with punctuation, spelling and form and he does not follow a traditional poetic pattern, but instead by doing so he created his own writing style. Though his poems being simple and most of them brief, he emphasizes key words and ideas, some created by himself. Additionally, he uses his layout of his poems to help create the theme. He frequently uses short sentences and also starts sentences with lower case and changed the syntax and spacing in his poems. Therefore, in order to analyze Cummings' poems, its important to take into account every aspect of the poem. Many of the poems, which Cummings has written, are satirical, meaning that it contains satire and his poems address social issues. Cummings has a bias towards romanticism, his poems, mostly celebrate the themes of love, sex and seasons, especially about spring. A great example would be the poem “Since Feeling Is first” This poem shows that Cummings’ celebrates love in his poems. (This poem has been analyzed)
Since Feeling is First
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
-the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutterwhich says
we are for each other:then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis (2)
While reading various poems of Cummings, we can see that he uses an odd type of typography. He does this on purpose; he does this to separate himself from other poets. When reading his poems, one can notice that he stresses many devices, such as, broken syntax and unusual punctuation. He capitalizes words in rare cases but, the capitalized words show emphasis, therefore he does not follow the normal rule of grammar. In many poems including “I carry your heart” he does not capitalize the letter “I”, he does this to show humility. As stated earlier in the poetry analysis we found out that Cummings made up his own words, he did this to emphasize the characteristics between words.
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