Preview

How Does E. Cummings Create Meaning?

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
234 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
How Does E. Cummings Create Meaning?
“Ree ray rye roh( E.E Cummings).” E.E. Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1894. Cummings was a poet who broke the rules of poetry. How does E.E. Cummings create visual and hearing techniques to create meaning? Cummings uses visual and auditory techniques to create meaning. To begin with, E.E. Cummings used visual techniques to create meaning. For instance, in document A when Cummings designs the poem a Leaf Falls into a leaf falling. In addition, document B Grasshopper, he adjusts the poem to make it look identical to a grasshopper jumping from place to place. Furthermore, the way he prints the word grasshopper is by scrambling the word like so r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r. Cummings used spacing, and many other techniques like capital

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    For example, the poem “Never Here” is a visual poem, and almost takes on the characteristics of a choose-you-own story, as there are 3 parts of the poem that diverge off with arrows. The first eight lines beginning, “When the girl / finally learned” (Never Here 1-2), leads in to two possible continuations of the lines, “Shadow. / They / roosted / in”, and “flesh – feather / and beak. / They lived.” These boxed in lines then branch out to other possibilities, leaving the reader to decide how to finish the poem. I think Choi’s intention here was to involve the reader in the poem in way that feels as if they are part of making the poem, rather than just readers, they can create new lines, and offer a difference perspective to how the poem is read, as there is no correct way to finish the poem. Another of Choi’s poems that makes interesting use of the physical space on the page is, “Tornado.” On the page, the stanzas look like little tornados, they start off wide and become smaller as you move down the page. This poem uses the image of a tornado to depict of the speaker feels as they are revolting against an oppressive…

    • 499 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The poetic structure I have used is free verse. Free verse is a type of poetry that does not rhyme or have any rhyming tune that can be heard in it. The poem can tell a story describing a person, animal, feeling or object. Free verse was easier for me to use. No rhyming patterns are easier for you to use more words instead of thinking of words to rhyme with the type of story you are doing. George’s marvellous medicine did not really explain any message for mood throughout the book.…

    • 596 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Robert Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts; on May 21, 1926 He attended Harvard University from 1943 to 1946, taking time out from 1944 to 1945 to work for the American Field Service in Burma and India. In 1946 he published his first poem in the Harvard Magazine Wake.…

    • 500 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Author Theodor Seuss Geisel created a writing style that has metamorphosed into its own separate category of unique vivacity coupled with a manipulation of everyday words and names to achieve rhymes or desired beats per line. The verse style found throughout most of Seuss 's work was the anapestic tetrameter (Fenkl, 2002). This style involved using words consisting of two short syllables followed by one long syllable or using words consisting of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable. The verses were then compiled into groupings of four lines. Along with this metric method, Seuss also utilized italics, full capitalization, different colored words and different sized letters to steer the reader down the paths of his books.…

    • 657 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Although one is easier to decipher than the other, they both require work to get to the roots of the true meaning of the poem, which someone who is just learning their letters, or only reads and doesnt really think about what it is theyre reading, would definitely be thinking Im seeing a poem but I have no idea whats happening. This is all due to the sophistication of the language used to write these poems, for example; Theres an espaliered pear from On the Birth of a Son, and was the noise of guns battering besieged Tobruk. For the average person, these to short parts of sentences would result in a tedious search through the dictionary and/or…

    • 846 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The study is limited to the selected poems of E.e Cumming and Gertrude Stein’s poems. E.e.cummings poems are “snow”, “in-just”, “go (perpe) go” and the poems of Gertrude stein are “new”, “study nature” and “chiken”.…

    • 208 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    A Pretty How Town

    • 456 Words
    • 2 Pages

    cummings uses narrative poetry, quatrain, couplet, and end rhyme. this poem tells a story of a man named anyone in a narrative poem form. cummings also uses a quatrain, which is a stanza of four lines. a couplet is a rhyme used in two consecutive lines. this poem has a couplet in the first two lines of each stanza, with the rhyme being at the end of the line. an example of this would be: "Women and men (both big and small) cared for anyone not at all." cummings uses many different types of literary devices in his poetry, making his poems more…

    • 456 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    A Pretty How Town

    • 1626 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Audre Lorde once said, “Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.”(Lorde) During the 20th century many authors used a new modernistic style of writing. E.E. Cummings, a modernist writer, saw poetry in this way; his poem “anyone lives in a pretty how town” shows how he believes poetry is the skeleton of our lives and that it brings about new perspective into people's lives. Cummings was born in 1894 and died in 1962, and throughout his writing career he created more than 2,900 poems. In the poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town” themes such as a move away from reality, alienation and disconnectedness, and realistic details are used to show his attitude and the attitude of the American people during this time.…

    • 1626 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    To be specific, Cummings removes the spaces between words and punctuation marks. There are several examples of this stylistic choice, but one that illustrates it very clearly can be found in a portion of the first stanza which reads “i am never without it(anywhere/ i go you go,my dear;and whatever id done/ by only me is your doing,my darling)” (2-4). The way in which Cummings opts to not include spaces between the words of his poem and the parenthesis, commas, and semicolons included therein, indicates to the reader that nothing can come between true love. The use of enjambment in which the lines of the poem flow together without interruption is also evidence of Cummings belief that true love is the product of inseparable unity. Another element of Cummings’s style that is exceptionally noticeable is the use of parenthesis around phrases that are especially romantic and endearing such as “(for you are my fate,my sweet)” (6) and “(for beautiful you are my world, my true)” (7). The way he makes the parenthesis wrap around the passionate serenades is symbolic for a lover’s embrace which gives the poem a more heartfelt and complex…

    • 813 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Editors play influential roles in literature. They can easily alter the overall atmosphere of literature or change the message behind it. Different versions of the poem “I heard a Fly buzz…” by Emily Dickinson demonstrate different caesura, capitalization and word usage. The 1955 edition by Thomas H. Johnson and the original version by Emily Dickinson portray almost identical ideas and emphasis through limited alteration of caesura and word capitalization in relation to death as somewhat unimportant event.…

    • 600 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Cummings used imagery to tell the story. Culture influenced my response to this piece of work in that I still watch cowboy movies and as a child I used to listen to old cowboy songs. By the time I got to line six; I was drawn into piece. “Buffalo Bill’s…ride a watersmooth-silver stallion.” (Clugston, 2010) Immediately I could visualize the ranch setting, the noise of the horse, cowboy lasso making circles in the air over his head. (Up to that point I thought that…

    • 667 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    descrptive writing

    • 458 Words
    • 2 Pages

    How does the poem look on a page? What about the way the poem is put together, or organised – the lengths of lines, the use of stanzas, any distinctive rhythm or rhyme? How does any of this impact meaning?…

    • 458 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    When God Lets My Body Be

    • 403 Words
    • 2 Pages

    In the poem "when god lets my body be", e. e. cummings uses archetypal images to suggest that life is a never ending circle. His images display the idea that even after death you are still left on the earth circulating through nature's cycle. To establish this idea at the beginning of the poem cummings creates the image of a tree growing from the soil of the narrators' dead body with the line, "from each brave eye shall sprout a tree." Trees are evocative of eternity- forever growing and always creating new life through their fruit. As well the tree gives that idea of dynamic life. In the line "the purpled world will dance upon Between my lips which did sing," a connection between nature and man is drawn. The narrators' lips and mouth were the center of many of the vital components of her human life. The mouth is how one eats, speaks, breathes, romances and communicates. The idea of flowers, a common symbol for the better land, now "dancing" over what was a fundamental part of her life as a human creates the image of human life and natural life being part of an intertwined cycle. The next line "a rose shall beget the spring that maidens whom passion wastes," displays the image of a rose which symbolizes fertility, resurrection and passion. The narrators' body has created the new life of the rose through the fertile soils her body created. Now with her creation another life, the life of the maiden- also symbolizing fertility and passion- is waiting for her chance to continue the circle of life. Towards the end of the poem there is an image of a bird. This represents that although the narrator is now just part of the soil she feels that she is free and without limitations. The poem is ended off with the line, "and all the while shall my heart be With the bulge and nuzzle of the sea." The words "with the bulge and nuzzle" finish with emphasis that, like the never resting tides of the sea, you go though immeasurable stages of…

    • 403 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In 1920, E.E. Cummings published the poem “Buffalo Bill’s”. This was only 3 years after William Cody (better known as Buffalo Bill) had died, making this poem like a tribute to Cody. The poem did praise Cody in multiple ways but Cummings also questioned if he really did anything heroic. Cummings was not known to have any sort of hatred towards Buffalo Bill, but he obviously did not respect him as much as any other person of his time would have. E.E. Cummings was born on October 14, 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.…

    • 702 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays