e. e. cummings: A Lyrical Rebel Alexa Dato College

Modernist poet Edward Estlin Cummings (pen name e. e. cummings) uses diverse poetic structures in “Buffalo Bill’s” and “next to of course god america i” to draw the reader’s attention to the deeper meaning behind the words. Cummings experiments with capitalization, punctuation, and line breaks to lightly veil his personal opinions with humor and disorganization. Through his unique poetic style, Cummings breaks away from traditional poetic standards in order to express his views on love, pain, and commercialized American culture. Modernist literature is often characterized by its reflections on the brutality of war, alienation and instability, and stream of consciousness narration. The work of an insightful experimental modernist, Cummings’ poems often revolve around the themes of cruelty and loneliness, which stem from his experience in a French prison camp during World War I, but asset his originality in the face of such adversity.

Susan Cheever, close family friend to the Cummings, describes e. e. cummings’ distinct brand of Modernism as having three parts: “The first was the method of using sounds instead of meanings to connect words to the reader’s feelings. The second was the idea of stripping away all unnecessary things...