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The Poetry of e. e. cummings |
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Stories -
Poems
- Favorites
of mine - Random things
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I was first introduced to e. e. cummings in my freshman year at high school, with the poem
Me up at does. A year later, after I became acquainted with the music of Tori Amos, I was delighted to find that she drew inspiration from his poems. Now I do the same. I think the thing about e. e. cumming's poems that baffles people is the kind of free verse he uses. He really takes it to another level; using licenses on punctuation, grammar, capitalization, etc. His poems take on an imagery, disregarding all rules of English in order to get an image across to the reader. But somehow, despite how I try to follow all the rules of grammar, I still like this kind of writing; the kind that kicks down the barriers and runs wild. People are sometimes afraid of it; just recently the students in my English class read In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound and scoffed at it. "If I wrote a two-line poem, you'd fail me!" one guy protested to our teacher. Well, not if it was a well-written two lines, LOL. The point is, though, people are afraid to accept a two-line poem. They feel as if it's unadequate, that it's not enough. Well, if a poem has two lines as well-written as those were, there's nothing more to say. These rules that people have hinder us a bit. In ninth grade, our English teacher asked what a poem was and almost everyone said that it had to rhyme. When she said that no, not all poems rhyme, many of them were taken aback. They had always thought that rhyming was an unspoken rule in poems. They needed something to limit their creativity, like rhyme, to help them think. Me, LOL, I can't say that I hate rhyming poems; I think they're charming. But for myself, I hate to write rhyming poems. My mind doesn't rhyme; it just goes and I don't like to hinder it if it thinks like that. If it doesn't make a bit of sense, let it be that way. I like to think anyway. Don't try to bother spoon-feeding me. I love to analyze things. Too bad I haven't gotten to that level of writing yet for other people to analyze deeply. Still have that Big Brother of Grammar hanging over my shoulder, nagging me that it has to make sense to other people. Maybe one of these days I'll be able to fight him off and let my mind run free like e. e. cummings has. |
