E.E. Cummings, born on October 14, 1894, was a man who loved writing prose, poetry, and plays as well as painting. He spent his life, which encompassed two world wars, learning from other poets and applying his writing skills to make texts interesting for society. Cummings was part of the Modernist movement, and he believed he could write poetry that had its own unique shape, structure, and form. He wanted to write poetry that expressed many different ideas about love; even though his use of point of view, theme, and archetype may seem bizarre, it expresses the time period in which he lived. E.E. Cummings was influenced by WWI and WWII, the Modernist literary movement, and his friends and professors who also believed in Modernism.
One important …show more content…
Cummings wrote a poem from Viva that describes his experience in prison when he was captive there. “Only one of his poems he wrote while interned, ‘Doll’s boy’s asleep,’ can be seen as perhaps related to his captivity. It recounts a dream fantasy of a women, an obvious subject for a young man deprived of all but a glimpse, now and then of a female among those also confined at La Ferté-Macé” (Laucanno 127). With his poem, he uses a lot of imagery such as “Behind prison she grins” (Laucanno 127) to describe his captivity. Another example of imagery would be “She stands / greenly over the flat pasteboard hill with a little pink road / like a stand of spilled saw-dust” (Laucanno 127). In addition, Cummings uses this line that has a lot of imagery and figurative language about love and relationships, “She is a white shadow asleep in the reddishness of Day” (Laucanno 127). Critic Laucanno knows his techniques and style make this poem unique and understandable. Readers feel as if they were part of the captivity.Laucanno also knows that Cummings does not understand love even though all the girls he met cared so much for him. Laucanno agrees that his use of punctuation and grammar