Lan Xiaomeng
A Brief Analysis of E.E.Cummings’s Peculiar Language in His Poems
Lan Xiaomeng
(Foreign Language Department, Taiyuan Normal University, Taiyuan 030012, Shanxi)
Abstract: As a modernist and avant-garde artist and poet, E.E.Cummings boldly experimented with poetic forms and language, forming a unique style of his own. To understand him, the analysis of his language techniques is very important. Therefore, this paper gives focus on the analysis of his language techniques in terms of morphology, word-class and punctuation. In respect of morphology, Cummings’s exploration of the most potential possibilities of the morphemic structures of words is discussed, such as the unusual combination of words, the split-up of one word into several parts, or the free addition of derivational affixes to create new words. Cummings brought novelty to his audience and gave some words nonce-meanings in certain contexts by deliberately changing the established parts of speech. In punctuation, his favourite parenthesis and the use of period are discussed. Cummings has rendered them special functions, such as rhetorical, rhythmical and psychological effects.
Key words: Cummings; peculiarity; morphology; word-class; punctuation
浅析E.E.肯明斯奇特的诗歌语言
兰晓萌
（山西省太原市 太原师范学院 外语系 030012）
摘要：作为现代主义先锋派画家与诗人，E.E.肯明斯在诗歌形式及语言上进行了大胆的尝试，从而形成了自己独特的风格。若要更好地理解这种独特的风格，对其语言的分析必不可少。因此，本文将从词语的形态、词类、以及标点符号三个方面重点分析肯明斯在其诗歌中所运用的独特的语言技巧。就形态而言，肯明斯将词语任意组合与拆分，随意添加词缀以构成新词；在特定情况下，他又通过刻意违背词语的常规用法来赋予一些词汇以偶有语义，给读者带来了耳目一新的感受；标点符号，尤其是圆括号与句号的奇怪运用，也是肯明斯诗中的独特之处。
关键词：肯明斯；奇特；形态；词类；标点符号
Introduction
E.E.Cummings (1894-1962), a poet and painter, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of Edward Cummings, a Unitarian minister, and Rebecca Haswell Clarke. He had an inclination for arts and literature from an early age. While in the Harvard, he became intensely interested in the new movement in arts and began to experiment with free verse and to develop as a self-taught cubist painter. He wrote poems to celebrate nature, natural spontaneous power, the individual, as well as love. He was such a radical Modernist artist and poet that conformity, mass psychology, and snobbery were frequent targets of his humorous and sometimes scathing satires. His knowledge of the visual arts led him to experiment with versification and by 1918, he had created a poetic style of his own. It is his innovative and controversial verse that places him among the most popular and widely anthologized poets of the twentieth century. His poetic style is noted for its peculiar and playful techniques: a unique employment of punctuation, idiomatic speech, compressed words, dislocated syntax, and unusual typography, line division, and capitalization in order to capture the particulars of a single movement or moment in time.
Cummings was very skillful in dealing with language. To make his poetic forms achieve some visual effects, he boldly experimented with unusual morphemic structures of words, unconventional punctuations, and deliberate grammatical tricks on word-classes, and syntactic collocation. He cast off the restraints of grammatical rules, freely played with capitalization and punctuation, combined or separated words, created new words by adding derivational affixes, and applied odd collocations of subjects and predicates, of subjects and objectives, or of nouns and its modifiers. These peculiarities of language broke the established mode of thinking of his readers, and made his poems unique and distinctive, thus establishing him as one of the central figures in that remarkable generation of American poets, including Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, T.S.Eliot, and John Dos Passos, who carried out a revolution in literary expression in the twentieth century.
1. Analysis in Terms of Morphology
Cummings’s aesthetic consciousness led him to the versification of both emotional and visual effects. To achieve this effect, he tried to explore the most potential possibilities of the morphemic structures of words, such as the unusual combination of words — to put several words together to form one single word, to split up one word into several parts, or to freely add derivational affixes to create new words. These peculiar morphemic structures can be found in many of his poems. In the following passage, this strange language phenomenon will be discussed in detail.
1.1 The Peculiar Word-Combination
Cummings often combines several words together to speed up the tempo of his poetic lines so as to produce a sense of urgency, emphasizing the continuity of actions or creating a visual effect.
In the poem “Buffalo Bill’s defunct”(see Appendix, the same below), for example, Cummings combines several words to present us the heroic bearing of a memorable western American folk hero－Buffalo Bill. The words “water”, “smooth”, and “silver” are telescoped together to modify the word “stallion”, suggesting not only the smooth fur or the speed of the horse, but also the smooth-riding virtuosity of Buffalo Bill. Again, Cummings combines the words “one”, “two”, “three”, “four”, “five”, “pigeons”, “just”, “like”, “that” together to show Buffalo Bill’s quick-shooting and the dynamic sequence of the successively falling pigeons shot by him.
In another poem “in Just-”, the names of two boys and two girls go together as “edddieandbill” and “bettyandisbel”, suggesting that “little” boys and girls are running hand in hand to the balloon peddler after hearing his whistling. Words so compressed sound impressive, and look live and vivid, stimulating readers’ memory to call back their childhood, especially their friends at that time.
1.2 The Peculiar Split-up of Words
Contrary to the word-combination, Cummings breaks up words into pieces to create certain poetic images and to display his skilfully “drawn” poetic pictures. He can play with the letters in such a fashion as a painter with their light and colours. A careful reader will not only appreciate a letter-drawn picture, but also wonder at the multi-connotations of separated letters. The two famous poems “l(a” and “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” are typical examples of this technique.
l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
Obviously, this is a “visual poem” which cannot be read aloud and have to be seen. There is not any complete word. All the words are broken up and presented as a design suggesting a falling leaf. Both the poet in writing the poem and the reader in reading the poem share one experience and focus on one image, that is, following the trace of a falling leaf. Furthermore, the pieces such as “l” (which is easily associated with the Arabic numeral “1”), “l(a” (which can be seen as the article “a” in French), and “one”, all evoke the feeling of “loneliness”, the theme. Therefore, by skilfully splitting up words Cummings successfully reaches a correspondence between the external form and a state of mind.
The poem “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” can exemplify the visual effect created by the dislocated words as well.
r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
who
a)s w(e loo)k
upnowgath
PPEGORHRASS
Eringint(o-
aThe):l
eA
!p:
S
a
(r
rIvInG
.gRrEaPsPhOs)
to
rea(be)rrann(com)gi(e)ngly
,grasshopper;
In this poem, Cummings creates a pictorially kinetic effect by ingenious separation and rearrangement of several words. The word “grasshopper” is rewritten as “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”, “PPEGORHRASS”, and “.gRrEaPsPhOs”, each of which seems to be a strange spelling. Moreover, some words are inserted by parentheses and other pieces of words, such as “a)s w(e loo)k”, “rea(be)rrann(com)gi(e)ngly”. All these tricks just unfold a poetic scene: a grasshopper keeps jumping in the grass. Again, Cummings unifies the form of poem with its images.
1.3 The Peculiar Use of Derivational Affixes
Cummings is good at creating words by adding affixes on the basis of the principles of word-formation and the productivity of English derivational affixes.
Words like “unmiracle”, “perhapsless” in the poem of “from spiralling ecstatically this”, “manunkind”, “of hypermagical ultraomniprotence”, “unwish”, “unself” in the poem of “pity this busy monster, manunkind”, “unanimal mankind” in “when serpents bargain”, and so on, are all of extremely suggestive power. These words achieve an impact on the readers’ consciousness; the poet’s negative attitudes toward the rapid development of human science, technology, and the so-called sophisticated western culture can be sensed. Besides, the poet also displays to the reader the productivity of language and its magical power.
2. Analysis in Terms of Word-Class
According to English traditional grammatical rules, every word belongs to a certain word class. Some words have more than one part of speech, but they are conventionally accepted. In Cummings’s poems, many words are used against the normal grammatical rules and ideas. For example, verbs function as nouns, and other locutions are as new linguistic creations. That is to say, Cummings has refreshed the meaning of worn-out words and enriched them with further meanings. It is said that modern language is a tired language so overused by propaganda, publicity, cheap novels, and songs that words have lost much of their strength and freshness. As an avant-garde artist and writer, Cummings keeps bringing novelty to his audience and tries to endow some words with nonce-meanings in certain contexts, making them revive in his poems. Therefore, his poems are clear and noticeable in their deliberately faulty grammar.
2.1 The Peculiar Use of Pronouns
There are some cases in which Cummings uses pronouns as nouns. For example, in the poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town”, the pronouns “anyone” and “noone”［sic］ are actually proper names of two persons－“anyone”, the man, and “noone”, the woman. Two other pronouns “someones” and “everyones”, which refer to “women and men” in the poem, are used as nouns, too. Both of them are even in their plural forms. The indefinite pronouns are used here to imply extensively two kinds of human beings. The “anyone” and “noone” belong to those isolated from other people, those “someones” and “everyones”. By contrasting the rare but true love between “anyone” and “noone” with the pretentious, unsteady love of the other people in the small town, Cummings satirizes the mass psychology and snobbery.
The word “theys” in the forty-ninth line of another poem－ “my father moved through dooms of love”—is also used as a noun, referring to the state that is isolated from others.
2.2 The Peculiar Use of Auxiliaries
Some auxiliaries are used as nouns in Cummings’s poems. Take for example the sentence “he sang his didn’t he dance his did” in the poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town”. The auxiliaries “didn’t” here actually means “what he didn’t do”, and “did” means “what he did”. The usage of the word “isn’t” in the seventh line is the same. It seems economical and effective in this way to make a contrast between the leisurely, carefree life of “anyone”, and the mediocre, vulgar life of “women and men”.
In the poem “my father moved through dooms of love”, one could also find such peculiar use of auxiliaries, such as “am” in the second line and the sixtieth line. It means “ego” in the context, which is obviously a noun.
2.3 The Peculiar Use of Adverbs
Cummings uses adverbs as adjectives or nouns in some of his poems like “anyone lived in a pretty how town” and “my father moved through dooms of love”. The adverb “how” in the sentence “anyone lived in a pretty how town” is actually an adjective modifying the noun “town”. It adds something ironical into the description of this town, where “anyone”, “noone”, “someones”, and “everyones” live. Different from the life of “anyone”, “someones” and “everyones” just “said their nevers they slept their dream” (i.e. “they talked about the things they have never done, and they have no dreams at all”). The word “never” here is used unconventionally as a noun in its plural form, which catches the attention of readers and calls for deep thinking.
2.4 The Peculiar Use of Verbs
In the poem “my father moved through dooms of love”, one can find some peculiar use of verbs. The words “have” and “give” in the second line, “begin” in the twentieth line are used as nouns. There are many English verbs having nominal meanings, which bear some relations with their verbal meanings. On this basis, Cummings wittily creates nominal meanings for some verbs, although in some important way, such success depends on the reader’s sharing assumption he thus reopens.
Again in this poem, words “must” and “shall” in the thirty-third line can illustrate Cummings’s peculiar use of modal verbs as well. Here, “must” and “shall” are used as nouns to mock those whose deeds do not match their words.
2.5 The Peculiar Use of Nouns
In Cummings’s poems, the moon appears frequently. It seems that Cummings loves it very much, and gives the moon many fine meanings. The moon in his poems refers not only to the natural object any more. In the poem “love is more thicker than forget”, he writes: “it is most mad and moonly”. Here “moon” is used as an adjective, referring to the state of love that should be as clear (honest to each other) and cold (reasonable) as the moon light. He even uses such expressions as “ a moon or two”, “young moons”, “if any moon”, and so on, treating the word “moon”, which normally refers to a definite heavenly body, as an ordinary countable noun. Thus he endowed this noun with multi-meanings.
In the poem “my father moved through dooms of love”, Cummings uses “September” and “October” as adjectives by adding “-ing”, meaning “like or of September” and “like or of October”.
The word “dreamest” in the eighth line of the poem “mOOn Over tOwns mOOn” is an example of the peculiar usage that nouns are used as adjectives. “Dream” here is an adjective in its superlative degree meaning the most dreamful in this context.
3. Analysis in Terms of Punctuation
Another striking feature of Cummings’s poetry is the peculiar use of punctuation. In his poems, punctuation marks are often omitted on purpose to achieve some emotional and artistic effects. For example, Cummings wants to satirize the politicians who constantly preach some doctrines to the public in his poem “next to of course god america I”; to present how urgent the politicians want their ideas to get through and be accepted by the people. He omits all the punctuations but the last one in his imitation of the lengthy speech of a politician. Thus, by the omission of the punctuations, his irony of the hypocrisy of this politician is achieved.
However, marks like parentheses, semicolons, or colons are frequently used in his poems for jarring effects. Once, he even employs an exclamation mark alone as the first line of a poem (the poem of “!”), to directly express his amazed feeling for the roundness of the moon.
3.1 The Peculiar Use of Parentheses
Parentheses are largely used in Cummings’s poems. Beneath their apparently peculiar usage, they mainly have three functions, one of which is to reveal a character’s inner world. It is something like the monologues in the play, which enrich the content and make the character more vivid. Take the last six lines of the poem “my sweet old etcetera” for example. The parentheses enfold the secret thoughts of the speaker as opposed to the objective scene of the rest of the poem:
cetera
(dreaming,
et
cetera, of
Your smile
eyes knees and of your Etcetera)
The second function of parentheses in Cummings’s poetry is to achieve a rhetorical effect so as to give the sentence two layers of meaning. For example, the strange sentence “rea(be)rrann(com)gi(e)ngly” is the mixture of two words “rearranngingly” and “become”, the latter of which is divided into pieces and enfolded into parentheses. The poem “l(a” illustrates this device of Cummings perfectly as well. The insertion of the parentheses in the middle of the word “loneliness” suggests the simultaneity of the scene and the feeling, adding the image into the theme, so as to strike a sympathetic chord between the writer and the reader.
The last function of parentheses in Cummings’s poems is to suggest something uncompleted or to be continued. As we know, for most cases, parentheses appear in pairs. However, Cummings sometimes employs a single parenthesis to infer something. Take the poem “silence” for example.
Silence
. is
a
looking
bird:the
turn-
ing; edge, of
life
(inquiry before snow
The last line seems peculiar because there is a concluding but unclosed parenthesis at its beginning, and no marks like period or ellipsis to end the poem. This parenthesis here “walls off what has gone before just enough so that the wondering, rather chilled awe of the poem’s final movement is given tremendous emphasis.” (Rosenthal, 2004) Furthermore, the omitted parenthesis suggests “the whole mysterious, freshly felt experience of silence, has become a relationship between the clear-eyed, awed, but uncowed observer and the imponderable, relentless nature of things”(ibid); and this relationship will go on.
3.2 The Peculiar Use of Period
In his later poems, Cummings seldom uses period at the end of a poetic sentence to mark a completion of meaning. This once more reflects his rejection of the convention. However, he uses periods sometimes for rhythmical purpose.
In “silence”, the word “silence” alone is written as a poetic line. It is isolated, and emphasized by the space below it as well as the period at the beginning of the third line. It seems strange to put a period ahead, but the period here in fact is not final but musically transitional. Meanwhile, it guides the reader to the right duration of pauses and to the right tone. That is to say, it controls the pace at which the connotation comes into view. It thus becomes the bridge for transition from the theme “silence” to its images below.