Ee Cummings Influences

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.” -E.E Cummings (Brainyquotes.com 1) E.E Cummings was a creator of a new style of writing that would impact the world of poetry forever. By introducing a new radical form used not only to convey a message, but a new style of ‘free-form’, Cummings made an early name for himself and quickly became popular among Americans. E.E Cummings work would go on to revolutionize what it meant to be a poet, what was considered a poem, and what was poetry in the people’s eyes. Cummings would inspire a new breed of writers and poets, ones with limitless space for their imagination, and the world as their canvas. Cummings did this through abstract
As a young man, Cummings was influenced by Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, both influential and unique poets. Cummings was also greatly influenced by his time in Europe during WWI. Due to his outspoken pacificity against war, Cummings and his friend were suspected of espionage and thrown into an internment camp, which inspired his first book, and autobiography, The Enormous Room which jumpstarted his career in poetry. Following the book in 1922, Cummings had four pieces published in 1923, three pieces following, and three in 1976, as well as a book of collected poems published in 2010. The book was Cummings’ first posthumously published after his death caused by a cerebral hemorrhage in 1968. During his life, E.E Cummings acquired several awards, including two fellowships, two Guggenheims, a Dial award, A Ford Foundation Grant, a Bollingen prize, and a professorship at Harvard. Cummings also used his gifts to write plays, like Eimi and Him. Cummings used his humor and unique approach to grammar and punctuation to emphasize his creativity and light-heartedness, which ultimately made his career as,“The second most widely read poet in the United States.”(Poets.org) Cummings’ humorous view of the world can be shown by one of Cummings’ most famous quotes,“The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.”(Brainyquotes.com
The Eagle is written using abstract placement of punctuation, which makes it seem like one flowy run-on. The poem seems to take place while the author is reminiscing about when he watched an Eagle fly in the wilderness on a clear, crisp, and sunny day. The Narrator goes on to speak about how he “looked to the heavens and saw Him there,”(Cummings; line 11). By capitalizing the word him, and referring to the heavens, as well as earlier saying that he had “ heard the Deity’s voice,” Cummings gives a majestic and Godly quality to whatever he is seeing: Which, in this case, is the Eagle that the passage speaks about. Cummings also gives the poem a flowy sound to help the reader visualize an eagle soaring and gliding along in the sky. This is just one of the examples of what was considered a signature style of Cummings during that time. Not only does his choice of punctuation help portray what is occurring in the poem, the lines sounds like a run-on when read out-loud. By having it read out-loud, Cummings creates a picture to help visualize what he is seeing , just as he had said in the second stanza “...A black speck downward drifting, Nearer and nearer he steadily sailed,”(Cummings; line