Transformation in E.E. Cummings' 100 Selected Poems

In Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s words “Literature does not grow or develop in a vacuum; it is given impetus, shape, direction or even area of concern by social, political and economic forces in a particular society” (Homecoming, 1972). This statement shows how the Kenyan writer associates literature with a typical process of development and evolution. As such, literature cannot avoid, while gradually gaining ground, undergoing or facing some important changes. This notion applies to all literary genres we care to name, but more precisely to novel, drama and poetry; the latter being a particular genre by which we are allowed to exteriorize our deepest and inner feelings, to voice our mind more freely and by which we are shown all the beauty and originality of language through aesthetics and figures of speech. In the late XIXth and the early XXth centuries, rose an important and famous literary movement known as modernism and which essentially aimed at breaking with traditional and conventional literary norms mostly in terms of style, form and expression. Motivated by a new era shaken by remarkable “technological breakthroughs” and World War I atrocities, modernists felt the need to break with habits of the past; which engendered various and noticeable transformations in novelists, playwrights and poets’ works. In the circle of modernist poets, we can name among others Ezra Pound, Thomas Stearns Eliot, William
Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Edward Estlin Cummings... Born in
1894 (October 14), the latter was an American poet who deeply marked the history of literature namely through the modernist literary movement. Profoundly influenced by some famous figures such as Pablo Picasso, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, he was actually very famous for his original style characterized by a very allusive, provocative and revolutionary poetry. As an iconoclast, he adopted his own and personal poetic style, regardless of grammatical, syntactic,