How E.E. Cummings uses form in his poems Essay

Form is an integral part of poetry. The form used by E. E. e. e. cummings is quite unique, and is different in from each one of his meters. His poems, nobody loses any the time, pity this busy monster,manunkind, and r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r illustrate this fact.The poem, nobody loses all the time is a good deputation of Cummings work, pen in no traditional form. It is 37 lines long, divided into six stanzas of six lines each, and one line standing alone at the end. This poem is unique in that it does not contain any punctuation other than apostrophes and pargonntheses. Cummings does not follow the traditional practice of capitalizing the first word of each line, either. In fact, the capitalization in this poem is quite unusual. Cummings does not have sentences, since there is no punctuation, so almost all of the words argon pen in lower-case. He does not even capitalize the word I. He capitalizes only the proper nouns Uncle Sol, Victor Victrola, Missouri and McCann, as well as th e words in line five, He Was a Diver on Xmas Eve desire Hell Itself.Written in open form, this poem has a very conversational tone. The lines vary in length, showing no pattern, and there is no consistent meter. The numeral of accents and syllables per line varies throughout the poem as well, and all of this poems lines are enjambed except the last. Another interesting characteristic of this poem is that it contains no clear caesurae, or pauses within a line, as it lacks punctuation. The reviewer can only estimate where caesurae should be. Finally, the poem has no rhyme scheme, or rhyme of any kind. These characteristics all aid in giving this poem its conversational tone, and makes it very different from his poem, pity this busy monster,manunkind.Unlike the previous poem, pity this busy monster,manunkind is written in a very specific form. It is fourteen lines long, and written in blank verse iambic pentameter with no end rhyme. This particular poem has no internal rhyme in it, e ither. Like others written in blank verse, this poem contains what are called verse paragraphs. These are stanzas containing varying numbers of lines. In this poem, there are seven of these verse paragraphs, with one, two, three, two, one, three, and two lines, respectively. Cummings does come to stray slightly away from the restrictions of iambicpentameter by using metrical substitution.Throughout the poem, a handful of trochees, as well as pyrrhics, can be found. In another digression from tradition, this poem does not have capitalization at the beginning of each line, only at the beginning of each sentence. On a similar note, only two of the poems linestwo and fourteenare end-stopped. This makes for umteen other pauses, found within the lines of the poem. Caesurae are stick in lines one, two, six, eight, nine, ten, twelve, thirteen, and fourteen. Overall, for E. E. Cummings, this poem is very structuredunlike some others he has written.The poem r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r is unique, to say the least. Seen written on a piece of paper, this poem looks like a hand in a scrabble game. Comparing this poem to most other poetry is like comparing a Pablo Picasso painting to a Leonardo da Vinci. This poem is in no way written in any traditional form. It is composed of cardinal lines, and has only one stanza. The fifteen lines of this poem are indented in eight different ways, with no apparent pattern of indentation. Spacing between words within the lines also varies throughout the poem. Those words, are barely decipherable at first glance, and with seemingly haphazard placement of punctuation and use of capitalization, this poem can be easily mistaken for a meaningless jumble of characters. It has no meter and it has no rhyme.One might say that this poem must not be a poem at all, but through careful scrutiny, a reader can see that this jumble of letter and symbols does, in fact say something. This poem revolves around the letters in its title r, p, o, p, h, e, s, s, a, g and r. These letters are seen together four times throughout the poem, only arranged in different orders and with different capitalization. By the last line of the poem, and the fourth time the letters appear, they spell the word grasshopper. The third time the letters appear, they are set up so that either other letter is capitalized, with the lower-case letters being the first six of the word, and the capitals being the last five (gRrEaPsPhOs). The second time the letters appear, they are written as PPEGORHRASS, not significantly altered from the original r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r. The other words of the poem are a puzzle as well. Only the words who and to are written as simple as they are written here. In line three, the words as, we, and look, are written as a ) sw (e loo )k. In line four, the words up and now can be drawn out of upnowgath.Two other words, become and a word that Cummings himself believably invented, rearrangingly, are intertwined as rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly in line fourteen. Within the parentheses are fragments of one word, and outside of the parentheses are fragments of the other. All of the other words of this poem are blood up between two or more lines. Altogether, there are fifteen to sixteen words in this poem, and there are a number of different conclusions that can be drawn from the form they take. One conclusion could be that the poem reads, r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r who as we look up, now gathering into PPEGORHRASS, he leaps, arriving at gRrEaPsPhOs, to rearrangingly become grasshopper. Another conclusion could be that E. E. Cummings used form in a way that only he could ever duplicate.Form, in many different varieties, is found in all poetry. E. E. Cummings poetry, though often atypical, and sometimes downright peculiar, is a perfect example of that.