E.E. Cummings

When reading these poems and seeing how we have progressed in the course and how modern poetry has changed, I think that this is the turning point in this era. As we move on through the years the jump from Whitman to here is drastic but many of the ideas and the call for change and questioning of mind and self have remained the same. Cummings has a varied word choice and experimental style that tends to start my definition of modern poetry. The loss of punctuation leaves the poems very open and interpretive I really enjoy that. As I still try to search for the American voice I have now turned to the voice of the modern poet as we move into more defined styles and diverse poets. The style of Cummings is an unstructured chaos that spills out on the page and pours over to leave the reader of the poem really grasping to hang on as the ride swivels and twists to make the reader dizzy but in the end hangs on as it comes to a screeching halt.

The poem I am going to examine is different than other poems that we have touched on and I believe harnesses that voice of the modern Poet that I am now searching for speaking with the brash voice of the American poet. I will be looking at pity this busy monster, manunkind. I really like this poem it is playful but at the same time profound. It comments on the state of the world we are living in and where we are going. Cummings seems to be fed up with the manunkind. He uses a phrase that I think is amazing "hypermagical ultraomnipotence" I took this as optimism in the face of depression. The natural world here is working but manunkind is somehow ruining it. The speaker is definitely pissed off that things aren't working out the way he or she had hoped. The speaker actual gives up on this world but looks to the next universe next door. It is a fun little poem that is relevant to today's issues of global warming and how no one is really trying to fix this "hopeless case". The fun is still in this poem which makes in not depressing. The "bigness of the littleness" quote really shows just how much can be encompassed in just a few short lines.