O Sweet Spontaneous - Linguistic Analysis Of Poem By Ee Cummings

7 Pages 1751 Words

American Literature 1865-Present


O sweet spontaneous

In stark contrast of style, e e cummings’ poetry rejected most rules of English grammar. Cummings used word positioning in conjunction with other grammatical idiosyncrasies to express his ideas about the celebration of individualism, love and the essence of spring. Other quirks would include using desired capitalization rather than when appropriate, “incorrect” use of parenthesis and other punctuation. Cummings’ modernism and artistic experimentalism culminated in a radical poetic language and he created an eccentric style. Although cummings’ poetry can be a difficult read as he writes for a sophisticated audience, his writing is readable through in-depth analysis, thereby creating work that is critically interesting and satisfying to the reader.
In the analysis of the poem “O sweet spontaneous” cummings speaks of his love of Mother Earth, and he also displays his disdain of humanity. He writes that although humankind performs scientific research, pollutes the earth, and even tries to destroy her, she responds to the abuses with the greatest strength and gift of all, life. His poetic and linguistic techniques make this poem flow as it shapes the images that cummings wants the reader to mentally see and spiritually feel. Using poetic literary features of alliteration and assonance, and modifiers, cummings draws the reader a dark picture of humanity as he presents his unique view of the earth. The effect of numerous devices demonstrates his linguistic capability creating precision, invention, and deliberation.
O sweet spontaneous offers two specific graphological features, the consistent use of the non-capital letters (common in cummings’ poetry), with the exception of the first letter - actually used as a word, and the olde English use. Cummings’ use of deep spacing between the stanzas and the indention of words do not necessarily bring a new par...