E.E. Cummings

Paper Summary:

Poet E.E. Cummings considered any force that threatened what is natural and instinctive to be an antagonist of life, an adversary that men must confront before they completely lost their ability to feel and respond as individuals. The paper shows that Cummings thought mankind obsessed with technological advances and flashy advertisements promising the American ideal that he renounced the natural condition by developing needs for unnecessary things. The paper examines Cummings' contempt for man's alienation from his true self in the poems "pity this busy monster, manunkind," and "when serpents bargain for the right to squirm," which scorn what organized society has proudly developed.

From the Paper:

"Cummings further expressed his fear of the degradation of man's natural state three years later when he wrote "when serpents bargain for the right to squirm," an Elizabethan sonnet that satirizes society's blind adherence to decorum and regulation. Here, Cummings demotes man from being a monster, a word that at least implies animalistic qualities, to being an unnatural unanimal. When such legalese as bargaining, striking, and signing on the dotted line is applied to creatures and events of nature, the effects are preposterous, and yet society accepts such irreverent behavior in man, once a natural creature. Despite the child-like language and nonsense comparisons in the poem that add a touch of innocence to the poem, Cummings' message is clear: nature is being "separated from its most essential qualities", left to exist "simultaneously with his horror of a society seriously awry" (Marks 60)."

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