who needs syntax

e.e cummings is a strong candidate for the category of “pretentious poet”. Rarely does his poetry follow the pattern for even the most basic structures of our language; a cummings poem makes reading a vertical as opposed to horizontal process, and even his chosen spelling of his name screams self-important, over-analytical and pretentious. Primarily, his poetry is a pain to read. It is a process of putting words together yourself, deciding which word makes most sense with what the poem is attempting, somewhat tortuously, to talk about. And yet, somehow, brilliantly, cummings makes it work.

cummings was the non-modernist poet writing in the modernist time. Whilst artists of the post-war era were fixated on using poetry as a medium to create and find meaning and structure in a dilapidated world, cummings was stripping all that apart, destroying the most basic and seemingly immoveable force of our existence, language, through warping and twisting its most basic rules and patterns. Words are not supposed to be cut across two lines, separated by paragraphs or interrupted by jarring open-ended brackets. So why create such chaos in an already chaotic world? cummings is, cleverly, proposing an alternative solution to the innate rootlessness of a post-war society. By breaking down the last of the human certainties, he forces people to look towards another human certainty and find a purpose in this – emotion. If we have nothing left to root us and structure us, the only thing we have left to know is what we feel.

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all the flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

and death i think is no parenthesis

For cummings, it is in feeling that we will find life’s meaning; And poetry is the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” (Wordsworth), the closest, most direct artistic communication of this overarching human capability. cummings’ work is rooted in this reality, the reality of emotion and human susceptibility to it. Pretentious? Or real, positive and innately, painfully human?