A Stylistic Study On E. E. Cummings’s Poetic Devices In His Visual Poetry

E. E. Cummings is a great experimental and Modernist poet of the US, and he is a painter, too. Deeply influenced by Dadaism and Cubism, Cummings changes completely the structure and language of poems, and creates a new featured Cummings’s style. His poetry is a milestone of Modernism poetry, for he manipulates every element of languages as the tool to integrate letters, punctuations and visual effects, so as to produce poetry with great aesthetic value, and bring readers a very fresh feeling. He often takes nature, love and art as the theme of his poetry, and expresses his gratitude towards nature and life, and his poetry is full of vitality and appealing.The main body of the analysis in this thesis contains five sections:the first section deals mainly with Cummings’s application of tiny language elements, for instance, the blankness between words—to dig out what kind of meaning they possess, and how the poet gives them meaning, the different effects of the same element, etc.The second section selects three poems:my sweet old etcetera,(fea, and somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond; they contain the use of parenthesis, and discusses its functions and meanings besides its fundamental meaning—the container for annotations. It can be the intimacy creator, protector and separation of meanings, and also works in structures of poems.The third section is about the foregrounding in graphology:capitalization, decapitalization, and the combination use of punctuation serve as the objects for study; they are magical tools for the poet to make a poem dynamic. In addition, we use mOOn Over tOwns mOOn as the example to analyze the actual situation contrast shot.The fourth section focuses on the shape of the poem one:shape is an essential part in this poem, Cummings makes use of the words and creates a shape of a gravestone for the readers. In this section, his enlightment from painting is deeply emphasized, and its symbolic meaning is discussed.The last section is about another element that is crucial for visual poetry—chromatic elements—colors. Color is very popular in poem writing, but Cummings, as a poet and painter, embodies colors with much more meanings, along with light, sound, etc. This is a section mainly deals with the combination of colors and other elements. As one of a representation of experimental and modernist poets, E. E. Cummings is a master of language. He is a magician with words and manipulates language, thus creates countless amazing effects.Cummings applies many kind of foregrounding techniques, and the thesis is based on the results of forerunners, chposes poems with visual effects as objectives to illustrate the appreciation of this kind of poetry, and we hope it can offer readers some enlightments.