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  • Essay / Decoding Ee Cummings' Intentional Peculiarities Through Stylistic Analysis

    Of all the literary genres known to mankind, poetry is a form whose distinction, norm, and structure are unclear. Indeed, 21st-century literature is replete with evidence of deviations from the usual form of language – or poetic license, as they put it. Many poets are interested in linguistic experimentation in which syntax, lexicon, capitalization, and punctuation are found to be unconventional and unique. Speaking of deviation from the norm, Edward Estlin Cummings, or often stylized as EE Cummings, is quite the pioneer of avant-garde poetry, especially in the way he writes his poems in a particular way and unusual. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay With the rise of stylistic analysis in literature, the works of EE Cummings are brought into the spotlight where readers and critics can view his poetry from a linguistic perspective and how examining his form would reveal a new meaning and a new interpretation. This article will examine the poem mOOn Over tOwns mOOn (1935) and will be analyzed in terms of linguistic deviations at two levels (graphological and lexical levels). Likewise, the peculiarities of grammar and syntax will also be examined accordingly in the poem. When analyzing Cummings' poems, his graphology is the easiest to identify, as it is at the most superficial level of linguistic deviation (Li & Shi, 2015). In the poem, spacing, punctuation, upper and lower case letters, line divisions and breaks are stylized in unusual ways. These intentional features effectively used all the possibilities of the visual patterns in this poem. Take for example, among all the letters in the poem, the letter "O" seemed to appear 18 times (11 times in uppercase, 7 times in lowercase). Given the emphasis on the letter "O", the reader must assume that the letter "O" is the symbolization of the moon. In the first two stanzas, the letter “O” is capitalized – it may suggest a magnification or accentuation of the moon, showing the fullness and roundness of the moon hanging high and watching over the cities. Additionally, the capital "O" can also imply the wide-open eyes and mouths of the townspeople, revealing their excitement, eagerness, and anticipation at the sight of the moon. On the other hand, we see in the last stanza the decapitalization of the letter 'O' while the other letters are in capitals. This may indicate that in the latter part of the poem, the previously excited townspeople have lost interest while looking at the moon and have become blind to the beauty that the sky has to offer them. This significant scattering of lowercase and uppercase letters across the poem is just one of Cummings's usual typographical quirks. He used letters to effectively exploit all the possibilities of visual motifs, particularly in this poem. Regarding words and lexicon, it is observable that this poem consists of its famous neologisms and lexical currencies, through affixes such as "groping" and "dreamer". The addition of the suffixes –ness (nominal suffix to express a state, condition, quality or degree) and –est (adjective or adverb suffix used to form the superlative degree) is intended to imply newly formed concepts about the search for something by reaching (groping) or visualizing something in its extreme (dream). These neologisms help evoke visual imagery in the minds of readers. Furthermore, this is also manifested in the.