Lisa's English Blog: 2011

Sunday, December 25, 2011

e.e. cummings

BIOGRAPHY

Quick Facts
Full name: Edward Estlin Cummings
Birth Date: October 14, 1894
Death Date: September 3, 1962
Education: Harvard University
Birth Place: Cambridge, Massachusetts

attended Harvard University before serving during World War I
his experience deepened his distrust of officialdom and he became disillusioned by war
began splitting his time between New York City and Paris (where he studied art)
he symbolically recounted his experience at war in his first novel, the autobiographical The Enormous Room (1992)
his first book of verse was Tulips and Chimneys (1993) in wrote a total of 12 works of verse listed below...

Tulips and Chimneys (1923)
& (1925)
XLI Poems (1925)
ViVa (1931)
No Thanks (1935)
Tom (1935)
1/20 (1936)
Fifty Poems (1941)
1 x 1 (1944)
Xaipe: Seventy-One Poems (1950)
Ninety-five Poems (1958)
73 Poems (1962)
Complete Poems (1991)

He also recieved the numerous awards listed below...

Dial Award (1925)
Guggenheim Fellowship (1933)
Shelley Memorial Award for Poetry (1944)
Harriet Monroe Prize from Poetry magazine (1950)
Fellowship of American Academy of Poets (1950)
Guggenheim Fellowship (1951)
Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard (1952–1953)
Special citation from the National Book Award Committee for his Poems, 1923-1954 (1957)
Bollingen Prize in Poetry (1958)
Boston Arts Festival Award (1957)
Two-year Ford Foundation grant of $15,000 (1959)

For further information refer to the links about e.e. cummings bio:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/e-e-cummings
http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/cummings.html
http://www.biography.com/people/e-e-cummings-9263274
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/156

Literary Devices

Assonance
The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry or prose, as in "I rose and told him of my woe." Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" contains assonantal "I's" in the following lines: "How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, / Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself."

Couplet
A pair of rhymed lines that may or may not constitute a separate stanza in a poem. Shakespeare's sonnets end in rhymed couplets, as in "For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings."

Enjambment
A run-on line of poetry in which logical and grammatical sense carries over from one line into the next. An enjambed line differs from an end-stopped line in which the grammatical and logical sense is completed within the line.

Figurative language
A form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of their words. Examples include hyperbole or exaggeration, litotes or understatement, simile and metaphor, which employ comparison, and synecdoche and metonymy, in which a part of a thing stands for the whole.

Hyperbole
A figure of speech involving exaggeration.

Imagery
The pattern of related comparative aspects of language, particularly of images, in a literary work. Imagery of light and darkness pervade James Joyce's stories "Araby," "The Boarding House," and "The Dead." So, too, does religious imagery.

Irony
A contrast or discrepancy between what is said and what is meant or between what happens and what is expected to happen in life and in literature. In verbal irony, characters say the opposite of what they mean. In irony of circumstance or situation, the opposite of what is expected occurs. In dramatic irony, a character speaks in ignorance of a situation or event known to the audience or to the other characters. Flannery O'Connor's short stories employ all these forms of irony, as does Poe's "Cask of Amontillado.

Metaphor
A comparison between essentially unlike things without an explicitly comparative word such as like or as.

Open form
A type of structure or form in poetry characterized by freedom from regularity and consistency in such elements as rhyme, line length, metrical pattern, and overall poetic structure. E.E. Cummings's "[Buffalo Bill's]" is one example.

Quatrain
A four-line stanza in a poem, the first four lines and the second four lines in a Petrachan sonnet. A Shakespearean sonnet contains three quatrains followed by a couplet.

Rhyme
The matching of final vowel or consonant sounds in two or more words.

Simile
A figure of speech involving a comparison between unlike things using like, as, or as though.

Sonnet
A fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter. The Shakespearean or English sonnet is arranged as three quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. The Petrarchan or Italian sonnet divides into two parts: an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet, rhyming abba abba cde cde or abba abba cd cd cd.

Syntax

The grammatical order of words in a sentence or line of verse or dialogue. The organization of words and phrases and clauses in sentences of prose, verse, and dialogue.

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Sunday, December 25, 2011

e.e. cummings

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