Ee Cummings Dbq

n the words of Albert Einstein, “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” The writer, E.E Cummings used imagination to create words that had never existed, and made his poems seem alive. Edward Estlin Cummings, commonly known by E.E Cummings, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the year 1894. He started to write poems at a young age, and his style of writing was very distinct. At the beginning of his writing career, he had a hard time finding publishers to publish his earlier works, and later he decided to publish them himself. He went to, and graduated from, Harvard University; and after his graduation, he went to Paris to join the World War I ambulance corps. On his arrival, he had time to explore the Paris art scene. He used this experience to put more style into his writing. The movements of Impressionism and Cubism influenced E. E. Cummings’s use of visual and auditory techniques in his poetry.

As shown in the poem l(a in Document A, he used visual techniques to show an image of a leaf falling. Parentheses are used to separate two different phrases. The words outside of the parentheses make the word “loneliness” and the word inside of the parentheses say “a leaf falls.” (Document A). The reader gets a sense of the leaf falling in a quiet forest, void of any people around. Therefore, he used visual techniques to add a sense of realism to his poems that no one had ever seen before. He also used visual techniques in his poem “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” in Document B, it shows a grasshopper hopping towards its business somewhere else. Cummings, with his imagination and visual techniques, paints a picture in the mind of the