Graphic. Punctuation
Phonetic Stylistic Devices
English Vocabulary
Lexical Stylistic Devices
Syntactical Stylistic Devices
Decoding Stylistics
Biographies
Guidelines
Analysis
Texts
Biographies
Cummings, Edward Estlin 1894 – 1962. One of the most technically innovative poets of this century, Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard in 1916. He drove an ambulance in Paris after the armistice. His first published work was a novel, The Enormous Room (1922), based on his mistaken imprisonment in a French detention centre during the war. This was followed by collections of verse, Tulips and Chimneys (1923) and XLI Poems (1925).Cummings’s new style, was influenced by jazz and contemporary slang and characterized by an innovative use of punctuation and typography, as in the use of lower case letters for his own name. Features of this poetry include the use of capital letters and punctuation in the middle of single words, phrases split by parentheses, and stanzas arranged to create a visual design on the page. Formal devices were often used as visual manifestations of theme or tone; the poem’s typographical dimension itself becomes a new level of meaning.
