GradeSaver has ClassicNotes on Cummings' most popular poems. Click through the link to read the full guide:
All in green went my love riding
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
The poetry of Cummings is an amalgam of the modern and the traditional. Much of his thought and emotion is captured in sonnets. However, he has inflected traditional literary practices with modern elements. Cummings's unique verses deal with the universal ideas of nature and love. What is interesting about his work is the contrast between the difference in his style of writing and the themes he writes. The themes covered are often quite traditional; however, he is known for an idiosyncratic style of writing. His style of writing is very characteristic of him and his dismissal of traditional sentence structures makes his poetry unique.
His poetry is free verse in some cases but has a rhyme scheme in others. Despite being heavily influenced by the modernists, his work had an essence of the traditional sonnet. Much of his poetry is unconventional in its style and uses language in a rather strange away. Often the reader is drawn away from the content to the structure. His intentional transgression of linguistic barriers is what makes his poetry unique and unconventional. In the poem below, such a transgression can be seen.
In a poem like i carry your heart with me(i carry it in, such a transgression can be seen. The title of the poem itself is a very clear indicator of the syntactical experimentation that manifests in the poem. The lack of punctuation, while might seem odd in the first place, actually adds to the fluidity of the poem.
The same is the case with somewhere i have never travelled. The unusual punctuation in this poem may be juxtaposed with a traditional theme, in a move that is not really characteristic of the modernist movement. In i thank You God for most this amazing, the unusual linguistic structure lends to the uniqueness of the content, which isn't nearly as striking as the syntactical structure. This kind of poetry is very characteristic of E.E. Cummings and while thematically he was conventional, he boggled the minds of structuralists and sometimes even post-structuralists.
