E.E Cummings 'what if a much' + 'pity this busy monster' Flashcards
State any key context about E.E Cummings
Cummings believed deeply in the individual + the conflict within the world drove a lot of his poetry. His writing was influenced by what he experienced throughout his life which is why much of his work has idiosyncratic syntax (the result of various forms and degrees of syntactic. distortion and dislocation including some unusual use of word order and punctuation, is. revealed in his work)
Cummings is associated with modernist free-form poetry and uses lower-case spellings for poetic expression.
State Cummings poems
- In Just
- what if a much of a which of a wind
- pity this busy monster manunkind
What is Cummings ‘What if a much of a which of a wind’ centred around?
Within ‘what if a much of a which of a wind’ Cummings engages with themes of destruction, the nature of the human race, and the apocalypse. His tone is deep and serious throughout the text allowing him to create a mood that is just as serious, solemn, and thoughtful. It speaks on the destruction of the earth and the risk humankind poses to itself.
The poem takes the reader through a series of three disasters. The first two are related to naturally occurring events, a tornado, and a blizzard. In the third stanza, the speaker introduces the reader to a human-made disaster that alludes to a nuclear apocalypse.
Only humanity, the speaker asserts, is capable of produces a disaster from which there is no return.In doing so, it deals with the inability to distinguish the important + significant aspects of life + those which are ultimately meaningless or less important.
State the key poetic devices Cummings utilises in ‘What if a much of a which of a wind’
- Alliteration
- Enjambment
- Allusion
- Juxtaposition.
- Rhetorical question.
- Symbolism (to the temporary happiness of Sunday summer days)
- Jumbled syntax (alluding to destruction)
- Personification (of the landscape)
The imagery that Cummings creates in these lines is vague, multilayered, and will likely bring up different references to different readers.
What is Cummings ‘Pity this busy monster manunkind’ centred around?
Pity this busy monster, manunkind’ by E.E. Cummings describes the destructive nature of progress and how it has damaged humankind’s view of the world.
The poem begins with the speaker stating that “Progress” is like a “comfortable disease.” It is something which is afflicting “manunkind” and from which humanity cannot escape. The progress to which the speaker refers is revealed to be scientific in nature.
He sees all of the problems that altering one’s own body and the surrounding environment can cause. The speaker is also extremely worried about humanity’s changing opinion of nature. The most important elements of the world are being put to the side in favour of destructive progress.
In the last lines, the speaker alludes to what he sees to be the worse choice humanity could make, to abandon earth and strive for a new world.
