E.E. Cummings

"Cummings, like quite a few modernist contemporaries, objectified langauge and even committed what we might call organized acts of violence against it. But this is violence with a cause, as Cummings’s linguistic innovations and typography serve poetic means within his philosophy. Theodore Spencer is accurate when he writes that through his typography Cummings “wants to control the reading of the poem as much as he can, so that to the reader, as to the poet, there will be the smallest possible gap between the experience and its expression” (120). Gorham Munson, writing as early as in the 1920s when Cummings was just at the beginning of his career, already realized that “Cummings makes punctuation and typography active instruments for literary expression” (10). The operative word here is active, action, process, and movement being prized concepts in the Cummings metaphysics. Norman Friedman highlights Cummings’s “obsession” with Making: “Experimental technique is the means whereby the poet tries to reproduce in the reader’s mind the vital flux of becoming which he (the poet) sees in life” (Growth 49). Something of this spirit is revealed by Richard Cureton when he says that “Perceptual immediacy for Cummings was not just an aesthetic principle: it was a central theme of his art” (“Iconic Syntax” 184)"

-E. E. Cummings’s Parentheses: Punctuation as Poetic Device - Roi Tartakovsky http://www.engl.niu.edu/ojs/index.php/style/article/viewFile/18/15