On The Matter of lower case and Tricks with Punctuation

e cummings didn't invent it but he certainly made it popular. We're talking about using lower case in poems and experimenting -and that's all it is and ever was, experimenting- with different line breaks and clever tricks with punctuation.

What the hordes of bad poets who have since followed cummings' lead don't seem to realize is that, in hindsight and with the perspective of distance, the cummings experiments are generally regarded as having failed miserably. How so? Well, for instance, how many people do you know who can recite from memory a single one of cummings' sonnets, some of the most beautiful in the English language?

There must be, somewhere, an example of poetry that's demonstrably improved by using lower case but we haven't seen it yet, and we've been searching for a combined fifty years. What we have seen, countless times, in classrooms and here on The Gazebo, are poems that have been very much improved -if nothing else, for readabilitys' sake- by the addition of proper capitals and punctuation. Try it for yourself. We're not making up this stuff.

As for tricks with punctuation, let's look at what is probably one of the most famous examples of all. It's a poem about a mouse, from ee cummings' book, is 5, first published in 1926. There's a line in the poem which reads


gr(oo)ving the room's Silence)this like

and back in 1926 -and ever since, it seems- this particular poem has been held up as proof that cummings' experiments were successful. "Look" say the devotees, "The two "o"s in parentheses are the mouse's eyes peeping out!" And yes, that's precisely what cummings intended. And yes, it is clever, and yes, it is amusing. The first time. Perhaps even the twentyfirst time. But there comes a point when it is no longer effective or amusing or clever. It becomes, as most of cummings' work does in the long run, merely annoying.

And that's a shame, because beneath the flim-flam and visual three card monte, there was a real poet lurking there. Now how many of cummings' sonnets did you say you could recite by heart?