‘nearerandnearerandNEARER’: Foregrounding effects of the unconventional capitalization in the experimental poetry of E. E. Cummings

Abstract

Marked linguistic structures in E. E. Cummings’ poetry have long been an issue within literary criticism and stylistics. In this sense, critical approaches to Cummings’ style have dealt mainly with grammar, lexis and morphology, while only few works have examined his graphology extensively. Departing from these trends, in this paper I analyse the use of unorthodox capital letters in 96 of his experimental poems. My aim is twofold: to identify the processes present in Cummings’ unconventional use of capital letters and to determine the effects observable in such unusual patterns. The analysis reveals that the foregrounding of capitals is materialized by the insertion of initial caps, middle caps, final caps, all caps or mixed caps where these are not expected or required. It also suggests that these unconventional patterns mainly emphasize certain elements within the poems, produce iconic effects, generate wordplay and create chaotic scenes. To a lesser degree, they also schematize words, lines or a whole poem, and reproduce differences in the tone of some poetic voices or depict elements that are capitalized in real life.

The year’s work in stylistics 2017

“…Sinclair shows how to take a Larkin poem ‘to pieces’ and focuses on grammar rather than lexis because ‘we have no proper description of English vocabulary patterns to use as a basis’ (1996/2017: 68); of course, that same year he wrote about the Firthian concept of ‘collocation’ (1966) and he would later go on to develop the first corpus-based dictionary, COBUILD. The effect of reviving this previously out-of-print title is to remind us how innovative linguistic criticism was and how transcendent its basic tenets are (see, for example, Gómez-Jiménez (2017) and McIntyre and Jeffries (2017) on poetic foregrounding; coincidentally, both examine the work of E.E. Cummings).…”