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Ranked "among the most innovative of twentieth-century poets," according to Jenny Penberthy in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, E. E. Cummings experimented with poetic form and language to create a distinct personal style. While he was linked early in his career with the Modernist movement, Cummings actually more closely resembles the New England Transcendentalists and English Romantics in his championing of individuality and artistic freedom. Rejecting the small-mindedness of many people, Cummings celebrated the individual, as well as erotic and familial love. A Cummings poem is spare and precise, employing a few key words eccentrically placed on the page. Some of these words were invented by Cummings, often by combining two common words into a new synthesis. He also revised grammatical and linguistic rules to suit his own purposes, using such words as "if," "am," and "because" as nouns, for example, or assigning his own private meanings to words.
Despite their nontraditional form, Cummings' poems came to be popular with many readers.
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