Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Patrick B. Mullen

Critical Essay by Patrick B. Mullen

It is generally overlooked that E. E. Cummings had an avid interest in various forms of American popular culture, especially burlesque, circuses, amusement parks, comic strips, animated cartoons, and movies…. To Cummings, burlesque and the other popular arts were alive with a spontaneous, unrehearsed quality. He wanted to capture the same quality of spontaneity in his poetry, both in content and technique. In a limited way, Cummings wrote about popular culture of the 1920's–1930's much the same as Tom Wolfe was writing about it in the 1960's. Cummings was one of the few writers of his day to deal with mass entertainment, and his fondness for it shows through in his poetry.

Burlesque had a more direct influence on Cummings' poetry than the other popular forms. (pp. 503-04)

In analyzing the art of burlesque Cummings emphasizes its incongruous and paradoxical qualities: "'opposites' occur together. For that reason, burlesk enables us...
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