Typography

Cummings is perhaps best known for his innovative typography and for his experiments with grammar and word form. He routinely uses capital and lowercase letters in unconventional ways, he inserts parenthesis and scatters periods and commas in a seemingly random manner; he uses nouns as verbs and vice versa, and he splits and combines words in unexpected places and ways. All of these devices slow down the poem for readers, asking them to think associatively, as the speaker thinks, and to question the ways in which reality has been described to them. In spite of all this apparent randomness, in general, each of his "stanzas" can be read as separate syntactical units.

Expressionism

Although cummings was known for his innovative typography and grammatical innovations, he was essentially an expressionist. Expressionism emerged as a movement in painting in the nineteenth century and reached its peak in the 1920s. Expressionists...