April was poetry month. In celebration, the Madison (NH) Library set out a “poet tree” where anyone could write out and hang a poem on a leaf. Reading a leaf with one of E.E. Cummings’ poems, a middle school student asked, “Why did he write it like that?”

“Even readers who seldom read poetry recognize the distinctive shape that a Cummings poem makes on the page: the blizzard of punctuation, the words running together or suddenly breaking part, the type spilling like a liquid from one line to the next:

one

t
hi
s

snowflake

(a
li
ght
in
g)

is upon a gra

v
es
t

one

Cummings was not the first poet to use a typewriter, but as this poem shows, he was the first to take advantage of its power to control the exact spacing and shape of every line, and thus to make a poem’s visual appearance as important as its musical rhythms. What looks like a thin trickle of letters becomes, to a reader who has learned Cummings’s tricks, a picture in print: the snowflake “alighting” in a twirl, the severe vertical of the “gravestone.” This playful tinkering with language is the most obvious and appealing sign of Cummings’s originality; as he once wrote, it is “such minutiae as commas and small i’s,in which…my Firstness thrives.”

The Rebellion of E.E. Cummings
The poet’s artful reaction against his father—and his alma mater
by Adam Kirsch
Harvard Magazine
March-April 2005
http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/03/the-rebellion-of-ee-cumm.html