E. E. 커밍스의 개인성 찬미와 시적 구조

Abstract

E. E. Cummings has been regarded as one of the most experimental poets or an avant-garde poet in modern American poetry. He is also called an individualist who pursues an authentic self or true individuality. He celebrates the natural, personal, private, spontaneous, present, immediate, and concrete and rejects the opposites. Thus, Cummings’ target is highly organized structures or forms of authority such as government, army, business, schools, and even churches. These organizations, he believes, rob individuals of their individuality and free will and impose conformity and sameness on them. Cummings’ poetry is marked by some unique poetic experiments of unconventional typography and syntax, breaking rules of grammar and punctuation, and unusual capitalization and word spacing or coinage. The poetic experimental devices are a try to express the inexpressible or to capture the a-logical, a-linguistic, and a-experiential essence of things that orthodox typographical and grammatical structures are limited in revealing. And the devices demonstrate the poet’s desire to transgress the dominant values of his contemporary society and linguistic systems based on the values. Cummings belongs to a tradition of American individualism tracing back to Emerson and Whitman. Unlike his precursors, however, he recognized that American individualism was or would not be guaranteed in America. This doubt led him to redefine the authentic individual who could endure or move through dominant social controlling systems. This individual does not regard itself as the fixed center of the world, but is self-aware, self-creating, and self-sufficient figure of ‘growing’ and ‘becoming.’