Summary
#e paper presents the unique oeuvre of E.E. Cummings, who claims an outstanding position 
in the heritage of American poetry, as a case of Bildungsdichtung. #is status is largely due to 
his highly innovative and iconoclastic approach to poetic composition, starting from his early 
rebellious endeavours drawing on an astounding variety of non-standard and downright 
shocking potentialities of the English language (including such peculiar linguistic and stylistic 
idiosyncracies as drastic changes of the syntactic English word order, shifts at the morphology 
and word-formation level, unorthodox use of punctuation, extravagant typography and spacing 
or arrangement of space between the lines, a diversity of meters and rhymes, as well as seemingly 
eccentric imagery), to his later and invariably maturer poetic diction – the diction of one who has 
apparently come to terms with the world and his fellow-beings, realising that genuine wisdom 
resides in the understanding and forgiveness of the inherently fallible human nature rather than 
in its continuous sardonic scrutiny.
Key words: E.E.Cummings, uniqueness of rhetoric, poetic truth and human truth, epiphany
 Povzetek
Članek oriše umetniški in človeški razvoj ameriškega pesnika E.E.Cummingsa, ki ima v ameriški 
književnosti poseben sloves. Utemeljen je na Cummingsovi nezmotljivi avtorski govorici ter vrsti 
njegovih izvirnih posegov v ustaljeno pesniško dikcijo, ki jo spoznava za preživeto, iztrošeno, 
neprepoznavno in zatorej vredno temeljite prenove. Takšno prenovo najde Cummings v 
mnogovrstnih preigravanjih skrajnega dometa angleščine ter njene leposlovne izraznosti, od 
osupljivih jezikovno-slogovnih bravur, kot so na primer drastično spreminjanje ustaljenega 
skladenjskega reda, premiki na oblikoslovni in besedotvorni ravni (posamostaljena raba glagolov, 
zaimkov, prislovov in veznikov), neustaljena raba ločil (zlasti oklepajev) ter velike/male začetnice, 
nenavadna tipografija in razmiki oziroma razporeditev prostora med verzi, preigravanje raznoterih 
oblik metruma in rime, do navidez čudaškega podobarstva in drugih retoričnih ter vizualnih 
prijemov. Razprava sledi razvoju avtorjeve pesniške in osebnostne konstelacije, ki jo zaznamujeta 
mladostno vihravo uporništvo ter poznejši zreli uvid v bistvo človeškega poslanstva.
Ključne besede: E.E.Cummings, revolucija retorike, pesniška in človeška resnica, epifanija
 DOI: 10.4312/elope.4.1-2.121-134

#e very first collections of Cummings’ poetry, Tulips and Chimneys (1923) and & [AND] 
(1925), while not yet displaying the full range of the author’s linguistic and stylistic virtuosity, 
already introduce all the themes to which he would adhere for the rest of his life: (1) love, 
especially in its relationship to the outside world and to death, following the well-known 
paradigm Eros−!anatos:
 i speak to 
 thee with a sword
 and thou art silent
 thy breast is as a tomb
 softer than flowers
    Come hither
 O thou is love not death?  (Cummings 1972, 27)
which takes up nearly half of his work; (2) a merging with the urban environment – the streets 
of cities and metropolises:
 Paris; this April sunset completely utters 
 utters serenely silently a cathedral…  (Ibid., 93)
– and with nature:
!ou aged unreluctant earth who dost
with quivering continual thighs invite
the thrilling rain the slender paramour
to toy with thy extraordinary lust…  (Ibid., 3)
#e latter theme comes to predominate in his third (XL Poems, 1925) and all subsequent 
collections, a fact which is linked by many exegetes (sometimes mistakenly) to Cummings’ 
adherence to the romantic tradition. #e third issue concerns the poet’s indefatigable  interest 
in people, either as individuals mentioned by name (Abraham Lincoln, Joe Gould, Ford Madox 
Ford, Paul Rosenfeld, Picasso, Buffalo Bill
1
) or unnamed men and women, or as types which 
are despised by the author and thus become the objects of political or social satire (generals, 
presidents, merchants, gossipy Cambridge ladies
2
) – in other words, the part of humanity for 
which the poet has coined the expression mostpeople. #ese are the major concerns of Cummings’ 


poetic spirit, overarched by many other themes such as death or eternal life, which are marginal 
at first but increasingly important in all subsequent collections: as a rule, these themes are not 
central to his early poetry but ramifications of the broader thematic framework of love, or life. 
Clearly, this stage merely lays the foundations of the great themes which are to attain larger 
dimensions in the poet’s mature and later periods. #ese foundations are complemented with the 
issue of World War I, which is likewise only outlined at this stage, namely in a short cycle with 
a French title, La Guerre (poems on war themes, both those from the front and those relating to 
Cummings’ experiences in Paris brothels, are often written in a mixture of English and French, 
presumably in an attempt to approach the idiom of the street, of the common people), which 
will reappear under the same title in the collection XL Poems:
 little ladies more
 than dead exactly dance
 in my head, precisely
 danced where danced la guerre
 Mimi à 
 la voix fragile
 qui chatouille Des 
  Italiens … (Ibid., 120)
 
A wide range of elements, sketched themes, aspects, ingredients, and poetic devices may be 
discerned in the very first collections of Cummings’ poetry, while certain characteristics 
prevailing in the contemporary or subsequent poetics of modernism are lacking. Most notably, 
these include the tragic vision (revealed e.g. in T . S. Eliot’s !e Waste Land), linguistic ambiguity 
(Wallace Stevens), structural contradictoriness (Ezra Pound), metaphysical cleverness (W . H. 
Auden), introduction of mythical fragments (W . B. Yeats), and some other constitutive modernist 
elements. Nevertheless, as noted by Norman Friedman, one of the leading experts on Cummings 
and a long-time friend of the poet’s family, the absence of the tragic vision from Cummings’ 
work simply means that his vision is of a different kind, but carries no less weight as a basis for 
lyric poetry for all that (Friedman 1960, 4).
3
 #is emphasis is particularly important because it 
is Cummings’ lack of a tragic vision that has often led to his characterisation as a sentimental 
and naive poet. As suggested in the first part of this paper, the essence of Cummings’ poetic 
philosophy lies in transcending the physical world, and his explicit lack of interest in the condition 
humaine of his time does not mean that he is insensible to it or too naive to perceive the evils 
surrounding him. On the contrary − Cummings is deeply aware of the manifold perversions 
in the modern society, as well as of the individual, lost in this society and seeking for a higher 
meaning. But in contrast to many other poets, such as Eliot or Pound, who seek a remedy for the 
so-called mal-du-siècle in the anthropology of the human spirit, by leaning on the values of the 
medieval tradition and on ancient mythology, Cummings understands the current situation as 
the reflection of a degenerate will, rather than the consequence of an evil inherent in the universe. 


He sees the final solution in an all-encompassing love, which can only be attained through the 
renunciation of suffering, preceded by the rejection of one’s ego or self.
4
 Cummings’ attitude to 
suffering and evil is characteristically averse and unsympathetic to the individual as a helpless 
victim of historical or metaphysical circumstances. In this attitude, Cummings is probably more 
strict and inexorable than in any other: a person who wants to be truly alive must be fearless, for 
this alone dispels all reservations about love: 
 … 
each dream nascitur, is not made…)
why then to Hell with that: the other; this,
since the thing perhaps is
to eat flowers and not to be afraid. (Ibid., 264)
#e complete liberation from fear and the consequent move to a level of existence dominated 
by pure and absolute love is, according to Cummings, attainable only through the abolition 
of all desires and needs fuelled by the ego. Admittedly, Cummings’ thesis is by no means 
an original one, showing sympathy not only with Buddhist and Taoist thought but also 
with the traditional philosophy of American transcendentalism, from Emerson and #oreau 
onward. Far from being simple, however, this sympathy contains a formidable measure of 
contradictoriness. More than any other poet or writer of his era, Cummings is a zealous 
supporter of individualism, free will and independence, a trait which may partly stem from 
his religious, Unitarian upbringing. His father, who aroused in Cummings both immense 
admiration and perpetual competition, even served as a Unitarian minister for a while. He 
was a peculiar, obstinate man, firmly convinced that he was in the right, as the poet reveals 
in one of his famous Harvard lectures:
I wot not how to answer your query about my father. He was a New Hampshire man, 6 
foot 2, a crack shot & a famous fly-fisherman & a firstrate sailor (his sloop was named !e 
Actress) & a woodsman who could find his way through forests primeval without a compass 
& a canoeist who’d stillpaddle you up to a deer without ruffling the surface of a pond & 
an ornithologist & taxidermist & (when he gave up hunting) an expert photographer (the 
best I’ve ever seen) & an actor who portrayed Julius Caesar in Sanders !eatre & a painter 
(both in oils & watercolours) & a better carpenter than any professional & an architect who 
designed his own houses before building them & (when he liked) a plumber who just for the 
fun of it installed all his own waterworks & (while at Harvard) a teacher with small use 
for professors – by whom (Royce, Lanman, Taussig, etc.) we were literally surrounded (but 
not defeated) – & later (at Doctor Hale’s socalled South Congregational really Unitarian 


church) a preacher who announced, during the last war, that the Gott Mit Uns boys were in 
error since the only thing which mattered was for man to be on God’s side (& one beautiful 
Sunday in Spring remarked from the pulpit that he couldn’t understand why anyone had 
come to hear him on such a day) & horribly shocked his pewholders by crying “the Kingdom 
of Heaven is no spiritual roofgarden: it’s inside you...” (Cummings 1995, 8)
#e above passage, with its undoubtedly exaggerated portrayal of Cummings’ father, suggests 
that the father’s figure played an important role in the son’s personal and poetic development. 
As admitted by the author himself in his published letters (Dupee and Stade 1969), the 
essential problem was that his father was both loving and intrusive, a strange amalgam 
of emotions which left a crucial stamp on the poet’s literary production, imbuing it with 
perpetual rebelliousness and an emphasis on his own identity. According to Cummings’ 
biographers, it also had far-reaching consequences for his private life. And since Cummings’ 
life, as has already been mentioned, copied the ideal image of the poet–artist which he 
had constructed in his youth, conflicts at this level were bound to occur. As it turned out, 
the poet’s bard was maturing faster than the poet himself, for even when the projection 
of Cummings’ personality had practically reached the level of complete liberation from 
worldly ties, he himself continued to lug around the needless clutter of his past, be it his 
parents’ heritage or his two unsuccessful marriages.
5
 According to research into Cummings’ 
biography, it was his unresolved past that produced the main limitations and weaknesses of 
his art, noted by many critics but inadequately addressed through the ignorance or neglect 
of the author’s personal development and/or decisive biographical facts.
6
 #e available 
information suggests with reasonable certainty that if Cummings ever slipped, it was on 
the thin line dividing life and art. Although this line is in many respects capable of being 
erased or even changed into an equation mark, it is also worth reflecting on W. B. Yeats’ 
observation that an artist has to decide whether he will seek perfection in his work or in life. 
#roughout his life, Cummings appears to have been (sub)consciously burdened with the 
necessity of this decision, perhaps all the more so because he tried to merge the two. #is, 
however, requires an enormous expenditure of strength and time, and it is precisely to his 
– sometimes more, sometimes less successful – attempts at transferring his professed artistic 
postulates to everyday life and vice versa – applying his life experiences and insights to his 
artistic activity – that certain critics ascribe his inability to compose a truly longer poem, 
prose piece, or play.
7
 


Cummings’ personal and poetic contradictoriness may be perceived either as an advantage or 
as a weakness. On the one hand, it places him convincingly in the modernist context of the 
aesthetician ambivalence and contradictoriness of artistic practice, which is established through 
seemingly irreconcilable views. #is is confirmed by Cummings’ admiration for Yeats’ ability to 
understand opposing views – the collective and individual, the systematic and spontaneous, the 
rational and instinctive (Dupee and Stade 1969). Yet this type of dualism has its weaknesses as 
well. #e one which calls for a closer examination in Cummings’ case relates to his – sometimes 
disputed – humanist stance, which stems from the poet’s division of humankind into mostpeople 
(snobs) and you and I (human beings). A categorisation of humanity is by its very definition 
contrary to the American tradition of “Whitmanian” romanticism and of transcendentalism 
as established in the philosophy of American literature by Emerson and inherited by E. E. 
Cummings.
8
 In contrast to Whitman’s inclusive, omnipresent love, Cummings’ introduction to 
his 1938 Collected Poems argues for an exclusivist view of man:
Mostpeople fancy a guaranteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness. 
If mostpeople were to be born twice they’d improbably call it dying−you and I are 
not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a 
supremely welcome mystery,the mystery of growing:which happens only and whenever 
we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it 
becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now’and now is much to busy being a little more than 
everything to seem anything,catastrophic included…
Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno,impotent nongames of wrongright 
and rightwrong;never to gain or pause,never the soft adventure of undoom,greedy anguishes 
and cringing ecstasies of inexistence;never to rest and never to have;only to grow. 
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question 
 (Cummings 1972, 461−2)
Clearly, Cummings at this stage of his personal development is not yet capable of attaining the 
level of transcendental experience from which the firmly established Whitman speaks to the 
entire humanity, urbi et orbi. Rather than by an experience of immanence, which would involve 
Cummings’ acceptance of the natural laws of existence and, above all, the inclusion and respect 
of all things existing,
9
 the poet’s mature (but not fully matured) work is permeated by a rebellion 
against differentness, against resignation, against contemporaneity, against lack of spontaneity 
– that is, against rationality – and against any form of insufficient (artistic) creativity. It is in 
this rebellious stance where Cummings comes closest to the romantic principle of Wordsworth’s 
“spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, although the perceptible ironic undertone is not 
characteristic of the romanticist world-view:


the mind is its own beautiful prisoner.
Mine looked long at the sticky moon
opening in dusk her new wings
then decently hanged himself, one afternoon… (Ibid., 170)
and
 O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
thee
, has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy
beauty     . how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true
to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerest
 them only with
        spring)  (Ibid., 46) 

#e moment of “truth” has come, and, with it, Cummings’ realisation that he has been led by 
aestheticism into “a salt marsh” – or, as he puts it in Keatsian terminology, “beauty has shut me 
from the truth”.
Nevertheless, the poet trapped in his temporary blind alley does evince some struggle to 
resolve and transcend the state in which he has found himself. Cummings appears to realise 
that the established concept of absolute individual love as a principle of salvation will have 
to be redefined and probably extended beyond the you-I : others paradigm.
10
 If we aim at 
mystical experience, it is bound to elude our reach as long as we exist in the monad, regardless 
of whether we fill our emptiness with metaphysical nihilism or with a beloved person. #e 
first step is thus known. #e second, for Cummings, would have been to recognise and decide 
which is the path leading to true transcendence: is it the emergence from the material towards 
the spiritual (as e.g. in W. Blake), or the complete annihilation of the difference between the 
material and spiritual? A dichotomy, then, one at least as old as humanity, reaching from 
antiquity to modernity, where it becomes flesh in the pellucid discourse of W. B. Yeats’ poem 
“A Dialogue of Self and Soul”:
My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
!at man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows
Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known –
!at is to say, ascends to Heaven;
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue’s a stone. (Yeats 1994, 285)
As may be expected, Cummings’ subsequent poetry collections express increasing pain, loss and 
hollowness, which is largely due to his more profound quest for the path to transcendence. 
All three collections, 50 Poems (1940), One Times One (1944) and XAIPE (1950), display a 
satirical and/or panegyrical turn rather than an ontological or existentialist one. #ey could 
be said to represent an intermediate yet productive stage in the poet’s quest for that general 
humanist attitude which he has tirelessly sought to establish ever since his first collection. One 
Times One in particular contains Cummings’ sharpest and best poems of socio-political satire, 
poems such as “a salesman is an it that stinks Excuse”; “a politician is an arse upon”; “pity this 
busy monster,manunkind”, and of course the popular “plato told”:
 


 plato told
 him:he couldn’t
 believe it(jesus
 told him;he
 wouldn’t believe
 it)lao
 tsze
 certainly told
 him,and general
 (yes
 mam)
 sherman;
 and even
 (believe it
 or
 not)you
 told him:i told
 him;we told him
 (he didn’t believe it,no
 sir)it took
 a nipponized bit of
 the old sixth
 avenue
 el;in the top of his head:to tell
 him (Cummings 1972, 553)
Despite the acridity of Cummings’ satire at this stage, it is significant that the substance of 
the poem, although founded on the antithesis between good and evil, no longer draws on the 
familiar polarisation of the world into the poet and mostpeople. Instead, there is a perceptible 
tendency to a gradual integration with that part of humanity which mostly involves the good 
and is apparently not as negligible as he had thought in the early period of his development. 
Indeed, every now and then we are surprised by a poem which, while ridiculing human foibles, 
nevertheless evinces so much compassion and understanding that it hardly still qualifies as a true 
satire. #e fact that Cummings’ world-view is undergoing an actual change is further evidenced 
by the increasing number of so-called panegyrical poems – modern odes and hymns, not entirely 
devoid of romantic admixtures. What is foregrounded is the praise of nature, children, life as 
such, and love (both eros and agape), with the object no longer established according to the 
principle of positive versus negative, but existing in its own right, deserving full attention because 
of its immanent characteristics:

 nothing false and possible is love
 (who’s imagined,therefore limitless)
 love’s to giving as to keeping’s give;
 as yes is to if,love is to yes…  (Ibid., 574)
#e most characteristic romantic element in these poems is probably the poet’s infinite wonder at 
everything surrounding him, simply because he sees everything that he perceives with his (wide 
open) senses as a miracle. If “[t]he Child is father of the Man” (Wordsworth), an intermediary 
between God and man as well as a gate to the Kingdom of Heaven (cf. Matthew 18:3), the poet 
is the father of the child or, more accurately, a “divine child” whose archetypal images may be 
found in most religions and mythologies of the world. In the inner human consciousness, the 
birth of a divine child symbolises the splendour of truth or the emergence of a spiritually renewed 
personality, such as is aspired after by mystics.
11
 Cummings, however, never directly refers to 
mystical experience, preferring expressions such as “magical”, “mysterious”, “miraculous” (e.g. 
“Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles”) etc. A reliable insight 
into the poet’s spiritual and emotional state around 1950 is given in the poem “i thank You 
God for most this amazing”. It was published in the collection XAIPE (1950), which cemented 
Cummings’ fame and opened for him many doors which had been hitherto closed:
12
 i thank You God for most this amazing
 day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
 and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
 which is natural which is infinite which is yes
 (i who have died am alive again today,
 and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
 day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
 great happening illimitably earth)
 how should tasting touching hearing seeing
 breathing any−lifted from the no
 of all nothing−human merely being
 doubt unimaginable You?
 (now the ears of my ears awake and
 now the eyes of my eyes are opened)  (Ibid., 663)


But while the publication of XAIPE improved Cummings’ standing with the institutions, the 
essential question of his poetic credo remained open: the question of the right way leading to 
transcendence, and the related dichotomy between spirit and matter.
In principle, this dichotomy may be resolved in two ways, either by translating reality into 
pure imagination, as practised by the most “philosophical” modernist, Wallace Stevens,
13
 or by 
equating that which exists in reality with that which should transcend this existence – in other 
words, by equating the matter with the spirit, a feature of most Eastern religions. While Stevens 
seeks a higher sense of reality by establishing a moral and aesthetic order, finally discovering it 
in what he calls supreme fiction, Cummings focuses on a moment in eternity, finding in it what 
is poetically described by Auden as “our mortal world enough”. #e realisation that the true 
nature of things is revealed through the act of complete focalisation has, of course, long been 
familiar and proper to many esoteric schools as well as to Eastern wisdom. But although the 
two share a common goal – the so-called eternal now − their methods of approaching this goal 
are fundamentally different. According to the doctrine of the then influential esoteric school 
under the spiritual guidance of P . D. Ouspensky and G. Gurdjieff, the only path leading from 
the world of illusions to a realisation of the truth about oneself and the world, and thus to 
an insight into the objective reality, is that of divided attention. In principle, this means being 
attentive to two or more things at the same time, attentive to one’s own environment and to 
oneself within it, as opposed to the principle of identification, where all attention is focused 
on one single thing to the extent of excluding everything else (Ouspensky 1949). Cummings, 
thoroughly familiar with the poetry and philosophy of the Chinese poet Lao Zi, undoubtedly 
also knew the teaching of the Chan School, “which leads to a vision of the true, Buddha nature 
of man lying deep inside the individual. #is insight is the state of immediately experiencing 
unity with the universe, which transcends all differences between subject and object, observer 
and observed, samsara and nirvana.” (Lavrač 1999, 50) Burdened with a number of complexes, 
from Oedipal problems and the sense of a continual threat to his own identity to a purely artistic 
complex, Cummings made a decision uncommon in his time but quite expected in ours: he 
opted for the Eastern path of unity (via unitiva) rather than the Western path of purification 
(via purgativa). #e two paths, however, are linked by a common denominator, the human 
struggle to overcome the three main obstacles on the way to illumination: pride, attachment, 
and anger.
14
 Now these three had been, as the present portrayal of the poet as a human being 
and as an artist has sought to show, Cummings’ main problems since the beginning of his life 
and writing career. To these three “cardinal sins” might be added a fourth, characteristic of the 
belief of the orthodox Christian, whose fundamental moral and ethical responsibility is based 
on constantly trying to decide between right and wrong. On the path of unity, however, such 
an attitude simply cannot bear fruit: Taoist wisdom, with which Cummings was evidently 
familiar, puts it this way:


#e man in whom Tao
Acts without impediment
… is not always looking
For right and wrong
Always deciding “Yes” or “No.” (Friedman 1996, 77)
When Cummings succeeded in shaking off all four – let us call them Western Christian 
– burdens for the first time, four years before his death, he wrote a poem which appeared in 
the last collection published during his lifetime, 95 Poems (1958):
now air is air and thing is thing:no bliss 
 
of heavenly earth beguiles our spirits,whose 
miraculously disenchanted eyes 
 
live the magnificent honesty of space. 
 
Mountains are mountains now;skies now are skies− 
and such a sharpening freedom lifts our blood 
as if whole supreme this complete doubtless 
 
universe we’d(and we alone had)made 
 
−yes;or as if our souls,awakened from 
summer’s green trance,would not adventure soon 
a deeper magic:that white sleep wherein 
all human curiosity we’ll spend 
(gladly,as lovers must)immortal and 
 
the courage to receive time’s mightiest dream (Cummings 1972, 675)
#is poem (in experimental sonnet form) expresses, graphically and persuasively, the words of a 
Chan master explaining the essence of satori (illumination) through the parable of a mountain: 
Before one has immersed oneself in the Chan, a mountain is for them a mountain, and 
a river is a river; once one has perceived the truth of the Chan with the master’s aid, the 
mountain is for them no longer a mountain, nor the river a river; but when one has truly 
attained one’s peace of mind, the mountain again becomes a mountain, and the river again 
a river. (Lavrač 1999, 175)
In other words, the essential shift may occur only at the point where knowledge breaks into 
experience. #is becomes possible only when one consciously apprehends and experiences the 
world in a single moment, obliterating all boundaries between matter and spirit. Even more 
exciting may be the dynamics of perception and the picture of reality emerging from the above 

poem. #e latter is formed by the interaction between two ideas: that what we see is a part 
of us, and that we are a part of what we see. #is fact may ultimately lead us to a recognition 
emphasised already by transcendentalists with Whitman in the vanguard, and likewise attained 
by Cummings: what exists outside us in no respect differs from that existing inside us, that is, 
there is no difference between the so-called World-soul and our true nature. Such a recognition, 
however, by definition excludes all such polarisation and categorisation as we have traced 
especially through Cummings’ personal and artistic development.
 Cummings’ development seems to have run in two different directions simultaneously. Like his 
modernist colleagues, he was trying to save art on the one hand and himself on the other, except 
that he attempted to attain through transcendence that unity of human existence which had 
been professed already by the metaphysical poets, especially by John Donne. #is was his first 
divergence from modernism. His other divergence was a consequence of his relatively conservative 
mentality, which led him to toy with the tradition of romanticism. Particularly in his initial and 
middle periods, marked by the extreme intensity of his life experience, his poetry grew out of 
that experience, transforming it into a universal idiom recognisable to all readers. In his mature 
and final periods, however, the influence changed: the poet’s reflection of the outside world 
turned inwards, towards itself, thus becoming a copy of itself. A new view emerged, directing the 
focus towards itself and discovering the universals there, in the particulars. #is discovery took 
Cummings approximately a lifetime. 
 − − − − [ ] − − − − č č č ž č − č č − ž [ ]