Cummings, E. E. - William E. Thompson (essay date spring-summer 1982)
William E. Thompson (essay date spring-summer 1982)
SOURCE: Thompson, William E. “Intensity: An Essential Element in e. e. cummings’ Aesthetic Theory and Practice.” University of Windsor Review 16, no. 2 (spring-summer 1982): 18-33.
[In the following essay, Thompson discusses Cummings’s attempt to compress images and words as tightly and succinctly as possible to affect the strongest intensity of feeling upon the reader.]
Intensity was a cornerstone in cummings' vision and a primary element in his aesthetic theory throughout his career. In his Dial review of T. S. Eliot's Poems (June 1920), cummings stressed that “every [Eliot] poem impresses us with an overwhelming sense of technique.”1 In a 1925 review, cummings used the circus as a metaphor for his idea of what Art should be. At the circus, the spectator/reader is continually amazed by the “unbelievably skilful and inexorably beautiful and...
[The entire page is 6428 words long]
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