Original Imitation
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date published 19/10/2007
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SummaryIn a modern era of corporate tyranny and the disappearance of an independent creative market, the artistic longing for originality is often forgotten. Radio stations sell out to public opinion, Top-40 hits recycling the last generation of Top-40 hits, and the hand-published pages of timid literary endeavors little the back shelves of Barnes & Noble like corpses on the beaches of Normandy. Because the Danielle Steele’s and Dan Brown’s of the writing world bare the arms, an army of the greatest living plagiarists, tapping into to public domain and regurgitating their own themes in the hope of producing exactly what their audiences desire. A simple kind of art, a simple kind of intelligence. It seems that the human desire to be the first, to be an inventor instead of a recycler, has vanished within the boundaries of popular literature. Now, attempts to attain originality are born mostly of hybrid genres, poets desiring to angst unconfined by poetical limits and fictionists seeking to write of love with all the beauty and sound quality of Shakespeare. Modern poetry is almost absurd in a sense, the product of coffee houses and lesbians reading to their guitars. From published collections to college workshops, form poetry has become a thing of history, and only laziness can describe the inability of poets to be original without completely destroying the sanctity of poetical constraint, for it is a talent, a precarious balance between uninhibited thought and control. More importantly, it is a sacrifice. Interestingly enough, one of the forerunners of this so-called new-and-improved experimental poetry was also one of the most notable of modern formalists: E. E. Cummings. Known mostly for his abstract syntax and absurd punctuation, his love for the sonnet form is rarely remembered in comparison to his unrestrained free verse, and he “turned to [it] more often than to any other form” (Mason 313). In many ways, however, he was a master of balance between form and emotion. For being a formalist does not always mean that the thought must be altered in order to adhere to an austere code; instead, E. E. Cummings bent the rules of formalist poetry to compliment his ideas, as exemplified in his poem “twentyseven bums give a prostitute the once” from his 1923 collection, Tulips & Chimneys (Appendix A).
Table of Contents- In a modern era of corporate tyranny and the disappearance of an independent creative market, the artistic longing for originality is often forgotten.
- The sonnet form that Cummings adapts for 'twentyseven bums give a prostitute the once' is not strict
- While the poem is, for the most part, characteristic of the Petrarchan sonnet, it also embodies many of the sound devices seen across the spectrum of poetry.
- It is apparent that, while 'twentyseven bums give a prostitute the once' is in most ways a sonnet, it is still under the full control of Cummings himself.
- Probably the most popular technique used by Cummings is punctuation.
- Beyond a doubt, like one-forth of his entire repertoire, 'twentyseven bums give a prostitute the once over' is a sonnet, even if only realized by trained eyes.
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