Appreciation of E.E. Cummings Poetry
From the Perspective of Foregrounding
1. Introduction to Cummings
E. E. Cummings, poet and cubist painter, was the reprentative of American modern experimental poets. As a poet and painter, Cummings reflected the harmony of poems and paintings in his works, eschewing the conventional rhymes and syntactic structure of poems and even rejecting to transfer information and emotion in the way of conventional printing.
2.Foregrounding in Poetry
The term ‘foregrounding’ is borrowed by stylisticians from art criticism, which distinguishes between the foreground and the background of a painting. The theory of foregrounding is probably the most important theory within Stylistic Analysis, and foregrounding analysis is arguably the most important part of the stylistic analysis in poetry.
Leech’s Theory on Foregrounding
Foregrounding is realized by linguistic deviation and linguistic parallelism.
Figure 1 The Realization of Foregrounding (Leech)
Leech divides deviation into eight types: lexical deviation, grammatical deviation, phonological deviation, graphological deviation, mantic deviation, dialectal deviation, deviation of register and deviation of historical period. Now we construct a new pattern of the realization of foregrounding.
Figure 2 The Realization of Foregrounding
九牛一毛歇后语
Figure 2 illustrates that the linguistic deviation and overregularity produce foregrounding. Linguistic deviation consists of lexical deviation, grammatical deviation, phonological deviation, graphological deviation and deviation of meaning. Linguistic overregularity includes phonological overregularity, lexical overregularity and grammatical overregularity, in which phonological overregularity consists of phonemic patterning and rhythmic patterning; lexical overregularity refers to lexical repetition; grammatical overregularity can be further divided into repetition and parallelism.
3. Analysis of Cummings’ poem “in Just-”
1. in Just-
2. spring when the world is mud-
3. luscious the little
喜欢秋天的理由4. lame balloonman
5. whistles far and wee
6. and eddieandbill come 栋字组词
7. running from marbles and
8. piracies and it's
9. spring
10. when the world is puddle-wonderful
11. the queer
12. old balloonman whistles
13. far and wee
14. and bettyandisbel come dancing
听从内心的声音
15. from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
16. it's
17. spring
18. and
19. the
20. goat-footed
21. balloonMan whistles
22. far
23. and
24. wee
3.1 Graphological Deviation
The most striking in this poem is perhaps the fact that there is no title. Rather, it is only one clau which runs over the whole poem. that only one clau runs over the whole poem. This may show that poet intends the poem to be read as a whole and places emphasis on the unity of the discour. The important effect created is the arousal of the reader’s expectation and interest. This is becau when the reader reads the first line, he gets a n of incompleteness and, therefore would like to read on to find out ‘what’ is said. Taking a clo look at the whole poem, we find that every line of the poem, in fact, creates a pulling-forward effect, though there may be differences in the degrees of strength.
3.2 Lexical Deviation
What may strike us is the compound nouns
goat-footed, mud-luscious , puddle-wonderful, balloonman, eddieandbill, bettyandisbel are ‘nonce-formations’ (the words the literary writer invents).
The Function:
1. The unusual compounds that Cummings invents are suggestive of a “child’s language”: hence, mud-luscious (pleasant muddy) and puddle-wonderful (= pleasant puddly). mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful evoke the joyful scenery-the children playing happily on the muddy ground after spring rain.
小车不倒只管推
工学是什么2. Secondly, the names are merged into one another; eddieandbill(＝eddie and bill =Eddie and Bill) and bettyandisbel (betty and isbele=Elizabeth and lsabela). eddie and bill come running(=Eddie and Bill come running). eddie and bill are the names of two little boys which have veral levels of meaning: (1)the decapitalization of the names demonst
rates the boys are very little; (2) eddie and bill are merged into one word eddieandbill renders the cubic impression – the boys are running hand in hand. The effect here is to render the hustle, bustle, and speed of the children as they come running to the summons of the whistle.
3.因为太爱你 According to the context, the nonce-formation balloonman is the compounding of the words balloon and man which implies veral meaning: 1) the man who lls balloons; 2) the man looks like a mixture of balloons and man becau there are a lot of balloons in his hands and over his head; 3) balloonman is the symbol of spring. Balloons grant a profound impression of happiness and joy. Goatfooted/ balloonMan makes readers to associate it with Greek god Pan-Half-man, half-goat. Pan, God of music and play, is the symbol of spring. The capitalization of “Man” in balloonman emphasizes that the man lling balloons is Pan-God of spring.
3.3 Lexical Overregularity
The repetition of words and phras is another device to realize the foregrounding in this
poem. The words “spring”, “whistle” ,“ballooman” and the phra “far and wee” repeat three times respectively with the repetition of the word “come”, giving a vivid account of what is happening.
