E E Cummings

Un poeta es alguien que siente, y quien expresa sus sentimientos mediante palabras Esto debe sonar fácil. No lo es. Muchas personas piensan o creen o saben que sienten—pero eso es pensar o creer o saber: no sentir. Y poesía es sentimiento — no saber o creer o pensar. Casi todos pueden aprender a pensar o creer o saber, pero ni un solo ser humano puede ser enseñado a sentir. ¿Por qué? Porque siempre que pienses o creas o sepas, sos un montón de otras personas: pero el momento que vos sientas, no sos nadie más que vos mismo. El ser nadie-más-que-vos-mismo—en un mundo que está haciendo lo mejor, día y noche, para hacerte todos los demás—significa el pelear la pelea más dura que cualquier ser humano puede pelear; y nunca dejar de pelear. En cuanto a expresar nadie-pero-vos-mismo en palabras, eso significa trabajar solo un poco más duro que alguien que no sea un poeta puede posiblemente imaginar. ¿Por qué? Porque nada es así de fácil como usar palabras igual que alguien más. Todos nosotros hacemos esto mismo casi todo el tiempo—y cuando lo Hacemos, no somos poetas. Si, al final de tus primeros diez o quince años de pelear y trabajar y sentir, te encontrás con que escribiste una línea de un poema, vas a ser muy suertudo ciertamente.

In Eimi, his poetic, typographically experimental prose memoir of a 1931 trip to the Soviet Union, E. E. Cummings measured his subjective “I-me” against the collectivist values and bureaucratized realities of the only existing socialist society of his time. His book overlays an allegorical Dantean descent into inferno with detailed, diary-like treatment of Cummings’ encounters with various Communist Party officials, Soviet cultural intellectuals, and American political fellow-travellers and tourists.  Although later in his life, Cummings would increasingly embrace a simple, binary hostility to communism, at the moment of Eimi his position is more complex with respect to the questions of communism and anti-communism. His experimental prose technique allows him a powerfully reflexive autobiographical voice that plays freely between attraction to and repulsion from his experiences in the Soviet Union. Especially focusing on his relations to other Americans in the U.S.S.R., Cummings makes his primary object of critical scrutiny not so much the Soviet system itself, as the willingness of liberal American intellectuals to embrace and make apology for that system, which openly disdained their liberal values and portended their ultimate liquidation.

About half a century ago, a little revolution in literary studies took place. Following the ideas of the Russian Formalists and Prague tructuralists, a more rigorous approach to the study of literary texts was proposed. One of the major discussions turned around e.e. cummings’ “anyone lived in a pretty how town”, especially about the heavy foregrounding in the poem. Initially, the debate was one of conceptualization and the framing of the function of literary analysis, and no effort was made to investigate the effects of the deviations empirically. This is where our research starts. In this paper we argue that the value of literary techniques lies in the effects they create in readers. Hence we will show the results of an empirical study in reactions to the poem by cummings, which will illuminate the way in which beginning vs. advanced EFL students react to foregrounding devices in the text.