2024年4月14日发(作者：如何注册chatgpt)

Lan Xiaomeng

A Brief Analysis of gs’s Peculiar Language in His Poems

Lan Xiaomeng

(Foreign Language Department, Taiyuan Normal University, Taiyuan 030012, Shanxi)

Abstract: As a modernist and avant-garde artist and poet, gs boldly experimented with poetic

forms and language, forming a unique style of his own. To understand him, the analysis of his language

techniques is very important. Therefore, this paper gives focus on the analysis of his language techniques in

terms of morphology, word-class and punctuation. In respect of morphology, Cummings’s exploration of the

most potential possibilities of the morphemic structures of words is discussed, such as the unusual combination

of words, the split-up of one word into several parts, or the free addition of derivational affixes to create new

words. Cummings brought novelty to his audience and gave some words nonce-meanings in certain contexts

by deliberately changing the established parts of speech. In punctuation, his favourite parenthesis and the use

of period are discussed. Cummings has rendered them special functions, such as rhetorical, rhythmical and

psychological effects.

Key words: Cummings; peculiarity; morphology; word-class; punctuation

浅析

E.E.

肯明斯奇特的诗歌语言

兰晓萌

（山西省太原市 太原师范学院 外语系 030012）

摘要：作为现代主义先锋派画家与诗人，E.E.肯明斯在诗歌形式及语言上进行了大胆的尝试，从而形

成了自己独特的风格。若要更好地理解这种独特的风格，对其语言的分析必不可少。因此，本文将从

词语的形态、词类、以及标点符号三个方面重点分析肯明斯在其诗歌中所运用的独特的语言技巧。就

形态而言，肯明斯将词语任意组合与拆分，随意添加词缀以构成新词；在特定情况下，他又通过刻意

违背词语的常规用法来赋予一些词汇以偶有语义，给读者带来了耳目一新的感受；标点符号，尤其是

圆括号与句号的奇怪运用，也是肯明斯诗中的独特之处。

关键词：肯明斯；奇特；形态；词类；标点符号

Lan Xiaomeng

Introduction

gs (1894-1962), a poet and painter, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of

Edward Cummings, a Unitarian minister, and Rebecca Haswell Clarke. He had an inclination for arts and

literature from an early age. While in the Harvard, he became intensely interested in the new movement in arts

and began to experiment with free verse and to develop as a self-taught cubist painter. He wrote poems to

celebrate nature, natural spontaneous power, the individual, as well as love. He was such a radical Modernist

artist and poet that conformity, mass psychology, and snobbery were frequent targets of his humorous and

sometimes scathing satires. His knowledge of the visual arts led him to experiment with versification and by

1918, he had created a poetic style of his own. It is his innovative and controversial verse that places him

among the most popular and widely anthologized poets of the twentieth century. His poetic style is noted for

its peculiar and playful techniques: a unique employment of punctuation, idiomatic speech, compressed words,

dislocated syntax, and unusual typography, line division, and capitalization in order to capture the particulars

of a single movement or moment in time.

Cummings was very skillful in dealing with language. To make his poetic forms achieve some visual

effects, he boldly experimented with unusual morphemic structures of words, unconventional punctuations,

and deliberate grammatical tricks on word-classes, and syntactic collocation. He cast off the restraints of

grammatical rules, freely played with capitalization and punctuation, combined or separated words, created

new words by adding derivational affixes, and applied odd collocations of subjects and predicates, of subjects

and objectives, or of nouns and its modifiers. These peculiarities of language broke the established mode of

thinking of his readers, and made his poems unique and distinctive, thus establishing him as one of the central

figures in that remarkable generation of American poets, including Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, , and

John Dos Passos, who carried out a revolution in literary expression in the twentieth century.

1. Analysis in Terms of Morphology

Cummings’s aesthetic consciousness led him to the versification of both emotional and visual effects. To

achieve this effect, he tried to explore the most potential possibilities of the morphemic structures of words,

such as the unusual combination of words — to put several words together to form one single word, to split up

one word into several parts, or to freely add derivational affixes to create new words. These peculiar

morphemic structures can be found in many of his poems. In the following passage, this strange language

phenomenon will be discussed in detail.

1.1 The Peculiar Word-Combination

Cummings often combines several words together to speed up the tempo of his poetic lines so as to

produce a sense of urgency, emphasizing the continuity of actions or creating a visual effect.

In the poem “Buffalo Bill’s defunct”(see Appendix, the same below), for example, Cummings combines

several words to present us the heroic bearing of a memorable western American folk hero－Buffalo Bill. The

words “water”, “smooth”, and “silver” are telescoped together to modify the word “stallion”, suggesting not

only the smooth fur or the speed of the horse, but also the smooth-riding virtuosity of Buffalo Bill. Again,

Cummings combines the words “one”, “two”, “three”, “four”, “five”, “pigeons”, “just”, “like”, “that” together