E. E. Cummings

Cubism

A Poet and a Painter

Besides being a famous poet, E. E. Cummings was also an accomplished painter. His style of poetry was influenced by his study of abstract art. 

In 1913, E. E. Cummings attended an art exhibition featuring the work of cubist painters.  The exposure to Cubism anouraged him to become a Cubist painter and also stimulated him to develop a poetic style in which he wrenched language into new meaning s by way of fragments, harsh juxtapositions, grammatical distortions, and startling images. He also brought a visual orientation to the placement of his poems on the page. Not only did he play with typography and punctuation marks for special effects, but he also created many poems whose full significance can be understood only when seen in their spatial arrangements on the page. 

He stated, " the goal is unrealism. The method is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism into the secret glories which it contains. 

Cubism

Cubism was the most influential movement in the history of modern art. The Cubists introduced radically new approaches to rendering form and space.

Cubism began in France, where it flourished as a movement between 1907 and 1914. The leaders of the movement were the Spanish-born artist Pablo Picasso and the French artist Georges Braque. 

The Cubist painters shunned conventional treatment of space and form. A typical Cubist painting analyzes the subject in basic geometric shapes and elementary signs. By reorganizing these elements and freeing them from direct reference to objects seen in nature, the Cubists developed a new language of representation.

Many Cubist paintings and sculptures are still lifes that represent such commonplace objects as tabletops, musical instruments, bottles, and glassware. Cubist painters and sculptors were often inspired by everyday subject matter, such as the mass media and popular materials, including advertisements, cartoons, and songs. Artists often included numbers and fragments of words in their pictures. The Cubists also made collages, which are paintings that incorporate real objects, such as newspaper clippings, wallpaper. In addition, many of the Cubists were strongly influenced by the formal simplification and expressive power of African sculpture.

Cubist paintings are traditionally described in terms of Analytic Cubism and Synthetic Cubism. Analytic Cubism refers to the style that emerged about 1910. Its name suggests the way artists broke down, or analyzed, and then reassembled observed forms in various ways. Synthetic Cubism refers to the style of 1912 and later, in which artists tried to synthesize (combine) imaginative elements into new representational structures.

Cubism and its ideologies

Paris before World War I was a ferment of politics and movements. Anarcho-syndicalist trade unions and women's rights movements were especially new and vigorous. There were strong movements around patriotic nationalism. Cubism was a particularly varied art movement in its political affiliations, with some sections being broadly anarchist or leftist, while others were strongly aligned with nationalist sentiment. There was also an ideological influence on cubism from the artists of Italian Futurism.

Settings in Music

A prime example of cubism in music was given by composer Igor Stravinsky in his Piano-Rag-Music, for solo piano. It was written during Stravinsky's stay in France around 1919, as a result of contact with American popular music (ragtime culminated, at that time) from the early '20s. Elements reassembled were rhythmic and harmonic segments from ragtime and polyrhythm, bitonality and melody from his Russian influence.

Cubism in literature

Cummings was not the only poet to adapt Cubism to their art form. He was joined by the likes of Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Gertrude Stein, and Pierre Reverdy. Such poets adopted a number of techniques which could be classed as close to Analytic Cubism (destruction of grammar, strange or absent punctuation, free verse, etc.) Others were close to Synthetic Cubism, especially in the case of Guillaume Apollinaire, who fused poetry and drawing in caligrammes; created collages involving postcards, letters and the like. It should be noted that Cubist poetry frequently overlaps with Surrealism, Dadaism, Futurism, or even more diverse movements such as Vicente Huidobro's Creationism.