Ambiguity and Idiosyncratic Syntax in the Poems of E. E. Cummings

The driving force of Cummings’ poetry is the desire to turn language into a flexible material that is no longer subject to conventional rules of combination and principles of distribution. Apart from breaking the limitations imposed by the referential function of language and constructing a semantic universe that works independently of the extra- linguistic one, Cumming’s poetic language also builds on an idiosyncrasy of syntax that is based on various forms and degrees of syntactic discontinuity, distortion and dislocation, in which the usual punctuation and word order rules are no longer respected, while the traditional world-building patterns are transgressed. However, they are not substituted by some new and thoroughly coherent system of principles that could justify the changes in the morphology that shape the syntax of the poems, since they only reflect the poet’s ‘ludicrous’ approach to language and the need to break free from any form of limitation enforced by convention. Cummings also plays with the iconic potential of linguistic signs, as if asserting that the juxtaposition of graphemes according to some clear principles that engender meaning is not unidirectional, but equivocal and open to multiple ‘readings’.