Modernism

• ee cummings served in WW1 as an ambulance driver, but this ended with cummings spending time in prison for critical comments he made about the war in letters at home - he was a pacifist
• ee cummings was fascinated by Communism and travelled to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s with the hope of seeing how it created a better society. Soon it became clear that Communism was a dictatorship in which the individual was severely regimented by the state.
• Through his father, he was rooted in Transcendentalism (a New England movement of writers and philosophers who believed that society and social institutions corrupted the purity of individuals)
• ee cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and was the son of a minister
• He experimented with poetic form, ignoring conventional punctuation and syntax by using language of precision and placing words eccentrically on the page in a deliberate pattern (experimental typography and imagist)
• Many of his words are invented, often combining 2 or more words = neologism
• he experimented with gaps, spacing and margins
• ee cummings experiments with typography could have been influenced by the French poet Apollinaire, who was considered the forefather of surrealism (irrational juxtaposition of images in order to realise the creative potential of the mind)
• ee cummings main themes were love, nature, childhood and society
• In particular, cummings explored the destruction of the individual by the mass through restrictions on free expression and conventional patterns of thought - group conformity, mass thought and commercialism
• cummings served in the ambulance corps during WW1 and was vocal about his pacifism and anti-war views
• what if a much of a which of a wind was published in 1944, as part of the collection '1x1', towards the end of the Second World War. The image of the 'wind' in this poem can be seen as an extended metaphor for the hypothetical societal, ecological and ultimately apocalyptic cosmic consequences which might have arisen from a further escalation of the conflict between the Allies and the Axis powers in WW2
• In Just is a part of poems entitled 'Chansons Innocentes' (songs of innocence) which can be seen as an allusion to the collection 'Songs of Innocence and Experience' by the Romantic poet William Blake. Like Blake, cummings adopts a seemingly innocent, childlike perspective on the world as he describes the coming of spring, which masks some ominous hints that this innocence may be about to be destroyed and corrupted
• In Just features a mysterious goat-footed figure called the balloonman who critics have interpreted as an allusion to Pan, the Greek God of the wild who was depicted as blowing his panpipes and drawing out woodland creatures at the beginning of spring. Like Pan, the balloonman has a mysterious, God-like power over the children. Drawing on Pan's association with lust and sexuality, some critics have argued that the balloonman's whistle symbolises the call of puberty, which calls children away from the freedom and innocence of childhood
• pity this busy monster, manunkind explores the destructive nature of progress