Book Review

Book: Tulips & Chimneys, E.E. Cummings

The book Tulips and Chimneys was e.e. cummings first published book of poetry. The publishing of this book marked Cummings arrival as a well read, and well criticized poet. The book gave readers the first taste of what it’s like to read poetry that completely ignores verse, rhyme, and punctuation. His work in this book exemplifies the Avant Garde style; Cummings was one of the first to really take it to the extremes. One of the aspects that make this book so fascinating is exactly that—Cummings uses radical syntax rather than a radical vocabulary in order to make his poetry peculiar.

The book is divided into two different sections with the first section, Tulips, and the second section, Chimneys. Generally, the poems in the first section of the book have a more lyrical feel to them. They are charged with description and emotion, laid out in an extremely lose free verse. The second sections calls attention towards more societal critiques, straying further away from the standard use of free verse and poetic rules.

My favorite poem in this collection is called “anyone lived in a pretty how town” His form isn’t too eccentric and he even has a bit of a rhyme scheme, but it’s his syntax that attracts me the most to it. Lines like, “spring summer autumn winter/ he sang his didn’t he danced his did” call to me in such a beautifully lyrical way. It’s a line that forces you to read over it again, until you are practically singing it with the rhythm that Cummings intended for. Stanza’s where he sticks to a rhyme scheme and definite form still hold the unavoidable creativity in his writing: “ When by now and tree by leaf/ she laughed his joy she cried his grief/bird by snow and stir by still/anyone’s any was all to her”. He uses simple technique—simple words---to create stories in a complex way. He says “he sang his didn’t he danced his did” instead of saying he was a lighthearted man who had flaws but celebrated all aspects of life, making sure to sing through all of the things he didn’t, or couldn’t, do. His diction is not only concise, but creative at the same time.

Although this book was published in 1923, the language he uses is still relevant today. His tone doesn’t seem archaic or outdated and that’s what I enjoy most about this book. I felt like I was taken through a sort of magical and majestic world of backwards sentences and tongue twisters. It is a fantastic collection of poetry.