E.E. Cummings and the Modern Man: On How the Concept of Masculinity Evolves in his Poetry.

Abstract

Very little has been written about masculinity in the writings of E. E. Cummings, a poet whose work is heavily based on his concept of American manhood and the masculine. The purpose of this article is to share a few thoughts on the models of masculinity adopted by Cummings throughout his life while highlighting how he anticipates models that appeared in the last years of the twentieth and the beginning of the twentieth-first centuries. In order to demonstrate this, I will explore some of his poems from the perspective of gender. In them we can appreciate how, through his analysis of people and events, Cummings’ progressive ideas favour the elimination of old-fashioned masculine models, celebrating feelings and a connection with nature.