Edward Estlin Cummings is an American poet and painter who attracted attention during the age of literacy experimentation or the late 19th century. Cummings’ work attracted many readers, especially the younger generation, because it abandoned traditional writing styles. He messed around with punctuation, spelling, and form. Cummings was criticized by many for his style and for writing about topics such as war and sex. Despite all of the criticism, in Modern American Poetry John Logan called him “one of the greatest lyric poets in our language.” Before his death in 1962, Cummings had received many honors for his work, including the Bollingen Prize in Poetry.
The main theme of “Love Is More Thicker Than Forget” is expressed in its title and in the first line of the poem which happens to be the same as the title. The title tells the reader how the author, e.e. cummings, feels about love. It can be determined that Cummings believes that love and falling in love is an experience that one cannot ignore or forget. This idea is emphasized when Cummings wrote: “and more it cannot die.” The title of the poem conveys that it is beyond someone’s control whether or not they fall in love.
Breaking Down the Poem
-The poem is written in a very lyrical style which helps to imply the rhythmic nature of love. -Cummings use of simple words in the poem, like less, begin, die, and win, allows him to convey his stance on love without confusing the reader. Additionally, Cummings creates his own slang words such as “moonly” and “sunly” to show how love can be and is constantly changing. -Tone: Although love is portrayed as sometimes pleasant and sometimes insane in the poem, the overall tone is unstressed and even humorous. Words such as ‘love’, ‘moonly’, ‘wave’, ‘sea’, ‘sky’ help to show how complex love can be in a lighter and more relatable manner.
Figures of Speech
-Personification: Throughout the poem, Cummings compares love to inanimate objects, such as a wave. This allows him to present love as something that is mad but also sane. -Antithesis: In the poem, love is “more seldom than a wave is wet.” Contrasting metaphors like this allowed Cummings to show how love can be frequent and rare at the same time. -Oxymoron: There are multiple oxymorons in the poem that help to show how contradicting love can be. An oxymoron that can be found in the poem is: “love is more thicker than forget”, “more thinner than recall.” -Imagery: “than all the sea which is only is deeper than the sea.” This shows how deep the sea is and how love is “deeper” than the sea. This implies that love is endless. -Extended metaphor: The entire poem is comparing love to forgetfulness. Cummings implies that it is impossible to forget love whether or not you are in love at that particular moment.
Cummings overall message in the poem is that love is contradicting. The poet uses figures of speech to show how love embodies everything and cannot be easily portrayed by one thing. There are many forms of love: those that are sane and those that are mad. Cummings wants to show that none of these forms of love are easily forgotten in one’s mind.
Works Cited
https://www.britannica.com/biography/E-E-Cummings
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