ee cummings / ernest hemingway

While working on my senior capstone project at Carroll, I wrote a reflective journal entry that I recently came across and the importance of it struck me again (and again). Here is an excerpt:

"Carroll has challenged me with intense reading and writing assignments but as I look back everything is just a bit blurry. I wish I would have learned how to appreciate writing and literature instead of just how to analyze and discuss craft and literary elements of a piece. For example, I (almost) wish that we had to pick five or so authors that we were required to know everything about - their work, their lives, their interests and opinions; I feel it is necessary to be followers of a certain order."
I've decided to become more familiar with "my" writers.
The two writers I identify with and cherish most are e.e. cummings and Ernest Hemingway. I'd like to think my poetry is reflective of cummings' avant-garde (yet traditional) style exhibiting lyrical qualities as well as (tender and) explicit images. My prose, however, is unlike Hemingway's pragmatic, no-nonsense style but I utterly admire his ability to say what he needs to say and not hide it behind adjectives. Sometimes I hide behind adjectives. I aspire to continually "clean-up" my prose.


I am reading Richard S. Kennedy's "E.E. Cummings, Selected Poems" and Norberto Fuentes' "Ernest Hemingway: Rediscovered".

Kennedy's book is a great beginner's selection of ee cummings' poems; Kennedy analyzes topics, themes, motifs without beating the reader over the head with his analyses. The reader also learns more about Edward Estlin Cummings - the boy, the man, and the writer - which helps in the understanding of the poems; Kennedy gives brief detail into cummings' life growing up in Massachusetts, his service during WWI in France, and his ideas on love, sex, war, and other social topics.

Fuentes' book is a collection of unpublished photographs of Ernest Hemingway taken by amateur photographer Roberto Herrera Sotolongo. The book is filled with biographical details and wonderfully candid photos of the writer. Through the photos one can see Hemingway's tendencies for excess, adventure, and his struggle for love and friendship.



Reading will help me to improve my own writing but it will also help me to better understand the craft, the slight (and drastic) variations in technique and style so that I may write with a purpose and speak clearly and directly to a specific audience.