poetry texts, poem archive at plagiarist.com

i agree with reecer for the most part about the satire on the editorial process. and also to sherri, you should cool down a bit, if you have that kind of hostility while debating poetry then nobody will take your views as having any real weight.

Is it a poem if it can't be read out loud? I don't know, but I like it anyway.

It's kind of interesting what cummings is saying: that it is only in the act of the hopping that the grasshopper becomes grasshopper.

(like that dennis hopper speech in "speed"--that the purpose of a bomb is to explode, etc.)

It would be reasonable if the poem had been written by anyone else, but the style is hardly atypical for cummings. Because of this, I find it highly doubtful that cummings is satirising anything.

At first glance, the reader is in total confusion. We try to make the best sense out of what we are seeing. One might ask “How is this a poem?” Well first of a poem does not have to follow any rules. Second, E.E. Cummings was not trying to write a poem that could be recited orally. He tried to make "r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r" visual. The word grasshopper jumps around up and down throughout the poem as a grasshopper usually would. We try to unscramble the puzzle, to make real words out of scattered letters.
When unscrambled, it looks something like this: “GRASSHOPPER, WHO, AS WE LOOK, NOW UPGATHERING INTO HIMSELF, LEAPS, ARRIVING TO BECOME, REARRANGINGLY, A GRASSHOPPER.” However it was by no means meant to be seen that way. In the original poem we see that the last word is acctualy grasshopper. It did nto need any rearanging. This establishes an imige of the grasshoper stopping, and as we see in the unscrambled version of the peom that infact is still at the end. It is interesting to look and analyze at such an unusual poem.

If you compare this work to analytical cubism of Braque and Picasso (1908-1914) you will see how they all break a subject up into fragments that don't necessarily add up to its original context. The apparently flat space of the fragmented work now engages the reader/viewer to participate in making sense of it. It has become interactive. The word grasshopper takes on meanings (as pointed out by all comments) that the reader can logically assign to it.

Has anyone else noticed that the line "a)s w(e loo)k" looks like a picture of a grasshopper? I see the 'a' as being the head, the 'k' as the back legs, and the other characters, especially the "oo" as sections of the body. Also, in some of the translations here, I see the word "himself," but I can't see it in the poem itself. I can't even find a single occurence of the letter 'f' to begin with. Also, the unscrambled "now upgathering" confuses me. Why reverse the positions of "up" and "now?" Just wondering where these translations came from.

I didn't read all of the comments because I basically understood the thing after careful reading. After that, it struck me that e.e. talks about how the grasshopper "rearranges" to still form grasshopper.

Thus, at the end of the poem, he spells "grasshopper" out perfectly. He rearranges it from the beginning, but he still is left with a grasshopper.

ok so, if you replace all the words, how is it that you see the "himself" in the translation.. there is no misjambled "himself" in the poem so yea.. do you read it because the picture is of the grasshopper himself.

in response to yan's point about himself appearing in the work. I would say to him that himself is not litterally in there as the word, but instead it is illustrated to be there with cumming's use of putting a grasshopper into the word "gathering" it is a kind of word puzzle in a way which is why cummings is so great

This poem is a great work of litterary technique. He is a real ming boggler. The poem to me represents. How as a young age u are all scrammbled up but as u get older u staighten out hint.
grasshopper at the end