by Fr Joe on November 11th, 2009

Fr Joe

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What is the name of the poet that never used capitol letters when writing? Any reason why?

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  • by iwnit on November 12th, 2009

    iwnit

    1) "Extravagantly romantic yet sophomorically naughty, outrageously Bohemian yet primly Calvinistic, E.E. Cummings became known as the poet who didn't use capital letters. Except he did, just not conventionally. For years, he experimented with the use and appearance of letters and punctuation marks. He even had a personal typesetter, S.A. Jacobs, to work on the arrangement of his poems on the page. One poem describes pigeons suddenly flying up from a sunlit sidewalk as "sprinkling," except in Cummings' hands, the word becomes "SpRiN,k,LiNg." It's not a picture of "sprinkling," but it is a visual equivalent in type."
    Source and further information:
    http://www.rochestercitynewspaper.com/entertainment/art/2009/04/ART-PROFILE-Its-All-Done-With/


    2) When people on Answerbag or some other site tell you not to use caps locks, what they mean actually is that you should use *mixed case*.


    3) All great poets who wrote in Arabic never used capital letters:

    "A unicase or unicameral alphabet is one that has no case for its letters. Arabic, Hebrew, Georgian and Hangul are unicase alphabets, while Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Armenian have two cases for each letter, e.g., A/a, B/b, C/c etc."
    Source and further information:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicase


    4) "The American poet e e cummings broke with convention by his refusal to use capital letters, even changing his name legally to lower case to make his point. His reason was, as far as I’m aware, that he didn’t see why he should use them, and that is reason enough. Don Marquis’s archie the cockroach didn’t use capital letters either. His reason was that he, being a cockroach, couldn’t reach the shift key. I’ll leave you to guess which of these reasons gladdens my philistine heart."
    Source and further information:
    http://www.jillmcgown.com/pages/writing_advice/constructing_the_story.htm


    5) "Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e. e. cummings (in the style of his poems), was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright."

    "Cummings' publishers and others have sometimes echoed the unconventional orthography in his poetry by writing his name in lower case and without periods. Cummings himself used both the lowercase and capitalized versions, but according to his widow did not, as reported in the preface of one book, have his name legally changed to "e e cummings". He did, however, write to his French translator that he preferred the capitalized version ("may it not be tricksy"). One Cummings scholar believes that on the occasions Cummings signed his name in all-lowercase, the poet may have intended it as a gesture of humility, and not as an indication that it was the preferred orthography for others to use for his name."

    "Others influenced by eccentric spelling:
    k.d. lang
    bpNichol"
    Source and further information:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings

    Further information:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K.d._lang
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BpNichol

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  • by Marguerite on November 11th, 2009

    Marguerite

    e e cummings hardly ever used capitol letters when writing poetry. It was said it was a gesture of his humility.

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