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    A Study Guide for E. E. Cummings's "old age sticks"
    A Study Guide for E. E. Cummings's "old age sticks"
    A Study Guide for E. E. Cummings's "old age sticks"
    Ebook28 pages17 minutes

    A Study Guide for E. E. Cummings's "old age sticks"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for E. E. Cummings's "old age sticks," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 19, 2016
    ISBN9781535829922
    A Study Guide for E. E. Cummings's "old age sticks"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for E. E. Cummings's "old age sticks" - Gale

      3

      Old Age Sticks

      e. e. cummings

      1958

      Introduction

      Published in the collection 95 Poems, old age sticks exemplifies many of the unique typographic quirks typical of cummings’s verse, including absence of capital letters, irregular use of parentheses, and the use of the ampersand sign as a contraction for and. While these surface qualities are characteristic, cummings’s poetry also displays more complex poetic structures and qualities. Old age sticks, for example, which is made up of five four-line stanzas conforming to a set syllabic pattern (3-2-1-2), speaks to cummings’s broader interest in poetic form. It also offers an example of how cummings used enjambment to focus his readers’ attention on individual words—and in some cases word fragments. The poem also showcases the poet’s skill with thematic scope and tension. Using personification to introduce the subjects of the poem, old age and youth, cummings manages in forty syllables to encapsulate the inevitable process of aging and the human response to that process. While old age warns youth to slow down, not to be in such a rush to become an adult, youth dismisses the warning and speeds on its chosen path, heading toward old age and death. Ultimately, the poem communicates very succinctly this conflict from difference in

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