Features of Syntactic Disorders in Cummings' Poetry

Abstract

In literature, departures from established rules are deliberate. In the language of sick people, departures from linguistic rules are not deliberate, but beyond the control of the diseased speaker or writer. In literature, deliberate departures are called deviations or deviances. In everyday life, the non-deliberate departures are called disorders. Normally, it is not expected to argue in terms of language disorders when studying deviations in literary works. But when characters in literature are diseased people or when the theme developed is madness, we find a pretext to analyze rule-breakings in literature, especially in poetry, in terms of linguistic disorders. Widdowson once mentioned what he called "the apparent madness of Cummings’ poetry". Our paper, anchored within the broader framework of communication disorders, is an attempt to show that the distinctions between deviations in literary language and disorders in pathological language are not always relevant. It examines some of E. E. Cummings’ poems classified as madness poetry, and shows how they share some features of linguistic disorders. The paper extends the study to other Cummings’ poems, which are not labeled as madness poetry, and shows that even these a priori madness-free poems can be considered as instances of disordered language production. After showing similarities between Cummings’ poetic language and linguistic disorders, we argue that the poet might be deliberately imitating the speech of sick people.