Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

2002

Thesis Director

David Radavich

Abstract

"This Man's Heart: Masculinity in the Poetry of E.E. Cummings" explores changing masculinity in the life and poetry of E.E. Cummings. The relationship between Cummings and his father, his first male role model, became strained when Cummings was a teenager finding his own male identity. As he rebelled against his father, a Unitarian minister, he began writing poetry in a modernist style under the direction of a new mentor, Ezra Pound.

Cummings' early modernist poems criticize conventional male roles and configurations of masculinity as outdated. As Cummings continued to grow as a man and writer, he confronted new realities which force a changing view of masculinity in his life and in his poems. The beginning of the Cold War, and his relationship with Marion Morehouse, contributed to a shift in configurations of masculinity.

While Cummings' early poems like "the boys i mean are not refined" and "Buffalo Bill's" point out the ineffectiveness of conventional male roles, his later poems present a new vision of masculinity as a man at peace in nature. Cummings began asserting a new pantheistic model of masculinity in poems such as "this man's heart I is true to his I earth:" which attempts to present a positive model of masculinity. Theories that focus on men and masculinity give insight into how and why Cummings made this ideological shift in his poetry, based on the poems themselves and on Cummings' own life experiences.

Sources cited include The Complete Poems of E.E. Cummings, Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E.E. Cummings, and books exploring masculinity such as Iron John, by Robert Bly, Fire in the Belly, by Sam Keen, and Kay Leigh Hagan's Women Respond to the Men's Movement.

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