Materials on Poetry Exam 2.A

First of all, the E.E. Cummings poem is technically untitled, but often referred to as america or the first line is used as the title. Here's some background info on Cummings, for those who did not know him previously:

Slate article about his influence on American Poetry.

Academic review article about his name.

Textbook page about the poem.

Blog page with essay on poem. This essay is good, but not great. A pretty basic 5 or 6.

One of the more surprising results of the test, to me, was that no one has--so far (I've read about half of the essays)--noted that the poem is a sonnet. You know, 14 lines, rhyming couplets (mostly, "beaut" and "slaughter" breaks the pattern), and the last two lines are distinct? It's not a conventional sonnet, by any means, but the bones of the form are there. And I'm POSITIVE most of you have had a passing knowledge of sonnets in your English classes up to now, poetic forms are big in the junior high curriculum. You need to be tapping into more of what you already know.

Finally, I am posting a sample essay below, this is NOT an AP essay, but it touches on many of the same points that a good AP essay would have. It scored a 5/5 on a different rubric, so would have scored at least an 8 or 9 on an AP rubric:

Values Without Knowledge

In his poem “next to of course god america i,” e.e. cummings takes what some would say about the values of patriotism and the tradition of fighting for the Untied States and shows his perspectives on these concepts. Cummings wrote this poem in 1926 during his disillusioned years after serving in World War I. Using unusual conventions along with assonance, diction and allusions to portray the irony of the speaker’s patriotism, cummings twists one man’s positive words about war into his negative feelings about it.

Making the main 13 lines of the poem entirely lowercase and using little punctuation portrays that cummings feels the speaker is unknowledgeable and hasn’t thought about what he is saying. No capitalization shows that the speaker does not know what he is talking about. He never saw the “heroic happy dead / who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter,” that he calls so beautiful. Cummings did see this and seems to have disrespect for the speaker’s words. Lack of punctuation makes the poem run together and go very quickly. This gives a sense of ranting and raving. Cummings is showing that the speaker has never thought about what he is saying and is only rambling on and on about what he does not know.

Cummings uses diction and assonance to further support his portrayal of the speaker’s foolish patriotism and let his own feelings show through. The first line of the poem clearly sets up the speaker’s priorities, “next to god america i.” God is number one and the sequence of the line follows his priorities. America and then himself. While the beginning of the poem has this articulation as the poem continues the word choice makes the speaker sound less and less serious, almost silly. “by gorry, by jingo, by gee, by gosh, by gum” The beginning of this line almost sounds serious but as the speaker finishes with “by gum,” it only supports that he is ranting because at this point he is speaking nonsense. Cummings also mocks the speaker’s word choice by dividing the word beautiful between two lines to represent that it really isn’t beautiful.

Assonance gives an unserious feeling to the poem with words such as oh and go, i and my, and dead and instead.
Allusions are another device cummings uses to mock the speaker’s thoughts. The speaker quotes famous patriotic songs in the beginning of the poem. “oh / say can you see by the dawn’s early my / country ‘tis of.’ This does show the speaker is patriotic. Rut the speaker only quotes the most popular lines of these songs. Cummings, again, shows that this patriotic speaker doesn’t really know what he’s saying; he doesn’t really know these songs.

Throughout “next to of course god america i,” cummings mocks the typical American patriot during post World War 1. He shows in many different ways the irony of what a patriot would say about these values that he is unknowledgeable of.