The purpose of this study is to carry out an ecocritical reading of some selected poems by the American modernist poet E. E. Cummings. The study aims to clarify how Cummings treats and represents nature and its motifs in the selected poems in order to find out whether such treatment and representation conforms to the ecocritical principles. In fact, it was the lack of a comprehensive ecocritical reading of Cummings’s poems that led to the conduction of this study so that such research gap would at least be partially filled. Due to the nature of the study and its participants (the five selected poems), this study adopted the qualitative approach as its research design to conduct an in-depth analysis of the poems. The process of data collection was internet-based and the process of data analysis was executed through the textual and content analysis of the poems. The model of ecocriticism applied to the poems was that which proposed by Lawrence Buell (1995:7-8). The results of the study suggest a heightened awareness of the natural world and its motifs along with a sense of interconnectivity with nature. Through an innovative use of and experimentation with language, Cummings subverts the anthropocentric views towards nature and questions the idea of nature’s otherness. According to the results, Cummings’s distortion of the syntactic and typographic aspects of language aims to portray the dynamism of nature and its processes in a manner that is partially influenced by romanticist notions. The findings of this study help answer the questions regarding the role of nature in Cummings’s poems and provide a better understanding of the modernist notion of nature in a time of massive industrialization.
