An Exercise in Literary Stylistics/Cognitive Poetics: “Humanity i love you” by e.e. cummings

Abstract

Literature, poetry in particular, has always intrigued readers, especially those who have an interest in delving deeper into it with a view to appreciating and interpreting it, such as literary critics, linguists, literary stylists, and more recently, cognitive linguists. The literary critic looks at it from an aesthetic point of view whereas the literary stylist and the cognitive linguist from the linguistic point of view with the latter adding a cognitive dimension to their interpretation. The most prevalent approach to studying poetry in Pakistan is the literary criticism approach. Very few would study literature through linguistics. Intrigued by both literary stylistics and cognitive linguistics, we studied some very obscure poems through these two approaches and discovered that they indeed were helpful in illuminating some of the hitherto obfuscated areas of those poems. In this essay, we present an application of literary stylistics and cognitive poetics to a poem by e. e. cummings, “Humanity I love you.”