Capitalization

__Capitalize?[[image:eng462/E.E.Sig.gif width="396" height="241" align="right" caption="Cummings' signature to Norman Friedman"]]__
E.E. Cummings' criticism often begins with how to capitalize his name. Cummings’ signs his work with both lower case and capital e’s, which only strengthens the debate. Some argue that he almost always capitalizes “I” in his poems and therefore should be addressed as E.E. Cummings. Others believe that he would have preferred the lower case e’s, because the use of capitalization in his works. Throughout this Wiki I will rely on the writings of Stanford Professor Norman Friedman who strongly suggests using the capital “E.E. Cummings”.

Friedman also notes that, “a casual look at his poems shows that of course he uses capitals—he uses them frequently, albeit not always conventionally. The same goes for spacing, word and line breaks, parentheses, and punctuation, not to mention grammar and syntax”.

E.E. Cummings was quoted in the New York Times saying, "So far as I know, English was the only living language in which the pronoun 'I' was written as a capital letter, and I see no reason to be bound by this usage".

If when reading through his poems you see that capitalization is abnormal, take into consideration why it would be altered and what effect the capitalization has on the reading.