Summary English IEB Poetry: Nobody loses all the time

Nobody loses all the time

Biographical information: E.E Cummings

 Born in Cambridge
 Studied at Harvard
 Modernist Poet
 Poetry breaks convention
 Experimental
 Non-conformist
 Content is fragmented and disconnected view of reality
 Requires active engagement to derive meaning


Meaning and Message
 Slice of life's most ordinary
 Successful farming career that didn’t work out
 Darkly humour anecdote (amusing story)
 Poem highlights how there are people who do not succeed in life (eg. Uncle Sol)
 Highlights how in some way he finds an ounce of success eventually
 Satire of the American dream

Structure
 Complete irregularity
 Classic Authors writing


Tone
 Dark
 Macabre (dark humour)
 "Tongue and cheek"
 Sarcastic
 Hyperbolic
 Punitive

, Title
 Implies that even a total failure has a chance at success
 Ironic title
 Initially sets up an uplifting idea but the tone is "tongue and cheek" and the use of dark
humour highlights how there is no real success
 Lowercase "n" of "nobody"
 Further enhances the disempowerment of uncle Sol



Stanza 1
 Uncle Sol is an absolute figure of ridicule
 Never been taken seriously
 Mixed punctuation together with the sentences running on creates a sense of disorder in the
poem
 Reflects the chaos and sad reality of a life lived in total failure

Lines 1:
 Lowercase "u" of "uncle"
 Establishes Uncle Sol as a loser from the start
 We as readers therefore have incredible low expectations of Uncle Sol
 Yet he doesn’t even reach the incredibly low expectations

Lines 2:

 Sol means sun in Latin
 Life giving force
 Incredibly ironic
 Sarcastic/ironic
 Sol represents life/growth and happiness
 Complete opposite of what Sol is
 "born failure": establishes how he has a doomed fate

Lines 3:

 Makes the wrong choice from the beginning

Lines 4:

 Vaudevile: Supposed to be a joke
 Sets himself up for failure
 He always has been a joke (Uncle Sol)
 Source of mockery



Lines 5:

 Title of a song
 Very unnecessary use of capital letters in the title of the song
 Playful style