Poem Response: "i sing of Olaf glad and big" by E. E. Cummings

Garrett Kitchen

April 11th, 2013

Poem Response: i sing of Olaf glad and big by E. E. Cummings

        “i sing of Olaf glad and big” by E. E. Cummings is a poem about a kind man named Olaf who was disgusted by war, and spoke out against while in the army and was beat for it, but kept talking badly about it and was tossed in a jail where he died. I think the military men beat him so brutally for speaking his mind because they were afraid that his beliefs were accurate. It seems as if Cummings was fond of Olaf for he had sympathy for Olaf in the way he wrote the poem. Also E. E. Cummings didn’t capitalize any letters in the poem including I, but he capitalizes the “O” in Olaf and that could partially be because it’s a name but I also think it is to honor Olaf. Also the when Olaf was speaking in the poem the “I”s were capitalized, but when it went too E. E. Cummings’s narration the “I”s were lowercase. I observed that in many of Cummings’s poems he plays around with capitalization, word and letter placement on the page, and different uses of grammar and punctuation, but in this poem he doesn’t tamper with much at all except to emphasize Olaf. I think Cummings did this out of respect for Olaf. He didn’t play around with grammar or punctuation much, but in the third line of the poem he puts a hyphen in the word objector. “a conscientious object-or” I think this means that Olaf is a conscientious objector of the military and its views or he is just a conscientious object, that means to the government and system he is not a person but an object among many other expendable objects. This poem tells the story of Olaf, but also is bias in his favor and because of this promotes nonconformity to an extent. This poem gets very gruesome at times which I think the author used to his advantage so that he could convey how brutal Olaf was treated. “unless statistics lie he was

more brave than me:more blond than you.” this was the conclusion to the poem, which was eye opening in the sense that speaking one’s mind against a powerful force can end up in bad things happening to someone. After reading this poem a few times and digesting it, I realized that this poem must be a true story of the poor Olaf, or it could be a fictional story made up to show the power of the government, and speaking one’s mind. But as long as the reader interprets it the way they want, and takes something important away from the poem, what does it matter.