Paternal Influence in E.E. Cummings and Dylan Thomas
This paper examines how paternal relationships influenced the poetry of E.E. Cummings and Dylan Thomas. Focusing on Cummings's "my father moved through dooms of love" and Thomas's "Elegy" and "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," the essay explores how each poet processed grief, admiration, and loss through verse. Cummings celebrates his father's gentle spirit as a means of coping with death, while Thomas confronts his father's blindness and mortality with urgency and anguish. Together, the two poets illustrate how deeply personal filial bonds can shape a writer's voice, imagery, and thematic choices.
- Introduction: Story, Connection, and the Writing Self: Personal experience shapes every writer's voice
- E.E. Cummings and the Paternal Muse: Cummings celebrates his father through grief and tribute
- Dylan Thomas: Blindness, Loss, and the Father's Gaze: Thomas uses his father's blindness as poetic lens
- Do Not Go Gentle: Rage, Light, and the Cycle of Life: Thomas rages against his father's coming death
- Conclusion: Paternal bonds deepen understanding of both poets
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds its literary analysis in a clear theoretical frame, using Howard Gardner's concept of storytelling to establish why personal experience matters to a writer's voice before diving into the poems.
- Direct quotation from the primary texts is used consistently to support each interpretive claim, allowing the poems themselves to carry the argument rather than paraphrase alone.
- The parallel structure — one section per poet, each working through multiple poems — makes the comparative argument easy to follow and reinforces the thematic connection between the two writers.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates close reading as a comparative method. Rather than summarizing plots or biographies, the writer selects specific lines and images — Cummings's "theys of we," Thomas's repeated "dying of the light" — and unpacks what those choices reveal about each poet's emotional relationship with his father. This technique shows readers how word-level decisions carry biographical and thematic weight.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a general claim about the role of personal experience in writing, then narrows to a thesis about paternal influence. Two body sections, one on Cummings and one on Thomas, each analyze two poems in sequence. The conclusion restates the comparative insight without introducing new material. The structure is clean and conventional, making it a solid model for a short comparative literary essay at the undergraduate introductory level.
Introduction: Story, Connection, and the Writing Self
Every writer has a different story — a unique path taken to become a writer or to identify as one. Many are born with natural talent while others struggle to learn the craft. It is this internal story, an array of experiences, that makes the writer who they are and influences what and how they write. Early on, a writer recognizes the need to convey that story, and a connection is born. This connection begins at a fundamental level of human sociology, where the use of story is central. Howard Gardner reflects, "the ultimate impact of the writer depends most significantly on the particular story that he or she relates or embodies, and the reception to that story on the part of the audiences" (14). By telling stories, a writer allows for a certain level of openness and vulnerability that makes them human.
In many ways, poems are snippets of stories told to evoke emotion and pursue greater levels of thought. The act of writing poetry is deeply personal and draws upon the writer's many influences. This paper focuses on the works of E.E. Cummings and Dylan Thomas as they pertain to paternal influences, exploring how each poet's relationship with his father influenced and inspired his work. By comparing the two views of paternal and filial relationships, one walks away with a better understanding of the writers' choices and the poetry's inner meaning.
First, it is useful to define the key terms. Paternal refers to a relationship between parent and child — an experience every person encounters at some point in life. Filial takes this definition a step further: the term literally means having the relation of a child or offspring, describing the bond between two generations that carries with it an expectation of connection and, historically, of obedience. In the context of this paper, the two terms are largely interchangeable.
Works Cited
Eich, Marty. "e.e. cummings: The Life of America's Experimental Poet." The American Poetry Web. 17 Feb. 2005.
Gardner, H. Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership. New York: BasicBooks/Harper Collins, 1995.
Thomas, Dylan. The Poems of Dylan Thomas. New York: New Directions Publishing, 2003.
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