How does E. E. Cummings present a critique of jingoism in his poem '"next to of course god america i'?

In '"next to of course god america i', E. E. Cummings presents a critique of empty rhetoric, specifically jingoistic rhetoric (evidenced by Cummings play on the phrase "by jingo"). All but the last line of the poem is a reported speech which relies heavily upon traditional American sayings such as "land of the pilgrims" and other idiomatic phrases, but the rhetoric of these devices is disrupted by the incomprehensible truncation and conflation of these phrases - the argument falls flat. For the quoted section of the poem, Cummings completely eschews punctuation and relies heavily upon enjambment - this makes the poem even harder to follow, literally blurring the lines between each idiom and removing the meaning from what has been spoken.The poem is in sonnet form, but Cummings subverts the sonnet structure by presenting a mishmash of untidy syntax and distancing the last line of the quatrain from the body of the poem - thus distancing the third-person perspective from the quoted speech. The final line: 'He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water' presents the first comprehensible line in the poem, suggesting that the voice of reason is far removed from the jingoist speaker, whose "rapid" drinking suggests an exhaustion and uneasiness which undermines what has been spoken.

Answered by William H. English tutor

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