The poem is by Edward Estling Cummings who was born in 1894 in the US. He had a highly religious upbringing and grew with a middle class family as his father was a professor at Harvard University where Cummings later studied himself. Cummings was a Pacifist during World War One, so he became a member of the ambulance corps. It is known that he was even arrested on the suspicion of espionage because he was not expressing views that where of German hatred. This influenced his themes in his poems and the messages he portrays.
Later on in life Cummings became interested in modern types of poetry, and his poems became very iconic as he focused on very traditional values such as God, love and patriotism. But he liked to weave in satirical elements to his poem that contradicted the messages of other poems. With his poems he liked to experiment with punctuation and the form of words, which is very prevalent in “Next to of course God America I”. Such as there are no capital letters or full stops until the very last line. In the poem “Next to of course God America I”, Cummings portrays a very satirical tone as he seems to be talking about patriotism, but then contradicts it and portrays a meaning that it is bad or a negative thing.
At the beginning of the poem, the narrator presents a lot of positive aspects about his country, which shows his patriotism. I can infer from this that the speaker is very motivational and has a lot of passion for his country. However, during the middle of the poem Cummings changes the style in his poem and the narrator begins to sound sarcastic by contradicting what he is saying. An example is the narrator says the idea of dying for your country is beautiful, which is very contradicting and gives it a sarcastic tone.
The poem ends with a line that contains punctuation. This shows that the speech was very fast paced as it ends with a full stop. The last line is “He spoke and drank rapidly a glass of water.” This symbolises a way that he also may have swallowed his words, and that the narrator himself may not even be believing the words he is saying. This is the final touch to portraying the narrator as a patriot who makes a fool of himself by sounding sarcastic and constantly contradicting himself through out lines of the poem. The message Edward Estling Cummings was trying to portray is that patriotism is not always necessarily a good thing and that it can be dangerous.
React!