Cummings had a number of artistic influences. As a child, he showed an affinity for Transcendentalism, a 19th-century American movement focused on the divine nature of the individual human soul, a connection to nature, and the polluting effects of society on the individual. Cummings developed his relationship with God through Transcendentalist ideas, and this early influence helped develop his intense commitment to individualism and his disdain for conformity.

As he continued his education, Cummings became familiar with the Romantic poets of the 19th century, and he identified with their commitment to intense emotion, individuality, and romantic notions of the soul and the individual human spirit. Romanticism was a heavy influence on Transcendentalism, so Cummings’s affinity for both was a natural development.

However, by the time Cummings became an adult, the artistic world was in the midst of the Modernist revolution. Inspired by industrialization, the rise of cities, and the horrors of World War I, the Modernists embraced a new kind of art defined by subjectivity, fragmentation, and new ways of looking at the world. While Cummings wrote most of his work in classical formats like sonnets, he embraced this new movement in his writing and art.