Pretty How Town

For this week’s journal I chose “Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town” by E. E. Cummings. It is quite interesting poem with simple words that can be easily understood by readers. The meaning of the poem is that it describes the simple/ordinary life cycle of human beings. All people grow up, work, get married and then die. For example, “someones married their everyones laughed their crying and did their dance” (line 17-18) and “One day anyone died I guess” (line 25).

The next piece of text stated in the poem is “women and men (both little and small) cared for anyone not at all” (Cummings 5-6).   This shows carelessness because in this town none cared for anyone at all not even the ones around them and was more about themselves than people they should care about. The last piece of text stated in the poem showing carelessness and demonstrating the tone selfish is “that noone loved him more by more” (Cummings 12). This shows carelessness because its saying that no one loves anyone in the town it likes there is no love in the air and everybody loves and cares for

“Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time”(Victor Hugo). F. Scott Fitzgerald, writer of the novel The Great Gatsby, and E.E Cummings, writer of the poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town,”, convey a similar theme in their works through the use of tone, imagery, diction, symbolism, and motifs.The novel was about how Jay Gatsby had love for a girl named Daisy and Gatsby threw these random parties in which no one was invited to. The poem was about how the years were passing slowly over a period of time and it was the beginning or ending of someone’s life. The main characters were Anyone and Noone and people really did not even care about death. Both selections are about love and reveal that it is wonderful and hurtful at times. Although love is careless in many ways.

At first glance, Cummings’ poems may seem random and unimportant. However, once a closer look is taken, it can be seen that all punctuation used by Cummings is there for a reason. His radical use of punctuation, structure and syntax ca be seen clearly in ‘O sweet spontaneous’. He inserts a comma in the second line of the third stanza. He also inserts a bracket at the end of the fifth stanza and waits until the last line of the poem to close it. This is an unorthodox method of using punctuation but it creates more meaning and imagery for the reader. Cummings inserts a comma in the third stanza to create a pause. This helps the reader think about the beauty of nature and allows the reader to reflect on how philosophy has taken advantage of it. When Cummings opens a bracket in the fifth stanza, he uses it to insert a message which is different to the idea he has been presenting throughout the poem. He uses the parenthesis to introduce a new idea – that nature will rise above all – without making the poem completely about the beauty of nature and this leaves the main focus on how science, religion and philosophy have abused nature. The way Cummings uses syntax, structure and punctuation may be a new idea but it creates a deeper meaning to his poems and he uses his techniques

“Anyone lived in a pretty how town,” a ballad by E. E. Cummings, was first published in 1940. Cummings is commonly associated with his peculiar ideas about punctuation; he lacked punctuation and structure frequently. Being one of the best known poets of all time, Cummings creates a language that is relatable to just about anyone. I think this poem is about a small community where everyone is concerned with his or her own actions, never caring about neighbors or other members of the community.

Life in society becomes quite busy as individuals age. From rushing to work or school, there is rarely time for anything else. Therefore, because of the busy lives individuals have, it causes them to be incapable of focussing on the little things in life. E.E. Cummings, reveals this as the cycle of life in “anyone lived in a pretty how town”. Cummings use of dictation creates an abnormal setting of life, which reflects reality. Not only, does Cummings create such a setting but also uses pronouns, as a dual meaning, to suggest people whose names were unknown. In the poem, no one is a man and anyone is a woman. These pronouns represent these two individuals because it exhibits that no one actually knows them because they are too busy with their

Cummings wanted to be a poet his whole life and wrote poetry daily from age eight to twenty two, exploring many different assorted forms. When Cummings went to Harvard he developed an interest in modern poetry which ignored conventional grammar and syntax, aiming for a dynamic use of language. When Cummings graduated, he worked for a book dealer. Most people would not capitalize his initials because of the way he would write his poems, without any capital letters. Cummings was a very successful man in his time, writing over 2,500 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays and several essays, as well as numerous drawings and paintings. He is known as one of the best poets in our history. In 1917, in the First World War going on in Europe, Cummings enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, along with his college friend John Dos Passos. Cummings assignment got mixed up, resulting him being delayed to deploy. Resulting in him having to stay in paris for five weeks. He fell in love with the city, to which he would return throughout his life. After the war, Cummings returned to Paris in 1921 and remained there for two years before returning to New

Cummings, he used a metaphor and symbolism as a form of figurative language. In the first stanza, Cummings writes, “anyone lived in a pretty how town (with up so floating many bells down).” This quote explains that anyone, an abstract idea of a singular person, lives in a pretty how town. The word how is used to depict the how’s of life. The bells in this quote can symbolize many things such as a celebration, but after reading on further, one can determine that it symbolizes a funeral.

Cummings “Anyone lived in a pretty how town,” is one of many examples of modernist poetry. The writer uses many elements of modernism throughout the poem, the usage of poetic devices and themes of modernism are very well exhibited. This poem displays unorthodox structures and improper grammar, as well as time manipulation to convey the deeper truth of humanity’s existence. The true meaning of birth, death, and all that lies in the middle, this is the natural cycle and the order in which life goes. And the destruction that leads to the ultimate death of the natural cycle and order of life when our lives are most monstrous, filled with routine tasks, unachieved ambition, and lack of an implosive lifestyle. This style of writing forces the reader to consider life in a different aspect, to rethink the true meaning of living, which is infected with a sickness of likeness and lack of excitement. The underlining message to all his readers is to live life to the fullest one of the many lessons modernism

E.E. Cummings uses many different literary devices throughout Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town, to explain the setting, as well as the tone of the piece. By using devices such as imagery, rhymes, and metonymy, Cummings creates the illusion of a pleasant town, that experiences many seasons together, and is eventually plagued by a death of a town member. Cummings chooses his diction carefully in order to make sure the audience is getting the right appearance of the town, he does so by choosing colorful words that will allow the audience to imagine the town and it's people. By using phrases such as, “Women and men(both little and small)” it shows that the townspeople are very much the same, all small, all little, not much variation between them.

In the poem, “anyone lived in a pretty how town”, author, E. E. Cummings sometimes uses words in very unusual ways. Line 7, which says “they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same” is no exception (line 7). To start off we need to decipher who the “they” Cummings is talking about in this line. The “they” Cummings is talking about here is made known in line 5. Cummings points out that “Women and men (both little and small)” are the “they” who “sowed their isn’t” and the “they” that “reaped their same” (line 5 & 7). If you think about line 7 from the farming standpoint you can infer that “sow” could mean to plant something and “reap” could mean to harvest what was planted. Now, let’s talking about how “they sowed their isn’t” (line 7). To sow something, you have to have a

Cummings” pg.13). Cummings continued to publish volumes of poetry at a rate of approximately one every four or five years (“E.E. Cummings pg.14). The last honor involved giving a series of public talks; published as i: six Nonlecture (1953), they provide a succinct and charming summation of his life and personal philosophy. Two years later he received a National Book Award citation for poems 1923-1954, and two years after that he won the prestigious bollingen prize in poetry from Yale University (“E.E. Cummings” pg.15). (In his poetry he often ignored the rules of capitalization and has sometimes been referred to as e.e. Cummings) expanded the boundaries of poetry through typographic and linguistic experimentation (Frazee, “E.E. Cummings). An avoidance of capital letters and creative placement of punctuation soon became his trademarks. His experimental poetry took many forms, some amusing, some satirical, some beautiful, some profound, and some which did not make much sense (Frazee “E.E. Cummings”). Typical stylistic devices in his work include: running words together; scattering punctuation symbols cross the page; subverting the conventions of the English sentence; intentional misspellings and phonetic spellings and the invention of compound words such as “puddle-wonderful” (“E.E. Cummings”). However, this obvious experimentation is often combined with strict formal structures and traditional

E. E. Cummings, an author known for his various poems and other forms of artwork, wrote numerous works of poetry over a vast amount of subjects. While the subject matter of the poems differ, a few elements of Cummings' style stays the same in virtually all his poems, some of which is important and some of which is not. The fact that Cummings uses enjambment in his poetry is a stylistic trademark that however annoying its use may be is consistent. Other stylistic trademarks of Cummings' poetry are that Cummings has a control over the tone of each of his poems and that each of his poems has its theme located near the end of the poem. While these traits that may not be highlighted in most of the analysis of his poems, each does occur quite

The readers can see spring, hear spring by the noises of life, and taste spring with the nice breeze and the fresh cut grass. Cummings conveys the message of innocence in the poem by using a few words and the way the poem is structured as well as the punctuation that helps readers understand Cummings’ thinking of innocence, the beginning of life, and happiness. Cummings rewrote the poem with significant changes. Grumman says, “First he changed the entire 1916 version’s capital letters-the beginning of his practice of using capitalization for emphasis only. He also removed all commas and periods.

In his poem “Acquainted with the Night,” Robert Frost describes a character who spends his nights wandering the city streets. The reader can infer from both Frost’s tone, and the time of day in which the speaker chooses to walk, that the character is in a world of isolation. This is especially evident in the lines, “When far away an interrupted cry/ Came over houses from another street,/ But not to call me back or say good-by” (Frost 898). From this line, the reader understands that the poem’s speaker feels as if he is completely isolated in the world. In a similar way, E. E. Cummings poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town” expresses the loneliness felt by people of this era. Cummings creative use of pronouns gives the poem a double entendre. The characters, anyone and noone, can represent their literal meanings, or a single man and woman. Therefore, when Cummings writes that “noone loves him more by more,” he could mean that anyone is being loved greatly, or not at all. This loneliness is expressed yet again when Cummings informs the reader, “Women and men (both little and small)/ cared for anyone not at all” (Cummings 922). The works of both Frost and Cummings both portray the hardship that accompanied the feeling of loneliness during the modern