Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town
“anyone lived in a pretty how town” analysis
This poem by e.e. Cummings is one of the rear pieces of his work that resembles a typical, ordinary poem. At least that’s what its structure reveals – the poem consists of 9 quatrains written with no particular meter and a rhyming scheme of a a b c. Regardless of the poem’s fairly common structure, we can easily notice some irregularities in the writing. The one that is most striking at a first glance is the use of lower case letters both in the title and throughout the whole poem. This only proves how unconventional and experimental Cummings was with his poetry. A detailed analysis of the lines shows how each irregularity is used for a reason, no matter how meaningless it may seem. All of Cummings’s poems are deceptively easy and seem to lack a logical point, but only with a careful reading they can be deciphered and discussed in a more serious manner.
On the surface, this poem is read as a poem about the everyday lives of ordinary people. This sense of the common, average, the mediocre society is achieved by the constant use of ‘anyone’, ‘noone’, someone, everyone, he, she, they. People with no names are taken seriously and by not using someone’s name you send the message that he/she is not important. In this poem we don’t have a description of the any of the protagonists, they are just some random people minding their own business. But at a deeper level, this very same poem reads as a love story about two people who nobody cares for. In order for you to understand this better, replace ‘anyone’ and ‘noone’ with real names, such as Jim and Jane, respectively. It is then that they realize the love story that lurks behind the poem of the ordinary lives of people.
The main point in this love poem is that nobody cares for the love between anyone and noone. That is to say, people stopped caring about the traditional moral values of life and are too busy with working to pay attention to things such as love, happiness,
This poem by e.e. Cummings is one of the rear pieces of his work that resembles a typical, ordinary poem. At least that’s what its structure reveals – the poem consists of 9 quatrains written with no particular meter and a rhyming scheme of a a b c. Regardless of the poem’s fairly common structure, we can easily notice some irregularities in the writing. The one that is most striking at a first glance is the use of lower case letters both in the title and throughout the whole poem. This only proves how unconventional and experimental Cummings was with his poetry. A detailed analysis of the lines shows how each irregularity is used for a reason, no matter how meaningless it may seem. All of Cummings’s poems are deceptively easy and seem to lack a logical point, but only with a careful reading they can be deciphered and discussed in a more serious manner.
On the surface, this poem is read as a poem about the everyday lives of ordinary people. This sense of the common, average, the mediocre society is achieved by the constant use of ‘anyone’, ‘noone’, someone, everyone, he, she, they. People with no names are taken seriously and by not using someone’s name you send the message that he/she is not important. In this poem we don’t have a description of the any of the protagonists, they are just some random people minding their own business. But at a deeper level, this very same poem reads as a love story about two people who nobody cares for. In order for you to understand this better, replace ‘anyone’ and ‘noone’ with real names, such as Jim and Jane, respectively. It is then that they realize the love story that lurks behind the poem of the ordinary lives of people.
The main point in this love poem is that nobody cares for the love between anyone and noone. That is to say, people stopped caring about the traditional moral values of life and are too busy with working to pay attention to things such as love, happiness,