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Pretty How Town

997 Words4 Pages

E. E. Cummings’s, “anyone lived in a pretty how town” is a wonderful poem. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 14, 1894, Cummings strove to create his own unique writing style, mainly experimenting with hyplage. Years latter, he died September 3, 1962, after having created a legacy for himself in the niche of poets. Cummings experimentation of hyplage helped to spread his fame across the world. His rearrangement of sentence structure allows his poems, especially “anyone lived in a pretty how town”, to have alternate interpretations. Besides Cummings’s exquisite usage of hyplage, he uses many other poetry devices to richen his poems and incorporate hidden meanings. Cummings’s “anyone lived in a pretty how town” begins by describing a man named “anyone”. Cummings paints anyone as a happy, content man. He states, “He sang his didn’t and danced his did”(Cummings 4). Thus, anyone rejoiced in the things he had done and did not …show more content…

It can be concluded that almost all of the literary devices in the poem conveyed a deeper meaning. Critics think that this poem betrays the typical American life. This means having kids, dying, your kids having kids, then they die, etcetera. The cycle of the typical American life repeats itself in the same old boring fashion. However, anyone and noone break the monotony of the cycle, but when they die, life goes on without them. Thus, it is deduced that one of the main morals of the ballad is that all good things come to an end. Furthermore, Theo Steinmann states that “The most striking pattern is obviously the revolution of the seasons, which is indicated by the rotating list of their names” (1). This also contributes to one of the patterns in the poem, the circle of life. Therefore, the poetic devices identified not only help incorporate hidden meanings into the poem, but also help us to understand the general

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