Re: e.e. cummings
codeman38, on host 152.174.13.123
Friday, January 14, 2000, at 20:19:32
e.e. cummings posted by Wolfspirit on Friday, January 14, 2000, at 20:06:36:
Heh, you're in luck. This is from a research paper I did last year... Pardon the bad formatting; this was directly copied and pasted.
-- codeman"guess there *is* an advantage to archiving all these papers on zip disks"38
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"anyone lived in a pretty how town" is one of Cummings' best known and most admired poems. However, critics have oftendisputed the meanings of some of its more famous lines. Expressions like "pretty how town", "danced his did", and "sowed their isn't" are trademarks of E. E. Cummings; although they maymake very little sense on their own, they can be interpreted many different ways in the context of the poem. The plot of this poem is quite simple: as Barry Marks puts it, "Anyone and noone are lovers. Cummings does not say whether they ever marry. What is important is that they love life and each other. They die, and in dying, they merge their love with the love at the heart of things. Bells ring. Day turns to night and back to day again. The weather changes. The seasons revolve. Children become adults. And that is the story." What makes this poem so confusing upon a first reading isthat anyone usually refers to an indefinite person, and noone to nobody at all. But in this "pretty how town", anyone and noone are quite definite people! Cummings gives the characters these names, Marks suggests, as they are so humble that they don't try to make names for themselves in society. anyone and noone are individualists who like to keep themselves away from thebusy folk, the "someones" and "everyones". They don't go along with the crowd at all. anyone "danced his did" while the others "did their dance"; anyone and noone "dream their sleep" while the others "slept their dream". The someones and everyones "sow" and "reap" their "isn't" - although they all work together, their work amounts to nothing in the end. The "someones marry their everyones", but Cummings does not mention any love between them, but anyone and noone fall in love without any mention of marriage. The townsfolk cannot see anyone's love for noone, and "care for anyone not at all". What Cummings is trying to say here is that love and marriage are two completely different ideas. Two people can love each other with no intention of marriage, but in some cases, marriage may be a convention that does not depend on a person's love at all! One of Cummings' favorite subjects, children, are mentioned several times throughout the poem. A few of the children ofthe "pretty how town" can guess that noone and anyone are in love, but nobody else in the town comes close to realizing. As the children grow up, they join the crowd of someones and everyones, losing their innocence and doing the same worthless work. There are also a few puns involving the true meanings of anyone and noone's names. For example, in the seventh stanza of the poem, did noone stoop to kiss anyone's face, or did nobodyat all? In the second stanza, did the townsfolk not care about anyone, or did they not care about anybody at all? We can't be totally sure - maybe Cummings meant both! Cummings' word order creates a sort of ambiguity in the poem as well. Take the first line, for instance: "anyone lived in a pretty how town." Lewis Turco suggests that we can rearrange the words to read "anyone lived in how pretty a town," "how anyone lived in a pretty town," or several other arrangements of the words. Although these phrases may mean basically the same thing, some lines could be totally changed in meaning when their words are rearranged. Although Cummings' language may seem a bit strange at times, "anyone lived in a pretty how town" has definite four-line stanzas and rhythms. There are several refrains in the poem, although they change somewhat as they appear; these refrains include "spring summer autumn winter", "sun moon stars rain", and "Women and men". The rhythm is irregular, but the poem usually tends to be in an iambic rhythm. Even though there is not a definite rhyme scheme, there is rhyme in many places of the poem: examples include "town/down", "small/all", "few/grew", "ding/spring", "leaf/grief", and "deep/sleep". There are also a few examples of half rhyme - "same/rain" and "came/rain" - as well as an example of consonance, "guess/face". Cummings' tone seems to favor anyone and noone over the busy folk - as Marks points out, the only four completely regular iambic lines refer to anyone and noone, and Cummings' life was much like that of anyone or noone. Cummings' theme in this poem is that people are fickle: People may both care and not care,love and not love, and be important to each other yet not important at all. Most people, like the someones and everyones, often contradict themselves, having a sort of double standard by which other people are treated.
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