anyone lived in a pretty how town

“anyone lived in a pretty how town” (1940) is a Modernist poem by American writer E. E. Cummings (1894-1962). The poem is typical of Cummings in its fusion of Modernist elements (including Cummings’s unique syntactic structure) and traditional structures (including its accentual style and rhyme scheme). The poem presents a complex, symbolic love story about two characters named “anyone” and “noone” and the town they live in.

While the poem is open to a number of varied interpretations, its main thematic concerns are love, the passage of time, and community. The poem focuses on the universality of love’s power to give people meaning, and it also comments on the isolated, conforming nature of modern culture. Finally, the poem focuses on the repetitive structures of time and nature and how they interact with human life and relationships. While the poem is difficult to follow and complex in its themes and presentation, it remains one of Cummings’s most famous poems.

Poet Biography

Edward Estlin “E. E.” Cummings was born in 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Born to a Harvard-professor father and a loving mother, Cummings enjoyed a stable, comfortable upbringing and showed interest in art, religion, and philosophy from an early age.