Cummings' Poetry: Argumentative Essay (Essay Sample)

Student
Professor
English
05/04/2014
Cummings' Poetry: Argumentative Essay
Poetry, more than any other literary form, uses powerful words and brevity to pass on a message. Poets like Cummings and Yeats had high mastery and dexterity with English language, an aspect that allowed them to use words, in denotation and connotation, to express tranquility with unrivaled avidity. In "Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town”, Cummings employs ambiguity, often interchanging the denotative and connotative meaning to great effect, to portray his protagonists uniqueness in the face of mediocrity. This essay will demonstrate that ambiguity and inventiveness with words is Cummings's major ingredient in passing across information subtly and with ease.
In this poem, Cummings demonstrates great innovation with language to achieve effect. To a casual observer, the poem lacks any semblance of grammatical forms that are an inherent feature of poems. However, Asher avers that Cummings poem derive their form from reading aloud, not quietly to yourself (23). The poet creates words at whims and breathes meaning to them. This lends ambiguity in his work especially where names refer to something different from what a reader knows or can find out from a dictionary. As Asher asserts, the obscurity in syntax is "clearly a trademark, but not needlessly or purposelessly" (11). The words have an underlying meaning that becomes evident especially if a reader recites the poem aloud. More than deciphering the meaning, arrangement of words provides a beautiful musical effect.
The storyline is simple, yet tacitly powerful as a way of passing across a message to an audience of any developmental level. The persona is a simple man, easy to identify with for his predicaments. His neighborhood is not entirely hostile, but it has shown little affection to him. His uniqueness has alienated him from a society that coexists through conformity. Luckily, he meets a woman who is his match. They settle down in marriage, only briefly before he died. The woman too dies shortly. This simple plot provides Cummings with an avenue to bamboozle, intrigue, and captivate the reader through words that require a keener attention to details to fathom meaning.
Cummings uses words at two levels; denotative and connotative. To an untrained mind, denotative meaning is overt (Rotella 16). However, the connotative meaning is covert for words major reason. Similar words take different meanings in subsequent sentences and stanzas. Secondly, Cummings employs words that have no semantic relationship with his subject of reference. Example is in the use of the words "anyone" and "how”. At the introduction of the poem, Cummings leads the reader to believe that "anyone" will substitute "villagers”. However, he does not sustain the meaning. In subsequent stanza, he uses "anyone" in reference to the persona in the poem. Additionally, the word "how" changes several times, making it obscure in the second stanza and ambiguous by the third stanza.
The poem employs similar inventiveness with words to besmirch the villagers for their mediocrity. In stanza 2, Line 5 and 6 show the carefree attitude with which the villagers approached life. Their desire for conformity leads them to hate and treat with animosity those who were different. In the stanza, the denotative and connotative meaning come together to scorn a vice among the villagers that Cummings disliked. The overt meaning lacks clarity, but the tone points to displeasure with the villages. It states, "Women and man cared for anyone not at all" (Asher 34). The covert meaning lashes at the regularity and conformity inherent in the village. Line 7 opines, "They sowed their isn't they reaped their same" (Rotella 16). The abuse of grammar by Cummings does not prevent the reader from recognizing the corruption of the English (and biblical) proverb that we harvest what we plant.
The third stanza continues with the woman. Cummings decides to refer to her as "noone”. This highlights her insignificance in the social status of the village. By virtue of living a different life, she does not receive the recognition that befits