Foregrounding of Deviations, Contrasts, and Irregularities in E. E. Cummings’s “Anyone Lived In A Pretty How Town”

Abstract

Communication is an important function of language. Sometimes, it stands out because of the novelty of ideas, and sometimes by the uniqueness of style. In art and literature, style dominates meanings. E. E. Cummings’s poem is the master of paradoxes. This paper is going to unentangle his puzzles in his poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town”. This poem is full of paradoxes. The poet has made seemingly weird grammatical collocations. Apparently vague, ungrammatical, and illogical modifiers foreground the themes of the poem. This paper describes how by virtue of his style, Cummings makes rational of the irrational, compatible of the incompatible, plausible of the implausible, acceptable of the unacceptable, and meaningful of the absurd. The method used to analyses his style consist of (1) highlighting his use of parallelism and deviations, (2) interpreting his lines in the light of his main theme i.e., disregard for individuality, (3) interpreting structure of the lines in accordance with the possible semantic sense. The outcome of the study is that meanings do not come exclusively from words; context, both situational and textual, also contribute to meanings. Sometimes, context manipulates both lexis and meanings. This paper highlights how contrasts, incompatibilities and absurdities may foreground meanings.