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EE Cummings - Anyone lived in a pretty howtown and Maggie and millie and molly and may

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E. E. Cummings 's experimentation with form and language places him among the most innovative of twentieth-century poets. He developed a style so unique that his poetry was not fully appreciated until after his death. Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new and unique style of poetic expression. Like Charles Williams and many other poets of his time, Cummings expresses in his poetry his philosophical views of individualism and transcendentalism, and his criticism towards society 's intolerance of nonconformists. He particularly conveys his philosophy of individualism and view of how we are all forced to conform in his poem’s ‘anyone lived …show more content…

The form of the poem reflects the spontaneity that an individual can have within the restricted views of mainstream society. The ungrammatical structure of the poem endorses Cummings views of being a nonconformist, as he promotes that he does not need to abide by society’s restrictions on language and grammar in order to portray and write a story. Through his experimentation with poetic form and language, Cummings is able to promote his philosophy on individualism in ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’.

In ‘maggie and milly and molly and may’, Cummings expresses and promotes his transcendentalist philosophical views through the use of personification. In the second couplet of the poem, Cummings introduces maggie, and she symbolizes the ‘sweetly’ troubled one. When Maggie was in a time of trouble, she turned to nature (the shell), as transcendentalists do, to find comfort. Maggie not only finds nature, she also finds art in the form of music. The shell ‘sings’ to her, personifying the shell as a person who can sing. It is through the shell and its ‘song’ that maggie loses her woes and finds her inner self, hence conveying transcendentalism and individualism. Cummings used personification in ‘maggie and milly and molly and may’ to help promote his philosophical views of transcendentalism and individualism.

A homophone was used in the end rhyme of ‘maggie and milly and

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