E.E. Cummings Defender of Individualism and Non-Conformity

E.E. Cummings- Defender of Individualism and Non-Conformity E. E. Cummings established himself as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, triumphing in hundreds of poems that struck his readers with a sense of awe and imagination. Cummings poems stand out among other poems as amazingly unique. Cummings was a staunch advocator of the individual, going against the grain of traditional, conformist poet. Cummings experimented with words on a page to make pictures and called it poetry; imaginably, it was controversially received at the time. But Cummings refused to mold into what every other poet was writing and always strived to stand out. He once wrote that, so far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was and is and†¦show more content†¦It is through the pioneering of such typology that E. E. Cummings became known as one of the most eclectic poets in American history. Cummings pioneering eclecticism is best exemplified through one of his greatest known works, anyone lived in a pretty how town. In this work, Cumming s uses a variety of literary devices such as personification, symbolism, and rhetorical questions to convey the themes of nonconformity and unconditional, everlasting love. anyone lived in a pretty how town is a narrative poem, describing the life of its central character anyone and his wife no one . Anyone and no one are contrasted sharply against their fellow citizens; anyone and no one celebrate in their triumphs and their defeats, while their fellow citizens dwell on their failures and conventional ideas and thus elicit their conformity (they sowed their isnt they reaped their same). The entire town, therefore, is strongly against anyone and no one . Another noteworthy effect of the poem is its use of allegory. All of the poems characters can be used as symbols: anyone and no one as the nonconformists of society, the townspeople as the rest of society and the children as individualist turned conformists. In the second stanza, second line (Women and men(both little and small)